The Billiken's Bluff

Two companies, Bain Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and Game Plan, a consulting firm that provides financial advice to pro sports teams, made an offer to buy the entire NHL for $3 billion, stadiums, skates, zambonis, and all.

30 teams for $3 billion. It’s a creative idea and bold offer, and just about the only thing related to the NHL that has caught my attention in the past few years. At first glance $3 billion looks like a large amount of money, but it only works out to $100 million per team. The Minnesota Vikings, a single NFL franchise were just purchased for $625 million. This goes to show what dire straits the National Hockey League is in. The league is said to have lost $497 million in over the past two seasons.

The NHL would then be run as a single entity, with each team receiving equal revenue, and having an equal amount of money to sign players. As my uncle would say, sounds communistic to me. Actually, it’s quite similar to the way the MLS (Major League Soccer) is run. This should set off a couple of alarms. Soccer doesn’t have much of a following in the country, and the MLS is hardly considered a successful professional sports league. And secondly, the MLS was conceived in this single-entity-corporation-format from its inception. The NHL would be trying to retrofit their league and their over-priced stars to this model. Sounds like a mess.

This entire scenario is a long shot anyway because many franchises, particularly those in the larger markets like Boston and New York who are not in the red, financially, have no desire to sell.

Bottom line though (because this is all about the bottom line isn’t it?) no one cares about hockey.