Losing Jets the wake-up call we needed

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2017 (3112 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

History travels in a circle and one of those circles closed this week with the news out of Glendale that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is demanding a new arena for the Arizona Coyotes — or else.

“The simple truth? The Coyotes must have a new arena location to succeed,” Bettman wrote to Arizona legislators this week.

Stop me if that sounds familiar.

The Coyotes, of course, are only in Arizona these days because a similar demand for a new arena that Bettman tried to broker in Winnipeg back in the 1990s was rebuffed, setting up the sale that moved Winnipeg Jets 1.0 to the suburbs of Phoenix.

So how did that turn out? Well, if the Coyotes end up moving, as Bettman is now threatening — either to a new taxpayer-funded arena elsewhere in Arizona or, failing that, out of the state entirely — the hapless citizens of Glendale will be left with an empty arena and US$230 million in debt.

Throw in two decades of lousy Coyotes hockey in the intervening years and the entire ‘let’s move a Canadian hockey team to the Arizona desert’ experiment has proven to be nothing short of an unmitigated debacle for which the taxpayers of Glendale will be paying for decades to come.

Now, if Glendale is looking for sympathy this week, the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers is probably the wrong place to come.

The only thing colder than a Winnipeg winter is 15 of them without the warming diversion of an NHL hockey team, and there will be many Jets fans this week who regard the latest — and quite possibly final — development in the Glendale saga as nothing more than a giant helping of karma.

Yet on a frigid Wednesday night that saw 15,000-plus Jets fans find refuge from a bitter Prairie wind in the cosy confines of the MTS Centre and a highly anticipated settling of scores with the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins, it was hard not to also conclude everything happens for a reason — including, as it turns out, having your hockey team stolen away.

Because as history has unfolded, there is a compelling case to be made the very best thing that ever happened to NHL hockey in Winnipeg is that, for a little while, we didn’t have NHL hockey in Winnipeg.

Put down the pitchfork and let’s go for a walk…

It is true the loss of the Jets created a huge void in this community and led to a whole lot of soul-searching in the years immediately following.

It also led to something else — the construction of a downtown arena that I’d argue is, dollar for dollar, the best value in a major sports facility anywhere in this country.

With no NHL team as a tenant at the time — and no guarantee there ever would be — Mark Chipman prudently built Winnipeg a new arena in 2004 on a shoestring budget of just $133.5 million, with just $40 million of that coming from taxpayers.

That’s ridiculously cheap — even by the standards of a city that’s never paid retail for anything. Consider: the new arena in Quebec City — built for an NHL team that might never come — cost $400 million, all of it paid for by taxpayers. And then there’s the new arena in Edmonton, which cost $480 million, with $325 million of that coming from taxpayers.

Those aren’t the outliers — the MTS Centre is. A 2010 study by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that the 45 stadiums and arenas built or renovated in the United States between 2000 and 2010 cost an average of US$412 million — quadruple what it cost to build the MTS Centre when you factor in the exchange rate.

All of which is to say that with the city’s hockey future so uncertain after the Jets left, we built ourselves a new arena that, in retrospect, was exactly the kind of affordable, low-overhead, function-over-form building that would allow NHL hockey to work in the league’s smallest market.

Are there nicer arenas in the NHL? Of course — most of them. (Although hardly all. I wouldn’t kennel my dogs in the Saddledome. Ditto Scottrade Center in St. Louis.)

Are the concourses at the MTS Centre too small? Yep. Is there too little leg room? You bet.

But the biggest concern about the MTS Centre when the Jets came back in 2011 — that it was too small to support an NHL team — has proven to be its greatest asset.

The Jets get two huge advantages out of having the fewest seats in the league: a scarcity of tickets that forces hockey fans in this province to lock into season tickets if they want to watch hockey live, and an intimacy that creates an electric atmosphere on nights such as Wednesday that the proprietors of all the league’s fancier buildings can only envy.

And the taxpayers? We got one of the best deals anywhere in North America for our $40 million initial investment in the MTS Centre.

In her 2012 book Public Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities, Judith Grant Long found taxpayers in Canada and the U.S. have paid, on average, 78 per cent of the construction costs of major stadiums and arenas.

The MTS Centre? The public’s investment in that building represents just 30 per cent of the costs. Think Glendale would trade us for that deal today?

Now, it’s true the public continues to subsidize the Jets. How much? Former Free Press colleague Bartley Kives, who now works for the CBC, broke down the public funding and operating subsidies the Jets receive and found it totalled about $13.5 million for 2017.

That’s not chump change, although it bears noting that more than $5 million of that total comes from local gamblers in the form of the Jets’ share of the proceeds from 140 provincial government VLTs installed at the Shark Club at Cityplace.

Look, I get there are people in this town who will never countenance one dime of money for our local sports teams — or any other public work, for that matter.

But these are the facts: you either pay or your city doesn’t play.

A 2011 study by the Conference Board of Canada found there are only three cities in Canada — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — that have economies large enough to support major sports facilities without public money. Everyone else either ponies up some public support or watches from the sidelines.

Besides, the Jets are an enormous bargain in terms of public investment when compared to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, for whom the public contributed more than $170 million in loans, grants and funding towards the $209-million construction cost of Investors Group Field.

In any event, it’s worth noting the majority of the public money the Jets are getting this year is going to get pumped right back into the MTS Centre in the form of a $12-million renovation as part of an ongoing effort by True North to keep the MTS Centre current.

So there’s that.

Then there’s this: the other thing the Jets got out of the Jets leaving was a new ownership group that blends a community-minded owner in Chipman with the ridiculously deep pockets of one of the world’s richest men, David Thomson.

You can say what you want about some of the decisions this team has made over the years on the hockey operations side. You can question whether ‘draft and develop’ should mean you sit on your hands while your opponents are upgrading at the trade deadline. You can question how six years into this thing, this team is on its way to missing the playoffs for the fifth time. And you can question how it is the Jets are paying defenceman Mark Stuart $2.6 million a season through next season, despite the fact he cannot get into the lineup ahead of either Paul Postma or Ben Chiarot.

What you cannot question is this city and its hockey fans are infinitely better off with the current ownership group than the dysfunctional bunch that simply could not find a way to make hockey viable in Winnipeg the first time

Hockey works in Winnipeg today in a way it never did before — and never will in Glendale.

We built it. And then we rebuilt it even better.

Through better and worse, we’re still coming, even as a Coyotes team that once called Winnipeg home now prepares to abandon yet another city.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek