Battle for Coyotes is theatre of the absurd

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/08/2009 (6147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

That’s it, the Phoenix Coyotes are moving to Hamilton, lock, stock and Shane Doan.

They must be, or the bizarre and bitter battle in Judge Redfield T. Baum’s bankruptcy court has been one of the most pointless and useless exercises in recent legal history.

The Coyotes must be moving to Canada, or the entire process has been a sham. A very expensive shell game.

After all, from the start we’ve been told that the priority of any bankruptcy court judge is to protect the creditors. That means Baum is obliged to accept the best offer for the delinquent hockey franchise.

Well, the best offer is Balsillie’s. Period. BlackBerry Boy has ponied up $212.5 million in cash to purchase the failed team. Oh, and move them to Hamilton, over Bettman’s cold, dead body.

True, Chicago Bulls/White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has a paper offer of $148 million, but not only is there little real cash involved, the deal requires that the City of Glendale, Ariz., eat future losses in either sales taxes or public funds that could amount into the tens of millions of dollars.

So essentially, the Reinsdorf offer — which the league has already voted to accept — will basically extort funds from the local residents in order to bankroll the vast losses of a hockey team many of them don’t even know exists. No, that’s not going to cause any unrest.

There’s another $150-million offer on the table from a hedge-fund group called Ice Edge Holdings, although to date there’s no proof that IEH even has the money required. Then there’s the little matter of Ice Edge proposing that the Coyotes play a handful of games in either Saskatoon or Halifax so hockey-loving Canadians can pay out of their pocket to subsidize an NHL franchise that has never made a single dime in the Arizona desert. Um, OK.

So, really, how can Baum do anything but approve Balsillie’s bid? Remember, his mandate is to protect the creditors, even if one of them is "owner" Jerry Moyes, the poor sap who’s lost a small fortune covering losses upwards of $300 million. Besides, if Baum accepts Reinsdorf’s bid, isn’t he not only passing on the richest offer, he’s saddling the innocent taxpayers of Glendale with a debt — under Reinsdorf’s proposal — of $15 million a year if the Coyotes operate at a loss?

Hence, it must be a done deal. Balsillie wins. Fire up Copps Coliseum, training camp is just around the corner.

Or…

This was a rigged game from the get-go. Balsillie never had a prayer because the house always wins; and the house would never allow anyone, much less Balsillie, to carpet-bag a team into a rich, hockey-mad region of southern Ontario.

This was a rigged game because money talks, and if you think the Toronto Maple Leafs don’t have a squadron of lawyers waiting to be unleashed if Balsillie so much as casts a shadow on their backyard, then think again. The Buffalo Sabres, with their football team already playing footsie with Toronto, will be filing legal motions at a rate so prolific it would make Stephen King blush.

And for the city of Glendale? Well, they’re screwed either way. It’s either sit there with an empty, publicly funded $180-million arena or continue to subsidize the Coyotes multimillion-dollar losses. Taxpayers of Nashville are saying, "Welcome to our world."

The only conclusion is that if Balsillie doesn’t win under these Gawdawful options, then the NHL was never going to lose. Anyone with a functioning brain knew there would be no real offer to buy the toxic Coyotes and keep them in Phoenix. That would be financial suicide. Just ask Moyes.

The only question was whether Baum would rule that the NHL must accept not only Balsillie as an owner but allow him to set up shop on the outskirts of the league’s undisputed kingpin franchise.

Well, on Sept. 10 we’re going to find out. Because there’s no doubt anymore over which bid provides the most relief to Coyotes creditors. Not a sliver. Meanwhile, the league-approved bid has been outed as a massive time bomb for local taxpayers.

So either the Hamilton Whatsyamacallits will be opening camp in Hamilton on Sept. 11 or the Redfield T. Baum Show was nothing but a facade; a futile legal exercise that, in the end, only made a bunch of fatcat lawyers a little more rotund.

Hey, we’re not saying Balsillie is some kind of mastermind in this farce. But an appalling lack of alternatives or hubris on the part of Bettman and the NHL — on paper, at least — seems to have left them vulnerable to their worst nightmare.

Or, perhaps, they knew the game was rigged all along.

And the rest has just been theatre.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca