Q: What about southern Ontario?
A: If we’re relocating, or if we decide to expand, then we’ll see who the applicant pool is, where they want to play, and it’ll get a very good, hard look. We don’t have this master list somewhere where we’ve ranked cities.
Q: Do the Toronto Maple Leafs in fact have a veto on another team locating in southern Ontario, as they claimed in a letter they wrote you that was submitted to the court in Phoenix?
A: They have the same vote as everybody else in the league. One-thirtieth. It’s a majority vote. They have no veto. That letter was a reservation of their rights, and it’s three or four years old. The fact of the matter is, we’re on record with the Canadian Competition Bureau, we’re on record in the proceedings in Phoenix. They do not have a veto.
Q: Are the Leafs on the same page as you on the issue today?
A: I believe they are. And even if they’re not, it doesn’t matter because they don’t have a veto! Even if they think they do, they don’t. Let’s be precise: relocation requires a majority vote [of NHL governors]. An expansion team, because you’re admitting a new owner, requires a three-quarter vote.
Q: Is there no sense among owners that the goose that lays the golden egg is in southern Ontario, waiting for you to take it—for the league to have another very profitable franchise?
A: You assume a lot of things. You may be right on all of them, but they’re all assumptions that haven’t been studied.
Q: You don’t think it would be a slam dunk that a second franchise in southern Ontario would be profitable?
A: I have no doubt that they would fill up the building. I don’t know what their media arrangements would be in an area that is very saturated. Is Copps Coliseum the right building? Who’s going to renovate it? Should there be a new building in Kitchener or Waterloo or London? Is it easy to get in and out of Hamilton 41 nights a year? These are all questions where, if we get to that point, have to be determined.
Q: Let’s talk a bit about how the league is weathering the recession so far. The early season figures for attendance in a lot of NHL cities seem to be down.
A: It’s all over the lot. I think about half the clubs are up, half the clubs are down. We’re probably, if you take Phoenix out of the mix—which is a unique circumstance—I think we’re somewhere around flat or within a percentage point.
Q: Do you think that you have some markets that are unduly soft?
A: I think there are places that can improve, absolutely.
Q: Ones that you’re worried about having turn into a potential Phoenix situation?
A: No, no. When you refer to a potential Phoenix situation, you’re talking about a bankrupt club. Phoenix didn’t belong in bankruptcy.
Q: Jerry Moyes was losing a great deal of money.
A: He was losing, I don’t know, $20 million to $25 million a year. Okay, so that happens to clubs occasionally. It’s happened to clubs that are doing quite well right now. The fact of the matter is, that club went into bankruptcy because Mr. Moyes was trying to get money from something that he didn’t own. He owned Phoenix, he didn’t own someplace else. You know, I’ve made it a point of not really discussing what Mr. Balsillie did and why, because for me this was never about Mr. Balsillie, this was about our rules. I know you keep asking the questions that point in that direction. But I’d like you to be clear that’s not really something that I think is particularly important for us to discuss. The other side made this very personal, and the only way we could demonstrate from our standpoint that it wasn’t was by not responding to the personal attacks.
Q: The legal files and the legal strategy that suggested that he was unsuitable as an owner. That wasn’t personal?
A: Not by me. The owners decided they didn’t want him as a partner.
