I see the Xcel Center won the Super Bowl media day farce.
Smartest thing Jacobs did in Boston was giving the Celtics 'free rent' at TD Garden and control of signage inside the arena for their games. (Bruins get the concessions and luxury box income ) as it kept the Celtics from building a competing arena.
Quebec City would be very hard pressed to bring in enough income to seriously reduce the debt service on paying 650M USD to join.
Hey, I'll play along here. Jacobs owns TD Garden. That's different than Mpls. Timberwolves don't 'own' Target Center. City of Mpls owns it. So, Xcel getting the "media" day is something the Timberwolves have no control over. And, considering that Burke and Gluckstern wanted 20M a year or some such outlandish price, I don't think that losing one Media Day over not paying out 400M is a bad deal for City of Mpls.
But, in general, I agree. Competing arenas don't help each other (NYC is the exception, of course).
As to QC, that's a little more mixed bag. Clearly there is debt service for Quebecor. However, should the team come, Quebecor itself have local media rights. Supposedly, media rights work like this: RSN buys the rights, because their own bottom line is better with them than without them (due to advertising income, etc). If that's a true equation, then Quebecor should profit even more than usual, because there is no middle man. They just get the benefit. So, there is that.
However, I continue to feel that the major leagues are largely missing the line for the new boat here. In another generation, the world will be digital. RSN value will be much less, media rights will be much less, UNLESS the leagues find a way to monetize digital to make up for it. I'm 50 and many of my friends 'follow' their team, but only through 'notifications'. They are not watching every second. Phone goes 'bing' they look at the highlight. That's the future, and the leagues need to think about how that's going to affect them.
It's off topic here, but that's why I think it was super-foolish for Mpls/Minnesota to build the US Bank Viking ship. 30 years from now, NFL is going to look much different. You are saddling yourself to horse the future of which is unknown. That's why I wonder about the speculative nature of the Key Arena project. And, that unknown future is reason to question NHL hockey in QC. {However, in a world where media rights sink, ticket sales will become golden again. In that case, IF Quebecor had purchased the team, they would be doing much better than many NHL teams - ticket market would be ravenous there.}
