And you guys are uncomfortable with the Winnipeg Jets use of Canadian military imagery? Imagine if they flew over Canada’s Wonderland with lightning-shooting supersonic jets and turned the upside-down swinging ship ride into a giant hockey puck. Imagine that.

Anyway…hockey’s back! Leafs are a bunch of bums! Montreal are slightly smaller bums because that city is a lot of fun sometimes! Go beer go!

Say what you will about Sportsnet, but Senators correspondant Ian Mendes has conducted himself with a lot of class and restraint while covering the Senators. He’s as aware as anyone of how sensitive this fan base is about Alfie. With that in mind, I don’t take his report that this might be Alfredsson’s last season, and that he would consider a trade, very lightly.

I don’t want to use this space to get sentimental about the best player in franchise history. If and when this supposed trade or retirement happens, there will be no shortage of tributes – from us included. But right now I can’t help but think about how unbelievably helpful trading a player of Alfredsson’s caliber could be for this team. Having him retire as a Senator would be nice. Getting a 1^st round pick and a prospect, having him win a cup, and then welcoming him home with a cushy front office gig or the title of Swedish scouting czar would be even better.

Because Alfie isn’t just a nice deadline acquisition: he would be one of the best on the deadline market in years. He still led this team in scoring before going on the shelf last year. He plays an incredible two-way game, plays on the power play and penalty kill, has been a captain in the NHL for years, has produced late into the playoffs, and has done so consistently. If Keith Tkachuk could get St. Louis a player, a 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd round pick (albiet from Don Waddell, hardly a model GM), what does Alfie garner?

There’s also the comic book fantasy of seeing one of our favorite players compete on one of the league’s most skilled teams. How would he do in Detroit, or Vancouver? What would he look like playing on the powerplay in Washington?

And besides: this is probably his last year. It’s less any one injury problem than a nagging and unspecific set of maladies that are keying the captain in on the impending end. After 16 seasons in the NHL, there’s just an amount of wear-and-tear the human body has difficulty sustaining. He’s already celebrated his 1000^th game, his 1000^th point, and an Olympic gold medal. There aren’t too many milestones left for him other than winning the Cup.

This one might hurt, sure. But you know what’s worse? Living through the Mats Sundin debacle in Ottawa. Weeks upon weeks of intense media coverage asking if he’d be willing to accept a trade, whether he’d do what is right for the franchise again, one last time, by getting us that extra draft pick or prospect. Sure, Alfie’s earned the right to choose, and no one will hold it against him if he chooses to stay. But thinking about the possibilities for this rebuilding club is tantalizing.

2)      Wayne Simmonds (yes, from the aforementioned story) called notorious trash-talker Sean Avery the homophobic F-Word. It’s true, I watched it on the internet. (FYI, Sean Avery has been at the forefront of gay rights in hockey. Huzzah!) On one hand it’s tempting to question how a person victimized by racial hate speech (and presumably not only in this context) could turn around and employ the same kind of tactics on another person. But then reality sets in and we realize that’s not how life works.  Things are actually complicated and post-modern (WOMN 1020). So let’s talk just desserts: Cold Stone Creamery. No, that’s not what I’m supposed to be talking about here. Take two: There have been a couple of sports players in the past who have been fined big bucks (and by big bucks, I mean small potatoes for a sports star—but I’m not complaining!) for this kind of offense: Kobe Bryant was fined $100,000 for spitting a homophobic slur at a referee, and Joakim Noah (whoever that is) was fined $50,000 for directing the same kind of love (hate!) towards a fan. Simmonds deserves to be reprimanded. Let’s get rid of homophobia already! If the “1 in 10” adage is true—that is, one in every tenth person is gay—then it stands to reason that each team has ½ a gay person on the ice at all times. Just kidding, that doesn’t make any sense. Not only because it’s stupid, but my math suggests that a team has five players on the ice instead of eight. Duh.

So you’ve probably noticed a few changes here at formerly-The Cory Clouston Fashion Review. First of all, Cory Clouston has been placed on an ice floe and set adrift, and we needed a new name. After an exhaustive consultation process costing a little under $60,000, we are now Welcome To Your Karlsson Years.

What does the 2011-2012 season hold in store for our millions of readers from all over the world but mostly inexplicably India? We’ll continue posting our indelible brand of hilarious insight, quasi-analysis, Steven’s unbelievable images (check the banner! He drew that shit by hand), tinkering with WordPress templates (sorry for the mess) and the one and only Scotchcast. Stay tuned for that last one, it’s going to be awesome.

So nut up, people: it’s year two of these four dudes and one woman teaching English in Korea writing about a rebuilding hockey club. This will be good.

Last week I wrote an article about the continued insistence by Ottawa’s ownership that the team has to get to the second round just to break even. And, specifically, what bunk that is.

Well, today Grantland ran an amazing article (By Malcolm Gladwell of all people) on the nature of investment in sports. He’s talking about the New Jersey Nets, but you could take his article and drop Melnyk and the Ottawa Senators right into his premise. Sure, it’s Ottawa – not Brooklyn. The profit potential isn’t in the same stratosphere. But his point is well taken: you don’t buy a sports team to make a profit. You buy a sports team first because of all of the peripheral profit it enables, and second because it’s a luxury item.

Anyway, well worth the read.

Up until recently it was almost a given that David Rundblad would not only get a long look at camp, but was automatically penciled in for at least third pairing minutes, sheltered ice time and lots of powerplay work. He has an out to go back to Sweden where Cowen can be more readily stored in Binghamton; he supposedly brings much-needed offense to a team that will struggle to score goals; and with expectations low for the season, the team can afford to throw him in to develop and allow him to make mistakes. All of this could still happen, but the framework we’ve all subscribed to is already off the rails.

Rundblad hasn’t played poorly, but has run into exactly the kinds of challenges someone who has never played in the NHL can be expected to encounter: greater size and greater speed. It’s been Ottawa’s other blue chip defensive prospect, Jared Cowen, who has declared himself ready to play, and in retrospect this should be obvious. He’s acclimatized to North American play already. He’s massive. And he’s also done pretty much everything he can at the minor league and AHL level.

More surprising, perhaps, has been Brian Lee, who skated almost 25 minutes (!) during Friday’s game, and had a goal and an assist last Wednesday against Boston. He’s playing big minutes in tough situations, is taking the body and playing sound positional defense, and moving the puck well. And while his low paycheck and the assumption that he’s already reached his ceiling implies that he’s press box-bound, he’s simply playing too well to not get a few games to start the season—probably at Carkner’s expense. After all: Carkner is cheap too, and the more pugilistic facets of his game are supplied by the addition of Konopka. Hard to imagine the coaching staff finally getting what they want out of Lee—who, after all, is only 24—only to sacrifice it to accommodate their logjam on the backend.

So us fans are faced with the decision of keeping intact all of our offseason speculation, all of the forced excitement of imagining not one but TWO Karlssons on our team, and the less-than-sensational prospect that Brian Lee can step in an be an NHL player right now. You can bet on the latter: Murray once gave up a late first round pick for Chris Campoli, an unspectacular defenseman who could nonetheless contribute right away. There’s obviously value in that. If there’s only one spot available, Lee deserves it, based not only on his play this year but also his dues paid in the organization’s system.

So, while it might seem mildly disappointing to think that our supposed Calder-candidate Rundblad might not be able to casually step into the best hockey league in the world and dominate, Sens fans should be overjoyed by Lee’s strong showing, that Cowen is more than ready, and that Karlsson still looks great. The youth movement is still underway, just in slightly different form than expected.

The release of the Moneyball movie adaptation today is occasion for us armchair stat-wonks to take yet another hard look in the mirror. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not in the same league as a Gabe Desjardins, creator of the advanced metrics site Behind the Net, or even Tyler Dellow, whose hardnosed and dogged inquisition on mc7hockey earned him much attention this offseason for uncovering Colin Campbell’s perceived improprieties as the NHL’s chief disciplinarian. I, like many casual sports fans, restrict my analyses to video game simulations and continued insistence that the hockey managers of my favorite team (The Ottawa Fat Cats, obviously) make use of these advanced metrics by hiring some analysts.

So the purpose of this article is two-fold. Fold the first: to implore someone smarter than I to validate the following assumptions about the Ottawa Senators:

• That Bryan Murray firmly belongs in the anachronistic category of the old school, and as such relies heavily on intuition, assessing character, and a notion of credibility established by a nebulous code of conduct. (At least it’s nebulous to me, an arts and humanities major and not, you know, an athlete.)
• That the organization is slowly moving towards the kind of vertical integration enjoyed by Detroit by aligning their drafting, development and play operations to enforce a single style, which may or may not be puck possession, rather than “grittiness” or “toughness,” which is why they would allow half a Calder Cup winning team to walk. You don’t want to win the AHL title, you want to have a farm that will develop a Stanley Cup winning team.
• That their spending on free agents has been atrociously wasteful. This probably doesn’t need much work.

The second fold is to point out some of the excellent writing happening right now in hockey journalism. Moneyball was a bit of a call to arms for hockey writers to identify their own “on base percentage” (I guess puck possession is pretty close, and Desjardin’s own quality-of-competition metric is a pretty good start). But what’s amazed me is the diversity of sports writing out there: romantic narrative historians and robotic bean counters are constantly jawing for some semblance of balance, and we, the readers, are the ultimate beneficiaries. There tends to be a lot of pessimism about the state of sports journalism, but I, for one, have never seen the quality so high.

So here are some links I’ve been reading lately:

• Tyler Dellow’s epic statistical takedown of a Grantland writer’s article about enforcers
  • (And that writer’s article about enforcers, pretty good in its own right)
• Dirk Hoag’s excellent application of Moneyball principles to Nashville Predators hockey
• The GM of the Houston Rockets talks about the influence and hype of Moneyball for Grantland

Varada: 

The Good
 
1) This team will not be as bad as people say.
 
It stands to reason that every single Senator cannot possibly have a new worst season of their career simultaneously. It’s just the law of averages. Even slight rebounds from Phillips, Kuba, Gonchar, Regin and Foligno, and some decent goaltending – it doesn’t have to be spectacular, just decent – and this team is much better than last year. Not playoffs better, but also not a lottery team.
 
2) Jared Cowen looks like a drunken bear out there.
 
In a good way. He looks NHL ready, not just scoring goals but hitting people all over the ice. They need this guy to fill the gap left by pretty much every single good defenceman the team has ever had leaving, and he looks up for it. I got a kick out of seeing Karlsson wearing the ‘A’ the other night, but I think the future of Ottawa’s D is Cowen-esque.
 
3) Karlsson just might be the new face of the franchise.
 
If Cowen is the defensive leader, Karlsson will be the little engine that could (drive the offense). Too early? Probably. But a 50 point defenceman in a terrible year has me salivating over what he might be capable of in a couple of seasons. When he’s playing with, uh, Alex Semin or something.
 
The Bad
 
1) The old school mentality prevails.
 
Zenon Konopka, Francis Lessard, Matt Carkner, Chris Neil. This team has enough sandpaper already. Too bad they can barely play hockey. It seems as if Senators brass know that this year is going to be a tough one, so let’s nut up and get ready to show people that we go down swinging. I’m not exicted to watch all of these good old boys put up a good fight but go -79 on the year.
 
2) I just don’t think Rundblad is ready.
 
Not a knock on him, he’s going to be an amazing defenceman someday. But you can count on one hand the number of Swedish players who came over and made an impact in their first NHL season. The hype is huge, but needs to be dialed down a bit. There’s going to be an adjustment period here. He’s already looked a bit lost out there. It’s Cowen playing key situations, not Rundblad.
 
3) Injuries…again
 
Gonchar, Alfie, and Spezza will each miss at least 20 games. Kuba might miss as many. Anderson too. If all of those guys go down at once….eeeeeeesh. We could be watching a lot of Alex Auld this year, backstopping a team led by a 21 year old defenceman who is 80lbs soaking wet.

4) Bonus (Breaking) Bad! Chris Phillips looks like a drunken bear out there.

In a bad way. 
 
Prediction
 
11th in the East. Top ten pick.

Pete:

The Good
 
1. A blank canvas. What do these guys have to lose? I say embrace your bad-news-bearness and play with an attitude that belies your experience (belies as in refuses to acknowledge the lack there of)
 
2. Tantalizing youth. Not to get all Nabakov (the writer, not the goalie) on ya but the rare but dizzying highlights provided by the young core of this team should at least make for some euphoric, if not frustrating times at SBP. You know there will also be that game where they incredibly pull out an OT winner in the last game of a road swing against a team they don’t know they’re supposed to lose against (see point 1 and notice I didn’t provide the option to pluralize game).
 
3. The all-star game. Really looking forward to attending the draft (drunker than Conrad in a Winnipeg airport) of all star players. Who will be on Team Regin? Team Foligno?.. oh, uh…
 
The Bad
 
1. No depth, zero, zilch, none. Sorry but this team lacks the reliability. It’s one thing to have bodies filling jerseys but there are so many guys in need of bounceback years (only 3 guys actually need a bounceback year,  the proven contributers). Forget the notion of asking if they can improve or recover, lets ackowledge that maybe Peter Regin and Jesse Winchester and Nick Foligno have hit their ceilings? In my opinion there are more stories of guys coming from nowhere than there are stories of guys bouncing back (minus injuries or change of scenery) I’m not sold on the penultimate generation’s maturation process.
 
2. The last days of Chez Alfie. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stomach watching Alfie’s decline. God forbid but father time makes 3rd liner’s of us all. Barring injuries Alfie needs a decent year of production to protect my golden-hued warm fuzzies of his career (including the cross-checking of Gary Roberts, which is one of Carvaggio’s finest works if you ask me). Like the Carpenters once sang, “I need to be in love”.
 
3.The scenario where the leafs finally make the playoffs and the Sens don’t. We dodged a real bullet last year.
 
Predictions

1. I can’t think of 5-10 teams that will be worse than Ottawa, gulp, maybe 4? Winnipeg, Colorado? Help me out here.
2. Ottawa fans will apathetically forget to stuff the ballot box for the all star game leading to a very awkward selection process
3. Zenon Konopka will see 2nd unit PP time as the faceoff winning net presence

James

The Goodish 
 
1.Nikita Filatov will be this year’s Bobby the Butler Beefcake and then some. Will he have a minus rating? Probably. Will he be an “in his prime Guy Charbonneau” back checker? Probably (definitely) not. Is he going to electrify us AND drive us nuts. YES. Good lord yes. I urge us all to manage our expectations and get over it a little. Like the sands of the hour glass, these are the complaints of our fans. I mean, look, as a wee lad going to my first NHL games in the 1950’s, my grandpapaw (who turns 171 today! Happy Earthday Papaw!) taught me the importance of playing a responsible 3 way game and washing all of our hands before using the toilet. Not all players do this (wash their hands). For example, Erik Karlsson doesn’t really do it (play two ways on some Lidstrom shit) but he excels in other areas such as SCORING GAME WINNING GOALS or getting over 20 points on the power play. So, there’s a bit of trade off. I think Filatov will be similar. Oh, he may well be that player who nets those 20 goals that the fan base has (rightly) been griping for a while now but will likely leave the back checking to the Z. Smiths of the world. And people will kind of lovehate him for it.

Side note: I must say the chances of Filatov being injured are quite high. I am not at all against the crew of policemen that the Sens have put on the payroll to protect our developing little wood nymphs from the knee on knees and high hits courtesy of the Matt “Garbage Monster” Cooke’s of the world. Do I hate staged fighting? Yes. Do I like the idea of a guy like Dan Carcillo being at least a liiiiiiiiittle bit hesitant to cross check Alfie in the lower back? Absolutely. Get well soon already Nikita Filatov (gulp!).
 
2. Lack of depth and injury will prove to be a blessing in disguise. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIt’s rebuild year there’s not a ton on the line and as such we must find new silver or even pewter linings on the season . Is Varada right about injuries? Yes, though my picks are slightly different. When some of these old mans go down with Rubella or Shingles in will come the inexperienced youth program. This will mean seeing stuff like Stephane Da Costa playing 2nd line centre FOR A WHILE or Mark Boroweikileaks getting top four time. How is this good? I never said it would be good I said it will be goodish. This mess will be usefull in weeding out who in the bullpen is the real deal going forward. Log jam at defense? Not so much when Sergei Gonchar or Chris Phillips go down with liver spot infections in November and we start taking from Bingo’s cupboard.

Will the Rundblads, Hoffmans and Lehners of our scrappy little world be able to keep up with the Ovechki (plural?), Charas and Pinkett-Smiths of the league? Well, at times it will be very ugly but I’m sorry Sens fans (we’re still fans at this point right?) A COUPLE of guys are going to work out. Last year Jason York made an interesting point on full time local advertisement stream / part time sports station TEAM 1200 about how we probably wouldn’t be so hard on Brian Lee if he was given the same power play time as Karlsson but since he doesn’t he’s left to redefine his game on the fly whilst dodging garbage thrown by those in pre-purchased Marc Staal/Anze Kopitar Sens footie pajamas. What am I on about? Remember what bottom six Bobby Butler looked like compared to top six Bobby Butler? I felt it was a little more of an honest look at the type of game he is supposed to play. We shall see a trial by fire what some of the new guys REALLY look like. Not just random one off call ups. Leave that for Corey Locke. Juuuuust kidding he wont be called up…man that’s gotta be irritating for him.
 
3. Erik Karlsson will make the All Star team again! Barring injury, The Sultan of Swede (sorry) will enjoy an outstanding season. Thinking about ice size less and ass kickery more will do worlds of good for our special little guy. This will bode especially well with what the French call “advantage numerique*”. Why? I don’t know, I just think making outlet passes to a group of guys trying to solidify a future in the league will pay more dividends than they did to Alexei “Toying with the idea of starting his own line of designer sunglasses instead of thinking about the game he’s in the middle of” Kovalev and – all due respect – Mike “RIPS A SHOT JUST WIIIIIIIIIIIIDE” Fisher. Karlsson’s future looks bright here “seriously considering getting a jersey of his” bright.  
 
The Bad
 
1.Heyyyy I get the advantage(?) of already having seen him go down once IN THE FIRST PRESEASON GAME but Milan Michalek will miss the majority of the season. He will be on the business end of some season/(NHL career?) ending injury early on and will sadly become a write off for the season. Pewter lining: He will take the Heatley curse / tease of his 20-30 goal potential with him. We’ll miss you Robot Knees. OH! And before I forget, I hope Heatley (who has ALREADY been traded to the Wild, B.T.M.Fing.W.!!!!) has a down year (he probably wont). Anyway, this is basically a specific way of saying some of the vets who had terrible years last year will bounce back, some will not.
 
2. Something mega embarrassing is going to happen this year during the All Star game festivities. As we all know, the most irritating thing about ENJOYING YOUR HOME TOWN’S NHL TEAM is that the majority of Francophone Ottawans risk disownment and dismemberment by family members by not cheering the habs and a lot of Anglophone people who’s dad liked the leafs feel compelled to like the leafs (imagine? blech). Anyway, these merry oops…miserable pranksters will likely do something like stuff the ballot box with the likes of former superstar Dionne “cool haircut bro!” Phenerf, Garbage Pail Kid turned NHL forward Phil Kessel or legit 1st line centre Scott Gomez. That or do something like boo any Sens that make the team. Well, if that happens…all’s stupid in love and maturity. We shall do our best to combat it. Anyway, I really just wanted to make fun of those players a bit. What is more likely is that the Sens promotional team will do a fine enough job helping our heads into our hands on some previous 3rd jersey level goof up. Already feeling great about that loud squad or whatever, I can just see it now, Loud Squad: “HEY BRO, WHY SO GLUM!?!” Me: “uhh…I’m just reading my program and waiting for the toilet here” Loud Squad: “AWWE C’MON BRAH WE COULD BE DANCING RIGHT NOW!!!!”
Anyway, BRING BACK NAKED GLADIATOR WHO REMEMBERS MOST OF HIS LINES! And that whole letting the fans pick the goal song? Ugh. What a disaster in the works that is. As fast as I change the station if “Song 2” by Blur comes on the radio I definitely enjoyed that it was one of the few traditions that our 20 year young team had going for it. OH WELL…now we can have a nicklebaque song about how many beers their dinks can drink. Man I love being a turtle.
 
3. People will lose patience with Paul MacLean. What I don’t mean here is that P Mac will do a bad job. No, what I mean is it is too much to ask to take a motley group of Xmas elves and band them together against the forces of …teams with their shit more established and quickly gel and look coherent a lot of the time. I think there will be some marked improvement in a couple of areas but those wacky line combos, occasional too many men penalties and numerous shootout losses wont completely disappear. May the power of consistent goaltending and secondary/any scoring protect you as you walk through the valley of the shadow of public discontent, oh Benevolent Mustachioed Leader.  
 
Huh, what does that say? TALK TO THE AUDIENCE? ….about…PREDICTIONS?! …ohhhh this is always death.
 
10. Craig Anderson finishes season with more wins than Brian Elliot…oh a real one? I don’t know…Erik Karlsson enjoys career year in points.
9. Cowen makes the big club. Zibanejad starts paper route (kid is EIGHTEEN)
8. Filip Kuba and Sergei Gonchar BOTH finish the season with the Senators (unless of course the cap floor doesn’t exist this season)
7. Filatov to finish in the team’s top three in goals (not points but goals).
6. Sens finish ahead of the Buffalo Sabres. (Sorry, I just think they are the new Rangers…great goaltender and a bunch of money plugging holes in the lineup)
5. Chris Phillips to stink up joint again. The guy’s confidence just looks…gone.
4. Scotia Bank Beers to remain expensive but delicious.
3. New scoreboard will NOT be installed by the all star game if AT ALL this season
2. Good will prevail and that Black Keys song I haven’t heard (I only listen to wax cylinders) will be the new goal song.
1. Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, Buttafuocoooooooooooooooooo *glass smashing sound effect* we’ll be right back! Stick around Christian Slater is here! 
 
*To all those up in arms about the French shoulder patch on the new 3rd jersey…do you know what you guys sound like? Chill, god. Seriously, like, fucking relax a little.

Yes.

Or, more accurately, how could he possibly not be? We’ve had plenty of enforcers on this team—who could forget Rob Ray’s wonderful, fictional breakaway goal in double OT?—so it’s not about what Lessard is bringing so much as how little else he combines with that pugilism.

Zenon Konopka seems to be a well-liked team player and an ace faceoff man. Rob Ray brought leadership and experience in the dressing room, having been a regular NHLer for many years. Chris Neil has flirted with 20 goals in a season in his career, albeit playing on the stacked 2005-06 team. Matt Carkner is actually a serviceable 5-6 defenceman, penalty killer, and shot blocker. It seems that, at a minimum, all an enforcer needs to bring to the table in addition to wanting to kill people is an attempt to be a good person in the dressing room, i.e. not lose his mind and kill someone on his own team.

In 115 career NHL games with Atlanta and Ottawa, Lessard has one goal, three assists and 346 penalty minutes, which I think officially puts him in the category of professional hitman. In the AHL he has 487 games with the Philadelphia Phantoms, Chicago Wolves, Hartford Wolf Pack and San Antonio Rampage with 26 goals, 42 assists and a stupifying 2,544 penalty minutes. Which transcends him beyond professional psycho to some kind of wild animal.

The blogs seem to read pretty unanimously: even the defenders of goonage don’t see what he brings to the table that one of our other goons doesn’t already.

Now you have Lessard taking a run at Filatov, our low risk / high reward player and arguably the player fans are most excited to see during what is sure to be a challenging year, during a meaningless scrimmage. Filatov left the ice, but then returned. There is a larger argument here, which is Ottawa’s old-boy insistence on putting tough guys out there in the first place. How he received 24 games at the end of last year over one of Ottawa’s more promising prospects is completely beyond me. 

But that’s a story for another day. Today we have a marginal NHL player (perhaps even marginal AHL player) taking a run at a 6th overall pick, for which this organization gave up a valuable, high 3rd rounder in a rebuilding year, for no other purpose than to distinguish himself. Can you imagine if he had taken Zibanejad, our other 6th overall pick, out for the year?

Murray, cut this joker loose.

Another day, another claim from the team’s ownership that the Senators need to go “deep” in the second round just to break even.

This has been repeated like a mantra ever since the 2007 run to the Finals, and to this day it smacks of creative accounting. How can a team with better-than-average attendance in a terrible year (11th best, better than the Rangers or Penguins or Bruins), higher-than-average ticket prices (again 11th), and all of the television revenue and merchandising sales that comes from being in a Canadian market possibly claim to be losing money?

Granted, they spent to the cap last year, but it’s hard to understand how a team that does better than almost 2/3rds of the league and spends to a ceiling linked to the prosperity of the league in general could possible be required to get to the second round just to break even. If that’s the case, how on earth do the other 2/3rds of the clubs get by? What kind of business model is that?

It’s not that I doubt that television and merchandising revenues are higher in a market like Boston or New York. Or that clubs like Columbus and Florida (who haven’t made the playoffs in years) are losing boatloads of cash. But an enormous market or consistently horrible club are exceptions, not the standard by which the league’s model is designed. A team simply can’t be expected to be among the very best year after year just to get in the black.

More likely is that the team is getting creative with the public face of its accounting in order to scare up more support – a tactic that just might work, given the team went bankrupt back before there were revenue-sharing schemes and a salary cap. This fanbase is just sensitive enough to respond to a good scare campaign right on the eve of a new season. Oh, check it out: tickets just went on sale! How convenient.

Also, with a CBA negotiation lurking next offseason, it’s in the owners’ best interests to present a united front of hard-done-by billionaires losing cash just because they love hockey that much. From public investment in new arenas to salary control: there’s a lot more to be gained by claiming to be losing money than in claiming to be doing fine.

The fact of the matter is that Melnyk owns the arena, and whatever revenues the team generates probably go into paying off fixed costs associated with franchise ownership, including operating expenses. The team, with all of its salaries and travel, may lose money relative to ticket sales. But television, merchandise, concerts at Scotia Bank Place and everything associated with assets owned because of the club but not directly related to its operations probably represent pure profit. Melnyk’s overall financial picture is rosier than what we’re being presented with.

After all, creative accounting isn’t exactly new around here.