So when the chance to buy Nashville came up five months later, Balsillie decided to play hardball. This time, he made no pretense of keeping the team in place, offering a stunning $220 million to owner Craig Leipold and selling “reservations” for season’s tickets at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton. The message was hard to miss: not only was Balsillie back, he was mobilizing public opinion in the heart of hockey country to get his way. Yet once again, the gambit fell flat. Even as anticipation of a new NHL team reached a fever pitch in southern Ontario, the owners fell into line behind Bettman, rebuffing Balsillie in favour of a consortium of owners that would keep the club in Tennessee. That group included William “Boots” Del Baggio, a Silicon Valley financier who last week pleaded guilty to fraud for forging documents to get loans from banks and two NHL fellow owners. Leipold, meanwhile, was placated with part ownership in the Minnesota Wild, a successful franchise located in a traditional hockey market. Evidently, Bettman would do almost anything to stop Balsillie from getting an NHL franchise.
No wonder, then, that the tech magnate took a scorched-earth approach when the Coyotes came calling this spring, doing everything he could to make Bettman look bad. He began by attaching a condition to his $212-million bid that he be able to move the team to Hamilton, a move that pitted the commissioner not only against Moyes but against his own bosses. It turns out the NHL counts among the Coyotes’ biggest creditors, having extended the team more than $30 million in loans and advances since last fall. Then Balsillie played the nationalism card, claiming that the NHL was stiffing the country that is “the source of the game, the players, the money.” His website became an outlet for pent-up Canadian frustration, inviting fans to go on “rants” that often as not devolved into personal attacks on the commissioner. “Stop being an ass, Bettman,” wrote one poster on Monday. “Hamilton can fund and support a team. Just stay the hell out of the way.”
Balsillie has repeatedly cast his actions as one more sign of his doggedness. “I spent five years looking for a front door,” he told the Hamilton Spectator last week. “We couldn’t find a front door.” But at what point does tenacity turn to self-defeating stubbornness?
In this case, say some observers, right about the time Balsillie began questioning the raison d’etre of his prospective partners. Asking the court to approve a sale in bankruptcy was one thing, explains Larry Grimes, a Maryland-based consultant who specializes in the acquisition of sports teams; asking it to approve one that included a move was an open challenge to the NHL’s power of self-determination. “The league set up ground rules for the sale of teams for good reasons,” says Grimes. “While I personally doubt the long-term viability of teams in the southern and southwest United States, I think Balsillie has gone about this all wrong. He’s botched it.”
More incendiary still is the lawsuit alleging cartel activity on the part of the league—a complaint filed by the Coyotes but one that serves Balsillie’s short-term aims. Like any league, the NHL is loath to put its rules governing the placement of franchises to a legal test, as a decision finding them guilty of anti-competitive behaviour would clear the way for any owner having financial trouble to move his team, or sell to buyers in another city. The NHL has no shortage of cash-strapped franchises these days (recent reports cite Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa Bay and Nashville among those with money problems, or debt-ridden ownership). Where is there to move other than the fertile territory controlled by more successful teams, or unserved markets where the league hoped to expand?
It is, in short, a recipe for pyrrhic victory. While it maximizes pressure on Bettman to make a deal, the anti-trust suit represents a direct threat to the monopolies enjoyed by the current owners. If he follows it to its logical end, Balsillie will have broken down the door to a club where he is Public Enemy No. 1, and where membership just became a whole lot less attractive. This explains why league officials paint him as a loose cannon and a backstabber every chance they get. “This has everything to do with respect for the league’s rules and processes,” Bill Daly, the league’s deputy commissioner, said recently. “It has everything to do with respect for contracts and upholding the public trust. Balsillie cares nothing about any of that as he has demonstrated over and over and over again.”
The irony, say people who know him, is that Balsillie is all about camaraderie once he is in your camp. “The sports analogies really apply to him,” says Fisk, the Waterloo chamber of commerce chief. “Jim is the sort of person who takes one for the team. He is very, very loyal.” The rest of the NHL owners would learn this if they would let down the drawbridge, agrees Balsillie’s friend Foxcroft, a former NBA referee who made his own fortune after patenting a specially designed whistle. “They’ve said he wouldn’t be a good partner to the other 29 NHL owners. Well, I don’t much like partnerships, but if there was one person in the world I’d go into a partnership with, it’s Jim. He would be a great ally. He would create wealth for the other owners, too. He would have a winning team making money in Hamilton that they aren’t subsidizing.”
The question now is which party, if any, will blink. It might well be in the NHL’s interest to make peace with Balsillie to preserve its own business model, says Grimes. “I could see them going into some backroom and saying, ‘Look, why don’t you run the team in Phoenix for a couple of years, and if you still can’t make money then we’ll discuss a move.’ ” But Bettman has made up his mind—so firmly, court documents reveal, that he would rather move the Coyotes back to Winnipeg, the city they left in 1996, than sell them to the RIM boss. With strong support among the league’s established owners, he’s unlikely to relent.
Balsillie, meanwhile, has staked his pride and reputation on a promise to bring another team to Ontario, whatever happens in Judge Baum’s courtroom. “It’s my firm commitment to Hamilton hockey fans,” he said in a weekend email to supporters. “It’s the best unserved hockey market in the world and it deserves an NHL team.” Already, there is speculation that he will target teams like Atlanta or Nashville if the Phoenix deal fails, and it’s entirely likely some “rogue” owners will approach him, as Moyes did last month. Yet any of these scenarios pits Balsillie in a series of court battles and publicity campaigns, spending millions more to attack the very business model he wants to be part of. To date, he has nothing to show for his efforts.
When he tried to buy the Penguins, Balsillie charmed many hockey fans by promising to get his name on the Stanley Cup “one way or another.” At the time, few had an inkling that they were witnessing quintessential Balsillie, a man who will spare no sum of money, no amount of sweat to realize his boyhood wish. The ambition and cunning that made him a billionaire may lead him yet to rewrite the ownership rules of professional sport. But now, as the clock winds down on the third period of this exceedingly bitter contest, it seems just as likely to prevent his dream from coming true.
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