Gord Miller: You've heard the quote before that using generally accepted accounting principles you can take a $5 million profit and make it a $5 million loss. Why would the players believe you when you have situations like Buffalo where the Rigas family faced criminal charges, Bruce McNall went to prison for financial malfeasance. Why would-with a long history of distrust, why would the players believe you?
Bill Daly: Well, none of those issues had to deal anything at all with our unified report of operations. As a matter of fact,
there are a lot of clubs in our league who, as legal entities report far less revenues than we record as part of our unified report of operations. Again, the goal of our unified report of operations is to report all hockey-related revenues, wherever it shows up, even if it's in a totally separate entity from the hockey club - if it's in an arena company, if it's in a concert management company, if it's in a concession company. All those revenues are reported as part of our unified report of operations. Now, let me finish because you're going to ask me, "Well how can the players be sure those are real numbers?" And, you know, I heard from the Players Association for 3 or 4 years - publicly, not privately - that while they're unaudited numbers, you know garbage in, garbage out, so we went out and hired Arthur Levitt to audit the books of all of our clubs to verify the accuracy of our unified report of operations. Arthur Levitt is the longest-standing chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, somebody of unassailable integrity and experience in financial reporting - quality financial reporting. He went in, did his own independent analysis of these businesses-
Bill Daly: Well I mean, I think, unfortunately, we've done everything within our power to try to get the players to believe our numbers. It's really the union that's responsible here, not the players.
Five-and-a-half years ago, in March, when we reached out to the Players Association, we expressly invited them to hire an independent auditor of their choice to come in and verify our numbers. They chose not to do that, and yet continued to be critical publicly of our numbers even after we'd gone through a minor economic study group to verify those numbers, so taking the position it's garbage in, garbage out, it's unaudited, we hired an auditor to come in and look at it, and they still want to have problems with our numbers. We're done talking about our numbers. There are no issues with respect to the financial losses facing this league, and anybody who's involved in this industry in a meaningful way knows this league is hurting. So the Players Association - schizophrenic in their views as they always are - don't want to acknowledge it at this point and that's their problem and not ours.
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