Bucking the trend
Weak dollar won’t hinder Quebec City’s push for NHL team: Mulroney
NEWYORK — There was a confident swagger in both the voice and mannerisms of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney Tuesday afternoon as he stood on a bustling sidewalk in midtown Manhattan and proclaimed our sagging dollar would not keep Quebec City from pursuing it’s NHL dream.
“It’s an important factor, but we can, even with the exchange rate, handle the team,” Mulroney said just minutes after the Quebec City contingent had completed its sales pitch to the NHL executive committee at the league’s head office.
Do we think Mulroney, Quebecor’s chairman of the board, actually believes that? Sure.
At the same time, commissioner Gary Bettman might not be so convinced. And he has 670 million reasons to feel that way.
With Bettman admitting any expansion fee figure “will start with a five” — meaning any guess in the $500-million US range would be safe — that figure translates into about $670 million Canadian, given the exchange rate was about 74.5 cents Tuesday. And who knows where it’s going from there?
To that end, several hours after Mulroney, Quebecor president Pierre Dion and their group had finished a presentation to the executive committee — a body made up of 10 NHL owners — the league’s board of governors heard a presentation from Avery Shenfeld, chief economist with CIBC who discussed the Canuck buck with them. As part of that chat, Shenfeld cautioned that people who attempt to forecast the future of the dollar will make a weatherman “look good.”
Keeping all that in mind, Bettman took the cautious approach regarding expansion when he met with media after the board of governors meeting had ended. His message when it comes to adding teams: There is no urgency, no deadline and no blueprint. “This is an ongoing process that doesn’t have a specific timetable and doesn’t have a predetermined outcome,” he said.
“In my two decades-plus of doing this, I’ve seen the Canadian dollar lower and I’ve seen it over par. So it’s just something we deal with and the system takes account for it. It’s not something that people are concerned about on a daily basis.”
Both Quebec City and Las Vegas have completed what was thought to be the three required stages of the expansion process.
When asked how many more phases would be needed for a decision to be made, Bettman replied: “As many as it takes, actually.”
You can understand why Bettman wants to proceed carefully.
Despite his constant insistence all is well with the league’s 30 existing franchises, the empty seats we are guaranteed to see next month in places such as Florida and Arizona suggest otherwise.
To be fair, the league is enjoying its most lucrative era from a financial perspective with Bettman hinting revenues are north of $4 billion.
In that regard, the league wants to make sure it does its due diligence in the expansion process in order to maintain such prosperity.
As a result, part of the presentation made by the Mulroney-Dion group was to show the commish and the committee how the economy in the Quebec capital is much stronger than it was back in 1995, when economic woes in the region played a major role in the beloved Nordiques leaving town and heading to Colorado to become the Avalanche.
There is no denying the Quebec City group was enjoying the momentum of the first NHL game played Monday at the new Videotron Centre, a 4-1 pre-season victory by the Montreal Canadiens over the Pittsburgh Penguins in front of a capacity crowd of 18,259. The executive board was shown first-hand evidence of the buzz Monday’s matchup created in the province capital.
Bettman admitted the optics of Monday’s spectacle in Quebec City was impressive.
“There is no doubt it’s a wonderful building and there are great hockey fans in Quebec City,” he said.
“But making a decision (on expansion) has to go beyond that.”