Melnyk has own silver lining playbook
NCC is likely playing hardball on LeBreton
Manipulating Ottawans into telling the National Capital Commission to give Eugene Melnyk whatever he wants because we’re terrified of losing the Senators is a ploy.
It’s Trumpian in its sophistication.
That’s the way to interpret Melnyk’s complaining about the scant attendance at his Ottawa Senators’ games and his musing that he might just walk away from the LeBreton deal with the NCC and build a new rink somewhere else. Maybe in Ottawa, maybe some other city.
The NCC is expecting to a “milestone meeting” in January on the deal for the NCC’s LeBreton Flats land, in which Melnyk’s “RendezVous LeBreton” group is the preferred bidder. The parties have been in secretive negotiations for more than a year, since the commission decided a preliminary bid from RendezVous LeBreton was more appealing than one from Devcore Canderel DLS. The second bid is officially still there, in abeyance.
Redeveloping LeBreton Flats is a multibillion-dollar, decadeslong project, the biggest deal Melnyk or the NCC have ever done. Just cleaning up the contaminated soil is a $200-million affair, never mind building anything on it. A couple of percentage points this way or that is very much worth fighting over.
“If it doesn’t look good here, it could look very, very nice somewhere else, but I’m not suggesting that right now,” Melnyk said Friday, obviously suggesting that right now. He went off on the struggle to sell tickets, even when the Senators are in the playoffs, and questioned aloud whether it makes sense to move downtown from Kanata at all, undermining the whole rationale for his LeBreton Flats bid.
Melnyk’s a swashbuckler, a guy who speaks his mind and trusts his instincts, even if his mind changes or his instincts aren’t sound. It’s made him very, very rich. He saved the Senators when the franchise was in peril. He’s donated tons of money to charity. At LeBreton Flats, he’s on his third major proposal to build something new and big in Ottawa after city council ruled him out of a pro soccer franchise and a casino. That’s stubbornness and some vanity, both of which have benefited this city.
His mode of leadership has also gotten him sanctioned by securities regulators for misbehaviour at the helm of his former pharmaceutical company; sued for wrongful dismissal by the Senators’ former top marketer after a corner-office slaughter that also took out local hero Cyril Leeder; and blamed for the departures of fanfavourite players such as Daniel Alfredsson and Kyle Turris and next maybe Erik Karlsson. The guy is not subtle.
That’s the Melnyk package, though. We might wish the guy who controls Ottawa’s one toptier sports franchise were less impulsive, less likely to offend, not the kind of person to wonder in a late-night tweet when Bill O’Reilly will be back blathering right-wing talking points on television. But if he were, he might not have gotten rich enough to buy the Senators, or been inclined to sink so much of his own money into a smallmarket team with some big challenges.
If you’re a Senators fan, having the team owner dump on you for not buying enough $100 tickets, $20 parking passes and $10 beers isn’t much fun. Hearing him threaten to slash the player budget or maybe just up and move is worse. It feeds all the fears that come from having come to love a team that’s ultimately a business owned by a guy who doesn’t live here.
Your team wants you to love it, benefits from your love, but no matter what you do, it does not love you back any more than Amazon does.
In Calgary, the Flames tried pushing Mayor Naheed Nenshi around. He doesn’t want to sink a pile of public money into the new arena the team wants, and the Flames all but campaigned against him as he faced re-election this fall. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman even showed up to denigrate him in public. Voters picked Nenshi.
A deal that brings the Senators downtown is in everyone’s interest but not at absolutely any cost. We as the owners of the land, and the NCC as our representatives in this negotiation, have to take the prospect of a broken-down deal seriously without overreacting to it in either direction, either by giving away the store or by blowing Melnyk off and leaving him no choice but to live up to his threats.
Melnyk’s mouth-shooting suggests the National Capital Commission is driving a hard bargain over the Flats, and that’s great from any other perspective. The commission is selling this public jewel for mixed public and private benefit and we want as much out of Melnyk’s RendezVous LeBreton as we can get without sinking the deal. If Melnyk were overjoyed with how negotiations were going, the NCC would be doing something wrong.