From the article though it looks like it wasn't so much that Waddell spoke disparagingly of him to the press but was asked specifically what went wrong with Semin. Personally I appreciate an actual answer to the question as opposed to obfuscation.
At any rate, the other take-aways from his talk before the Raleigh Sports Club
- The team is still for sale, but relocation from Raleigh is NOT being contemplated - "This franchise eventually will get sold, but it’s not leaving Raleigh."
- Waddell has purchased a house in Raleigh and he "wouldn’t be buying a house if I thought we were leaving the city."
- A $50M - $70M expansion/renovation of PNC Arena is being planned
- While average attendance went down last year, the team also reduced the number of complimentary and reduced tickets to put more of a premium on STHs
- # of STHs has increased by an unspecified amount - first time in the last six years that there's been growth among the STH base
- Waddell not opposed to ads so long as they're limited to a small patch near the shoulder on home jerseys only
From the last thread
Hopefully, they're spending that money to move the whole damn building downtown.
I'm interested in what is going to be done to PNC w/ these renovations. Anyone know?
Jumbotron is already six years old and is starting to look a bit small. Maybe we could be getting one of these monsters:
That jumbo tron is a beauty in real life. It really makes ours look like poo haha.
I mostly grew up in Orange/Durham, so I don't know a lot about Raleigh, but aren't there surface parking lots? I can think of countless teams that have tailgating despite being downtown like the Nationals, Ravens, Orioles, Panthers, Braves, etc.
Also, why are you assuming that NC State wouldn't play at a downtown arena?
There probably would be at least some surface parking as the arena would likely go on the fringe of downtown (probably to the south), not right in the heart of it.
There's plenty of parking capacity in the downtown area (especially after work and on weekends) to accommodate an arena and grid-based street layouts are extremely effective at dispersing crowds. I think physically downtown could handle it quite well. It's a huge shame it was never built there to begin with.
That said, the current arena is still quite nice and I'm tired of local and state governments throwing millions (sometimes billions) of dollars to build venues to hand over to billionaires. I just wish there was a bit more development in that area and better transit. The Caniac Coach alone isn't cutting it.
There's also a good way to build an arena downtown where it blends in, has street-facing retail/mixed use, and is not a black hole outside of game days (Verizon Center in DC is successful in this regard) and there's a bad way to do it where it just blows up a whole superblock area. Raleigh has an extraordinarily vibrant downtown for its size so any arena plan should enhance that not work against it.
There's been a lot of pushback recently against massive public subsidies for sports venues, so I think this new venue building craze is going to slow a bit over the coming years.
There probably would be at least some surface parking as the arena would likely go on the fringe of downtown (probably to the south), not right in the heart of it.
There's plenty of parking capacity in the downtown area (especially after work and on weekends) to accommodate an arena and grid-based street layouts are extremely effective at dispersing crowds. I think physically downtown could handle it quite well. It's a huge shame it was never built there to begin with.
That said, the current arena is still quite nice and I'm tired of local and state governments throwing millions (sometimes billions) of dollars to build venues to hand over to billionaires. I just wish there was a bit more development in that area and better transit. The Caniac Coach alone isn't cutting it.
There's also a good way to build an arena downtown where it blends in, has street-facing retail/mixed use, and is not a black hole outside of game days (Verizon Center in DC is successful in this regard) and there's a bad way to do it where it just blows up a whole superblock area. Raleigh has an extraordinarily vibrant downtown for its size so any arena plan should enhance that not work against it.
There's been a lot of pushback recently against massive public subsidies for sports venues, so I think this new venue building craze is going to slow a bit over the coming years.