2002 closed with the hounds of commerce finally cornering the exhausted Ottawa Senators. Living on credit since day one, the Senators and their spiffy new arena were buckling under a combined debt of over $350 million. Ownership scrambled, cooking up a scheme to sell shares in the franchise, which would cut the debt in half and provide desperately needed cash. But it fell apart when the banks refused to play along, leaving the Senators bankrupt as the new year dawned.
So began the search for a saviour, a benevolent millionaire willing to prop up a sickly outfit, all for the love of the game and the eternal gratitude of local sportswriters. For Canadian hockey fans, it was the 1990s all over again: another team-saving crusade, arousing the familiar whiff of pathos and sweaty desperation that surrounded earlier efforts to salvage the Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques.
While one sympathized with fans in Canada's capital and marvelled at how a great team could emerge from such turmoil, it was hard to feel sorry for the franchise. The Senators’ financial history is a monument to the hubris of tinpot tycoons who seem willing to promise anything, squander pots of other people’s money and leave creditors on the hook in a quest to set themselves up as NHL big shots.
Eventually, a pharmaceutical baron named Eugene Melnyk emerged from his Caribbean hideaway and assumed the operation, identifying his purchase as a hockey deal, not a business deal. When his advisors looked at the Senators’ books, he said, they told him to “run for the hills.”
Meanwhile, in Buffalo, prospective Sabres' owner Mark Hamister began the year demanding the usual taxpayer freebies: arena improvements, a new parking garage, a break on the rent and so on. Local and state governments failed to see the greater good in throwing cash at a feeble sports franchise, so Hamister disappeared. A few weeks later, a billionaire named Tom Golisano finally rescued the Sabres from the NHL orphanage. The exact price he paid for the team is hard to pin down, because the deal involved the assumption of so much bad debt.
By this time, the Pittsburgh Penguins were burning the furniture to warm the house. Scoring wizard Alexei Kovalev was peddled to the New York Rangers in March, and even some NHL players cringed when they saw the spare parts Pittsburgh received in return. Further cost-cutting trades followed, leaving the Penguins with a line-up that might do well if it dropped down to the West Coast League, taking on the Fresno Falcons or Idaho Steelheads.
As these crises played out, several other NHL teams watched their ticket sales perish in the dog days of winter. Fans in the NHL's "sunbelt" cities - Atlanta, Miami, Nashville, Tampa, Anaheim - stayed away in droves throughout the regular season. Announced attendance was sometimes barely half of capacity, and the announced attendance was usually exaggerated. More established teams in Boston, Chicago, Washington and New Jersey also played before acres of empty seats.
With the league inflated to 30 teams and American television audiences showing more interest in arena football and dog shows, there was no prospect of franchise fees or a new TV deal to bolster the bottom line. By the time the Stanley Cup Playoffs got underway, cries of poverty rang from owner’s suites and gated estates throughout the hockey world.
It was all very bad news indeed. But bad news for who, exactly?
Next page: The NHL Should Think Small
