Turning a profit

Only a tiny percentage of Burkle’s net worth has been generated by the Penguins, but he said the franchise is a money-maker.

“We’re a profitable team, under almost any scenario,” Burkle said. “From a budgeting point of view, we assume we’ll make the second round [of the playoffs].

“That’s kind of our baseline, when we look up what we can do over the course of the year without doing something unusual, capitalwise. We assume we’ll make the second round.

“If we make the second round, everything works. If we don’t, we have room, anyway. We don’t get ourselves in trouble.”

The Penguins also stand to generate some income from the development of the former Civic Arena site, although that project has been running behind schedule. Burkle, though, said the delays don’t trouble him as much as some might suspect.

Mostly because the revenue that could come from developing that site is not a primary concern for him.

“I would never say that I was frustrated by it because part of my business philosophy — and my philosophy in life — is to remember what the goal is,” Burkle said. “Remember why you’re here, what you’re trying to do and remember what you’re headed toward.

“We’re a hockey team and we want to win Stanley Cups. We want to have our players feel like they’re in the best place they can be, and we want our fans to care. Incidental to all of that, we have this piece of property over here that has some value to it.

“To me, that’s exactly what it is. It’s incidental. When the governor was trying to put a package together [to have an arena built] that was acceptable to him and acceptable to us, one of the things was, ‘Here’s this land for the arena.’

“We’re not going to be a typical