The campaign started, appropriately enough, with an e-mail. Richard Rodier, the willful, tough-in-the-corners lawyer behind the bid to relocate an NHL franchise to Hamilton, initiated the league-shaking manoeuvre by tapping out a simple note to Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie in the fall of 2003 after hearing him speak at a venture-capital conference.
And Balsillie, the BlackBerry billionaire, promptly e-mailed back: Not interested. It may have ended right there - before Pittsburgh, before Nashville, before Phoenix - had Rodier been the type to take "no" for answer.
By then Rodier had already tried to snag the Ottawa Senators and Buffalo Sabres out of bankruptcy on behalf of ownership groups that have never been identified, and had met with Hamilton politicians about putting a team in Copps Coliseum.
Rodier is nothing if not persistent. "I saved his e-mail and, a year later, right before the [NHL]lockout, I hit the reply function," Rodier says. The second message to Balsillie read: "The reasons you stated [for not being interested]may not be relevant now. Might you change your mind?" Balsillie told him to come and see him in his office, "and I guess the rest is history," Rodier says.
While Balsillie is the face on the stubborn bid to secure a second team for the Toronto area, Rodier is the dogged strategist.
He dresses the campaign in a cloak of nobility.
"It's an important cause ... of millions of people," he says during a rare interview. "Canadians have been reticent to speak up; we're overly polite. But this is something that people can participate in, and have a real effect on."
Rodier's determination has certainly helped get Balsillie this far, but some NHL insiders believe Rodier's door-crashing tactics may mean the day may never come when Balsillie is welcomed into the NHL lodge with backslaps, toasts and cigars.
By his own admission, Rodier is hardly the smooth, small-talking, velvet-gloved sales type. So if a personality clash is holding up Balsillie's efforts to land an NHL team, is it between Rodier and the league office, rather than between Balsillie and commissioner Gary Bettman?
"You hear through the grapevine that there is a lot of animosity from the NHL toward me personally," Rodier says. "But everyone has a job to do. I have no doubt that deputy commissioner [Bill]Daly and commissioner Bettman are doing what they think is the right thing and really believe in what they're doing. That doesn't make them bad people. I really believe in what I'm doing, and that doesn't make me a bad person.
"To know me is to love me."
It depends on the context, perhaps. Predictably, getting NHL people to talk on the record about Rodier is difficult. But a series of off-the-record conversations paint him as someone out of his depth and often too clever by half, having hatched an unlikely plan that he's clinging to with all his might in the absence of an alternative.
"He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room," says one team official who has dealt with Rodier extensively. "And those guys are always dangerous."
One NHL governor described him as a "schemer;" another, a "gnat."
According to Rodier, he does have allies among the league executives, but they won't talk on the record either. "My official response is no comment," said one team president cited by Rodier as a friend, sounding board and advocate.
Rodier left Montreal after high school, did a preparatory year at Carleton University in Ottawa before attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for an undergraduate degree in economics. He graduated from the University of Toronto law school in 1984 before being called to the Ontario Bar in 1986 and heading for Bay Street.
"He's a bright guy, a very capable guy and a very, very independent guy," says Don Jack, a litigator at Lerners and previously a partner at McDonald Hayden, a defunct boutique commercial firm where Rodier worked. "Sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not. ... He conducted his business on his own. He was very collegial, but it's more in his nature to work on his own."
To obtain an NHL franchise though, Rodier needed a backer.
He hatched his plan in late 2002, with the Ottawa Senators heading toward bankruptcy and the Buffalo Sabres not far behind. A life-long hockey fan, Rodier says something clicked during a quiet moment in court. The bankruptcy process, he reasoned, could be the way to trump NHL bylaws on which league governors lean to restrict franchise movement - and thus keep a second team out of Southern Ontario.
On Tuesday in Phoenix, U.S. federal bankruptcy judge Redfield T. Baum is to hear arguments that go to the root of Rodier's blueprint, then rule whether the Coyotes can be relocated and sold off to the highest bidder. Balsillie's pending $212.5-million bid for the Coyotes is conditional on being able to move the franchise to Southern Ontario.
"It's just the application of very general bankruptcy principles to sports," Rodier says. "The Senators and the Sabres were in the news [in 2002]and I'm sitting in a CCAA filing process, and you wonder, well, gee, how can you apply x to y? It's not more interesting than that."
Rodier compiled a 30-page dossier and shopped it to hockey fans of significant means. Balsillie might have been the first aspiring NHL owner to be wedded to Rodier's plan, but he wasn't the first to flirt with it.
His approach was disarmingly direct - calling, or in the case of Balsillie, e-mailing potential investors out of the blue.
It was Rodier's idea to chase the Pittsburgh Penguins, and when Balsillie was on the verge of closing the deal in December, 2006, Rodier advised against because of a seven-year non-location clause that had been tucked into the transfer-of-ownership documents. And it was Rodier who managed the controversial season-ticket deposit campaign related to Balsillie's bid for the Nashville Predators in 2007.
Balsillie, who wasn't available to comment for this article, shares with Rodier a passion for the Montreal Canadiens. Otherwise, not a lot is known about the dynamics of their relationship.
"I can tell you this: There is not one shred of paper between Jim and I. Not one shred," Rodier says. "To work with Jim is to understand that it's about total integrity and trust."
Rodier has generally avoided on-the-record interviews, and even then can be prickly about the process - refusing, for example, to say how old he is: "Not relevant."
People close to Rodier say his single-mindedness and love of hockey suit him for his current role. He describes himself as a recreational-level player and a father of two teenaged sons who played at the top levels of the Greater Toronto Hockey League.
"He's a passionate guy who likes to focus on a big, meaty project," says Marc Milgrom, a law school classmate, intramural hockey teammate and president and CEO of Filemobile, a Toronto-based media company that is managing the social-networking aspect of the makeitseven.ca website. "I know he's been working on this for a while and it's not easy to do; there's a lot of opposition out there."
While he describes bringing a seventh NHL team to Canada as a just cause, Rodier's determination begs the question: What's in it for him? Would he be in line for an equity stake when Balsillie lands a team? Or perhaps an on-going role with the team in an executive capacity?
"It's easier for me to rule out things," Rodier says. "I wouldn't be the general manager and I wouldn't be the president of the team. Jim hasn't spoken to me about it, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to him because the president is the public face of the team and has different skill sets than me."
Chief executive officer?
"No"
Equity partner?
"I'm not sure that's what the NHL has in mind for me," he says. Depending on what happens in Phoenix, we may soon find out.