Gee, you’ve got to love Jim Balsillie and his mouthpiece. They just keep the laughs coming. Their latest gag is as funny as the National Hockey League’s idea that Las Vegas is a good place to put an expansion team.
The joke starts with word from the Hamilton Spectator that the city councillors say Balsillie “wants them to approve his proposal to lease Copps Coliseum, Hamilton Place, and the Convention Centre” at their meeting next Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Balsillie’s mouthpiece, Toronto lawyer Richard Rodier, is telling the newspaper in Nashville, The Tennessean, how upsetting it is to read all this stuff about the Predators being moved to Southern Ontario. “It’s very frustrating reading all this wild speculation,” Roder said. “This team is not going anywhere as long as the lease is in place.”
Man, Richard, stop it. You’re killing me.
This is the same Richard Rodier who has been paid for the last several years to examine the status of several financially shaky NHL teams with an eye to buying one that falls into bankruptcy and moving it. The same Richard Rodier who has been Balsillie’s point man on the deal with Hamilton for the rights to an NHL team at Copps Coliseum for years. The same Richard Rodier who protested the Hamilton deal is only a “contingency plan.” Yeah, a contingency plan until the rink is built in Kitchener-Waterloo if they have to move the Predators faster than planned.
Even the dimmest Nashville hockey fan knows the Predators’ lease is in place only as long as no one invokes the clause that says the team has one year to average 14,000 paying customers or it’s too-de-loo. I believe this year’s deadline for putting the city on notice is June 15. Since Balsillie won’t officially own the team by then, I am willing to bet the current owner, Craig Leipold, will issue that notice. If Balsillie did not make that arrangement with Leipold before he overpaid to the tune of $220-million or $240-million or whatever number Rodier is hinting at these days, then Balsillie is not nearly as smart as I think he is.
