No Hamilton Preds??? fuÇk OFF BETTMAN

[Booche]

As usual, I find myself asking Kev the same question again.

What the hell are you talking about?

Put the bong down. There is no fighting in football. If you really think that fighting in the NHL is the answer to their US woes than I think you need to dial it back and attempt some moderation.

[Kanada Kev]

Buddy, I'm not saying that fighting in the NHL is the SOLUTION. I'm saying that trying to eliminate it completely is a MISTAKE.

[ollie]

No one is trying to eliminate fighting completely. I don't know why this keeps coming up as a topic.

[AD]

it's against the rules, isn't it?

[ollie]

It's codified into the rules as a penalty.

[Booche]

I'm saying that trying to eliminate it completely is a MISTAKE.

Truthfully, I find that I fight myself with that topic almost every day. I am not pro or anti fighting but I often wonder if it really does serve the purpose/need that the believers want us to follow.

And please everyone, there is no need to cite examples. I am schooled enough which is probably why I get so easily confused. One day I want them to drop the instigator rule and the next I want them to really crack down on the fisticuffs.

[Jaimoe]

I'm finding myself liking the enforcer vs. enforcer fight less and less (to the point of not wanting to see it occur at all) and the spontaneous scraps ones more and more. At least the latter ones make sense in a heat of the moment context.

[AD]

I'm finding myself liking the enforcer vs. enforcer fight less and less (to the point of not wanting to see it occur at all) and the spontaneous scraps ones more and more. At least the latter ones make sense in a heat of the moment context.

Ditto. See Comrie, Mike.

[badams]

I'd rather watch UFC than a NHL fight any day. The NHL fights have really lost their luster too me.

[Booche]

Bob McKenzies take.

[Davey Boy 2.0]

weird, i just got a flash of dyslexia and read the end of that first sentence as "gay pride" instead of "pay grade".

wishful thinking of something like that maybe

[Booche]

[color:purple]Bettman is sooooooooooooo evil.

Canadian Press

7/5/2007 12:12:01 PM

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - A group of Nashville businessmen has submitted a bid to buy the Predators, joining at least two other potential buyers vying for the NHL team.

The group, led by David Freeman, chief executive officer of 36 Venture Capital, and Herb Fritch, CEO of HealthSpring Inc., has not said how much it has offered in an attempt to try to keep the team in Nashville.

"We've signed a confidentiality agreement and we really can't comment on it," Fritch said Thursday. The group submitted the bid earlier this week, he said.

Predators spokesman Gerry Helper declined to comment about the Nashville group's bid for the team.

"Until and unless we have a binding agreement in sight, we're not going to comment on the status of the ownership situation," Helper said.

The Predators, third in the NHL with 110 points last season, were put in play when current owner Craig Leipold announced in May that he had signed a letter of intent to sell the franchise to Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie for US$220 million.

Leipold said his team has lost $70 million in 10 years of ownership.

Soon after making his offer, Balsillie started a process to move the Predators to Hamilton if low ticket sales allowed the Predators out of their lease with the arena in Nashville following the sale's completion.

Last week, Leipold asked the NHL to hold off its consideration of the deal until he reached a binding agreement with Balsillie, who is co-CEO of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd.

Instead, Leipold is reportedly pursuing a bid from San Jose, Calif.-based venture capitalist William (Boots) Del Biaggio III - originally estimated at $190 million.

Del Biaggio, who owns a minority stake in the NHL's San Jose Sharks, has an ownership agreement in place with Kansas City's Sprint Center to bring a team there.

Del Biaggio did not immediately return phone calls on Thursday seeking comment about the Nashville group's bid to buy the Predators.

Richard Rodier, Balsillie's lawyer, could not be immediately reached on Thursday regarding the Nashville group's bid.

Fritch would not say how many Nashville investors are involved in the group's attempt to buy the Predators but said they want the team to stay in the city because it's good for the "community economically, the quality of life."

"I've been a season ticket holder for a number of years and enjoy hockey and the Predators," said Fritch, a northern Minnesota native who's lived in Nashville for nearly 12 years.

"During hockey season, that's one of the major things my wife and I look forward to. We'd feel like Nashville was a lot less desirable place if the Predators weren't around."

[Booche]

Maple Leafs quietly pulling the strings

It has been quite the propaganda war.

Gary Bettman, cast as a hater of all things Canadian. Jim Balsillie portrayed as a zillionaire maverick, bordering on kook.

On both sides of the fence, some very fine and sophisticated fiction has been spun around the potential sale of the Nashville Predators and their move to Southern Ontario — a deal that now seems dead in the water.

But step back for a second, and get past the character assassination.

Though it's loads of fun to tweak the commissioner, to contrast his oh-so-heartfelt paeans to Canada when he was begging for government handouts or trying to enlist fans to the cause of breaking the players' union through a lockout, against the stonewalling now, the picture of Bettman as some kind of anti-Canuck bigot doesn't really hold water.

And Balsillie, the dangerous rebel, is the same guy the National Hockey League's executive committee endorsed unanimously, with enormous enthusiasm, when he was about to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins.

If Balsillie stopped playing by the "rules" in his attempt to purchase the Preds and move them to Hamilton and if he deviated from the league's unwritten protocol by making his arena deal public and taking deposits on season tickets, perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising, given what happened to him when he stayed quiet and polite and did things by the book while pursuing the Penguins.

And, in any case, this is a league that historically hasn't been awfully picky about whom it allows into its exclusive club.

So let's assume that the NHL's absolute opposition to a second franchise in Southern Ontario has nothing to do with either Bettman or Balsillie, personally.

It also has absolutely nothing to do with the good of the game, or the good of the professional hockey business.

You simply can't make the case that the sale of a dead-end team for an enormous, precedent-setting amount of cash and its subsequent move into the biggest, richest hockey market on the continent could be anything but beneficial to the NHL and the vast majority of its owners.

Up go franchise values, up goes equity and up goes the price of an expansion team.

A "have not" team that has taken more money than any of the others from the revenue-sharing pool immediately becomes a "have" team playing to full houses and contributing money to the in-house welfare system.

Hamilton has its issues, but with eight million and counting mostly hockey-literate people in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, what's the real difference if the team is there, or in Burlington, or Oakville, or Mississauga or Cambridge? Fans would certainly find their way to the arena, and one of the NHL's worst problems — though certainly not its only one — would be solved in the process.

The Buffalo Sabres, just a couple of years removed from insolvency, and reeling now over the loss of two key free agents, might be damaged in the process. But on a cold-blooded, bottom-line basis, given how little the Sabres bring to the league table, it's hard not to believe that most governors would be willing to accept that risk in return for the rewards that Balsillie's team would guarantee.

Which brings us to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The NHL's official position is that the 50-mile territorial veto that is explicit in its bylaws no longer applies (a change made to fend off anti-trust action of the Al Davis variety.) But Balsillie's people think it's still there.

And, more important, so do the Leafs, which is why they have remained very quiet, and very secure, even as the two sides have been firing salvos back and forth.

Simply put, no other team is coming into Southern Ontario, because the Leafs don't want it to happen. The Toronto owners are guaranteed enormous profits no matter how their team performs on the ice. They are in many ways the chief beneficiaries of Bettman's new economic order, forced to pocket tens of millions of dollars that they would have spent on player salaries in the old, cap-less world, while watching their revenues go up and up and up (not to mention the windfall of the 90-cent-plus Canadian dollar).

It's all good for them, and they don't plan on sharing, because they don't have to. It says so right in the NHL constitution.

Is that legal?

Well, if it never comes to a vote, if a sale is never approved, if relocation is never on the governors' agenda or if there's nothing to challenge in court, then we'll never know for sure. There are all kinds of ways to kill a franchise transfer without being explicit about it, as has become blatantly obvious in the past few weeks.

But make no mistake where the buck stops: not with the personalities out front, but with the discrete folks at the Air Canada Centre, who haven't lost a moment's sleep despite all of that noise.

[Kanada Kev]

Fuck 'em all ... the league needs a reality check. Time for another WHL???