THE SONICS DOOM: LESSONS FOR US IN SEATTLE’S LOSS
Losing the Seattle SuperSonics NBA team to Oklahoma City in 2006 holds an important lesson for Calgarians who value the Calgary Flames.
Since this fall, the rumours surrounding the Calgary Flames leaving town, and taking their estimated $410 million of annual economic activity with them, have been swirling around like a tough-to-control spinning puck.
Those rumours whirled into a cyclone of speculation starting Monday, after Seattle city council voted 7-1 in favour of signing a memorandum of understanding that will speed the way for $600 million of renovations to downtown Seattle’s KeyArena, to make it workable for both NHL and NBA teams. The renovations are expected to be finished by the start of the 2020-21 hockey season.
Seattle’s celebratory news left Calgarians commiserating over the possibility of losing their beloved Flames, something Seattle residents understand after Washington state government officials refused to upgrade KeyArena in an effort to keep the team in 2006. Sound familiar?
On Thursday, during the National Hockey League’s board of governors meeting, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said he would allow Seattle to hold a season-ticket drive, which is expected to sell out at the speed of a slapshot.
The addition of an expansion team in Seattle will even out the number of hockey teams to 32 — instead of the current 31 — with 16 teams in both the east and the west divisions. In other words, moving Calgary to Seattle solves nothing for the NHL in terms of having an even number of teams. Whew! Good news, right? Not so fast.
During the October civic election in Calgary, Mayor Naheed Nenshi launched his re-election campaign on Sept. 10 announcing he had a “bold path forward” for a new arena. It was all news to the Flames organization, which said the city and the Flames had stopped negotiating July 31.
Nenshi’s stickhandling on that issue appeared to initially wound him politically, casting him as a mayor who can’t negotiate anything — not even a contemporary art museum. However, he was re-elected with 51 per cent of the vote on Oct. 16, besting lawyer Bill Smith, who had no platform, other than the message that he was not Nenshi.
While it’s true that Seattle citizens are more into hoops than hockey, the National Basketball Association’s $24-billion TV contract runs to the end of the 2025 season and it’s considered improbable that NBA team owners will want to dilute those profits by adding another team prior to the expiration of that deal.
“If the NHL so chooses to expand, we will be all over them,” said Tim Leiweke, CEO of the Oak View Group, a Los Angeles company that is privately funding the renovations of KeyArena. “If there is a team that they choose to move, we will be all over them.
“If the NBA — and they’re not there yet — but should they at some point in the future begin to talk about expansion, we’ll be the first ones at the table,” added Leiweke.
In short, if the newly renovated arena doesn’t get a hockey team, it could sit mostly empty for at least three years, so the Oak View Group is highly motivated to get fans in seats as soon as the renovations are completed by securing an NHL team.
Nevertheless, a reliable hockey source from Central Canada, who has asked to remain anonymous, says Seattle was never really in the running as an option for the Calgary Flames. Rather, the world’s “richest restaurateur,” Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta, is trying to import the Flames to Houston, where his NBA team, the Rockets, play and where much of his real-estate empire and restaurants thrive.
Fertitta, who is also the owner of the Golden Nugget Casinos and Hotels, which includes online gaming, has made it clear he wants to see pucks in nets, not just basketballs, and judging from this man’s bio, it appears that he tends to get what he wants.
The Flames’ owners have offered to pay $275 million towards a $500-million arena it won’t own. Calgary is willing to pay just one-third of the arena cost. Additionally, Nenshi has tried to say that a new arena ticket tax is a neutral third-party funding source, but it is really just more Flames revenue.
After the Seattle deal was announced, Nenshi rubbed salt in the Flames’ wounds again.
“I’m interested in the Seattle news because, of course, that’s over $600 million of private funding,” he told reporters in a scrum. “In fact, it’s the first time I’ve seen an arena deal that has the private funder actually paying for the road and infrastructure improvements as well as making a donation to charity just cause,” said Nenshi. “So, it certainly shows there’s a larger universe of options in getting this kind of infrastructure built perhaps than what we’ve been exposed to.”
The greater metropolitan area of Seattle has a population of almost four million. Calgary has 1.3 million, so there are millions more people who will buy tickets to other events like concerts, than Calgary’s market can provide.
It’s important to keep this information top of mind, so that decision-makers don’t become tone deaf to a potential SuperSonic boom that could suck the Flames out of Calgary.