Friday, May 30, 2008
Canadian teams, including Oilers, doing just fine
Don't let any Arena Truther out there tell you otherwise. This, and only this, is why the Edmonton Oilers want a new hockey facility. Which is cool, as long as they pay for it all themselves.
PDF of the NHL's 07'-08' Ticket Revenue list here. Mirtle has more on the Westhead story here, and there is some good stuff in the comments. I find the stance of the new NHLPA head to be especially interesting.
Labels: New Arena
# posted by andy grabia @ 6:37 pm 
Comments:
I highly recommend the March 12th podcast of Bill Simmons' "B.S. Report", which also touches on the Bettman era (starts at about the 23:50 mark).
Yeah yeah, Bettman=evil, I guess somebody has to shoot the fish in barrels. But I love Brunt's spin on the ESPN to Versus move; like it was Bettman's strategy to move the show to Versus. Uhm.. Steven: ESPN was the one that failed to pick up their option. Mark Shapiro (the ESPN exec at the time) couldn't move hockey out fast enough so he could get poker on TV. The Versus deal was totally trying to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. Even at the time, after getting royally screwed by ESPN, Bettman went out of his way to praise the network and bend over backwards to hold the door open for a future return. Its only since Shapiro's era has ended that ESPN is making even vaguely conciliatory remarks about working with the NHL again. Bettman never wanted to move to Versus, but he did have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners to get some dough for the franchises.
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I highly recommend the March 12th podcast of Bill Simmons' "B.S. Report", which also touches on the Bettman era (starts at about the 23:50 mark).
Yeah yeah, Bettman=evil, I guess somebody has to shoot the fish in barrels. But I love Brunt's spin on the ESPN to Versus move; like it was Bettman's strategy to move the show to Versus. Uhm.. Steven: ESPN was the one that failed to pick up their option. Mark Shapiro (the ESPN exec at the time) couldn't move hockey out fast enough so he could get poker on TV. The Versus deal was totally trying to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. Even at the time, after getting royally screwed by ESPN, Bettman went out of his way to praise the network and bend over backwards to hold the door open for a future return. Its only since Shapiro's era has ended that ESPN is making even vaguely conciliatory remarks about working with the NHL again. Bettman never wanted to move to Versus, but he did have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners to get some dough for the franchises.
# posted by 
: June 01, 2008 10:04 pm
: June 01, 2008 10:04 pm Post a Comment
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