Hoek said:
Bingo. Even if they looked at the books they would whine about wanting to include all sorts of extraneous revenues as hockey revenues. Nonsense. Hockey should be profitable or at least hover near breaking even on its own, not subsidized by all the other things the owner is doing with his arena and property surrounding it.
"Cooking the books" is very difficult if there are even remotely intellegent people that have access to the information and know what questions to ask. Like others, I am a CPA and have my background in forensic accounting.
What is difficult is "peeling the onion" to determine what is really hockey revenue, and make sure that transaction with related parties are reasonable. Example: Bill Wirtz owns the vast majority of the parking lots around the United Center. However, he had to invest substantial money to purchase the land, and money to improve it is as well. What portion of the parking revenue is "hockey revenue" for the Hawks, and is that fair if (let's just say) that the ownership group in EDM doesn't get any cut of the parking $'s (because they never invested the money to purchase the land). This get's REALLY tricky when some teams own their building, and other just lease them. Same thing with TV rights, especially when the cable company owns the team (NYR, PHI).
Rules would have to be established on "Fair Values" for those expenses/revenues, which is difficult to do initially, but relatively easy to audit going forward.
I think the PA just trots this out as a easy out, and the individual players don't have the business savvy to seperate the truth from their own propaganda.