It wasn't a slant. MacLean quoted the NHL's lawyers as to what Bettman had said, Bettman said No it wasn't about saving Moyes from public embarassment. MacLean confronts Bettman with his own quote in an article and he flip flops and says yes it was about saving Moyes from public embarassment. No slant. It was a simple No to a simple yes.
Except it wasn't, of course. Trying to characterize it as the same question being asked twice with two different answers once again simply ignores the surrounding context, which you have demonstrated is pretty much your entire modus operandi.
You may have a past experience of pushing your points via bully tactics rather than real arguments, but it won't fly with me.
Someone thinks he's a "board warrior", apparently. Those of us who really have been around a long time get a kick out of your kind.
Let me get this straight. You are stating my assessment is incorrect because I don't have the inside knowledge of what the league processes are for due dilligence.
Actually YOU have admitted such. I'm just repeating your own words.
Yet you are saying the league used adequate means even though you have no idea what processes were used.
You made the claim, YOU back it up.
I quantify my statement by a track record of a decade of debacles in ownership.
...but refuse to demonstrate whether or not it is of any deviation from other large businesses.
Your argument is the exact same as someone claiming a .333 batting average sucks because the batter is not getting on base two times out of three, while completely glossing over the fact that virtually the entire baseball world does worse.
And, as usual, the context of that "bad ownership" is completely ignored in favor of just generalizations. No weight given to whether or not there was even an opportunity to discover the "bad ownership" beforehand, or even acknowledgement that in some cases they only went bad AFTER they became owners.
You don't quantify your stance with any source, but choose to hang on my lack of working with the NHL as the counterpoint to my argument. Clever sir.. you don't actually have to say or prove anything, you just have to reapet "You're wrong you're wrong"over and over ad nauseum.
Apparently you're not a proponent of formal logic. You are the one making the claim that the league hasn't done all it could have done to stop these "bad owners" and that this somehow reflects on Bettman. I've simply asked you to support it. You then proceed to
use your conclusion AS the supporting evidence . Well, the questions are still pending - what should the league have done differently, and how is their performance any different from other big businesses who are looking to add multimillionaires to their roster?
On the other hand, I have not actually made any claim at all. Were I to have actually taken a stand, I would have mentioned that I believe the NHL has switched the firm or firms it uses to vet potential owners at least once. This isn't general knowledge and isn't something the sports media would typically report on, so I don't have a link for it.
There will never be any perfection in the vetting process. The Boots situation makes it clear that if someone has the background and the will to push a certain amount of wealth, they can probably get away with it for a while no matter what anyone does. It wasn't the NHL or CIT who discovered Boots' misdeeds, after all, but a completely different group looking a completely different issue (completely unrelated to Boots at all) who suddenly noticed what Boots was using as collateral wasn't actually his own brokerage statements at all.
I am arguing from a point of track record.
Which is a fallacy, of course.
You are arguing from the point of arguing.
Poking holes in faulty arguments is a favorite pastime of mine, I admit it. If you're going to go after someone like Bettman, who has demonstrated sheer brilliance in his running of the league, I expect the arguments to be a lot more sound than you have made them so far.
Some people just stick to dislike because they don't WANT the league to do what it does, like Fugu. That's a different story, opine all you like. But when you try to prove objectively that he SHOULDN'T have done things he did, or was wrong to do so, the bar is set a lot higher, and I call to account.
Yes... many of us saw it coming years before it happened and have profited from it in fine fashion.
I'm happy for you. Doesn't address the point at all, of course.
Let's look at Del Biaggio then...
1. Part of his disclosed financials was a 4 million dollar loan.... from his own bank. Anyone worth their salt in due dilligence would see this as a huge red flag. Major conflict of interest.
CIT is not "worth their salt in due diligence"? A financial institution with over a hundred years of experience in investment, and you think its own vetting process on Del Baggio can be dismissed with a message board post and a wave of your hand?
We're right back to arrogance.
The article in the Sports Business Journal quite clearly showed that there was pretty much no way the league could ever have caught Del Baggio before the unrelated audit suddenly found he was using - not false documents, but documents that didn't actually show his own dealings.
The article is unfortunately no longer available (that I can see at least), however. If I can find the archive of it I will give you the link, however, the actual details are: the point at which the league would have found many of the details you are accusing them of being negligent in not finding had not actually been reached - in other words, Boots had not progressed towards ownership to the point at which the league would have started looking at these things. It's a habit of many to believe that Del Baggio was "an owner". He wasn't. He never became one. He was a minority investor with no controlling interest, which the league - like everyone else - doesn't need to delve as deeply into. Del Baggio, through his family connections, had demonstrated he was able to raise 30m in his own capital, and that was good enough for what he was trying to do at first. When he tried to do more, when he tried to raise financing to take over the Predators, he couldn't do it. At some point after this, his double dealing was almost accidentally exposed by an unrelated company doing an unrelated audit.
I get the feeling you think you are bringing up new information that we haven't seen before. We've actually been through this on this board long ago several times already.
Let me make a few things clear in any event. Del Baggio passed along financial documents that were correct. They weren't actually HIS, but they were correct for what they were. So the numbers were working out. This is fraud. But it's fraud that could only ever be discovered through an audit. The NHL never got to the point of doing so because Del Baggio never got to the point of being able to make an offer to take over the Predators.
Or, to put it another way, you are using hindsight to castigate the league for not knowing what it couldn't possibly have known at the time.
http://hfboards.com/showthread.php?t=667540&page=2
The issue has already been hashed out. You're a bit late to the party.
As such the NHL has a track record of taking anyone who can at least make it appear as if they have the fortitude to own a franchise.
Actually, history has shown the league has always found the crooks out when the time came to do so, your 20/20 hindsight standards notwithstanding.
Definition:
I hope this helps. I am more than happy to provide definitions on any other basic 3-letter words you require assistance with.
Feel free. Still waiting on the first lie, though. One would have thought that since Bettman's statements were a matter of public record that perhaps your interpretation of two completely separate statements as somehow being contrary to one another might be a bit iffy.
I understand what they are doing, Ike... I get it. My point is that it osn't the COG's job to find an owner for the franchise and subsidize said owner because the league has decided that they will not sell the team for market value. They chastized Moyes for wanting the ability to sell the team for top dollar, but when they are wearing the shoes they won't take the hit.
They chastised Moyes for attempting to sell something he didn't actually own - the rights to a franchise in Hamilton. Had Moyes decided to stick it out, and assuming he had a way out of the lease in the first place (he didn't), then it would be expected that he would play the exact same negotiating game with the city as the league is.
You still seem to be confusing the idea of maintaining a team where it is no matter what vs maintaining it where it at least has a chance to at some point succeed. If that was all the league cared about, it could have allowed the Jets to be sold for 5 bucks to Joe Blow on the street and watched it fold three minutes later. The lease negotiations (ie, the sbusidies) are what the league believes the team now needs to survive in the market given its poor history and the more recent, and quite possibly fatal, damage done to it by Moyes and Balsillie.
It will NOT sell the team just to have it fail just so it can say it "did all it could to keep the team where it is". That is not a reasonable definition of doing so, when the league is right back to square one a few days later.
I invite you to do what you apparently didn't do: reread but instead of "doing everything" to keep the Coyotes in Phoenix, remember the full line is "doing everything IT CAN" to keep it there. It has to be a viable solution.
And so endeth the argument that they are somehow NOT doing so.
You're Poker metaphor relates nothing on the world of business. Now you are changing the shape of that metaphor... talk about revisionism...
Rejected. Risk analysis is at the heart of every business that is trying to expand. I boggle at the idea that you are somehow involved in one and don't understand this. I reiterate my opinion that you don't know enough about poker to actually understand the analogy. To you, poker is about "bluffing" apparently. But at the high end, poker is about the odds (in other words, risk analysis) and making sure you always play on the right side of them.
If you are sitting with a 50/50 chance of winning should you stay in, the pot is at $1000, but it only costs you $250 to play, the correct action is to stay in. Doesn't mean you'll win, but over the long haul these odds will pay out. If the odds are 67/33 against you... its STILL worth it to play even though you will now lose two times out of three. In fact, as long as your odds of winning that hand are better than 20% (!), the correct move is to play.
And so it goes in business. Some risks are worth the payout should they succeed. To the league, southern expansion's odds were worth the risk. It's not even really true to say they didn't win, either, given the southern teams contribute somewhere around 800m a year in revenue (from memory, so give or take a bit). They didn't have to take this risk, they could have sat at 21 teams, or just expanded in Columbus and added in some Canadian teams, maybe bringing it to 24 or 25. The "safe" move, no risk. Apparently what you think they should have done, CERTAINLY what many here think they should have done. And the outcome? At least half a billion less revenue every year and that is BEFORE accounting for the pre-lockout TV deals which almost certainly they wouldn't have gotten without those teams (even though they rarely actually show any of them).
Seems to me the BOG (since the expansion mostly predates Bettman they get most the credit) has come out a lot better in this than is generally given credit.
You are correct, I never had any intent on describing what the NHL should have done. I made one line stating that the league was sloppy in their selection of owners in recent years. Now its on my shoulders to offer my ideas to improve how the BOG selects their partners.
That's right. That's how a logical argument works. You make the claim and then provide supporting evidence. So far, all you've done is restate the conclusion AS the evidence ("well there are bad owners therefore they MUST have done something wrong!").
You can stop the clock now I guess...
I suppose so, since you've indicated you will not attempt to defend your statement.
I've never taken the stance the league hasn't been a successful venture. There are what? 12 teams showing even a minimal profit... that which prop up the remaining 18 that range from being on the bubble to being over their heads. The model used isn't for me to decide... that would be very arrogant.
Are you really so new here? Surely in the hundreds of threads talking about the business side of hockey here you've seen people mention that the year-to-year operating profit is not necessarily the best measurement for team or league health, right?
Man if things like that are getting missed, I should make sure to stick around here more. I guess with GSC gone the patience of the few, as Killion called them, "sane" people is getting strained at the sheer amount of Bettman-hating noise being thrown around.
Ike, the problem with trying to be a 'Bully' debater is that louder doesn't make you right. In a desperate attempt to 'hang on' you just keep pushing the same issues and expand on them to new regions in hope of having the last word. You've run into a person who is equally as stubborn.
You're not equally as stubborn. You're just caught in between a rock and a hard place because you bet your ego on your posts - when you lapped up someone giving you props, you exposed it for all to see. You don't have any choice but to hang on with all your strength now, because you've wrapped your self-image up in "winning".
I, on the other hand, have no such issue. I can, and do, respond as long as new arguments are presented simply because it amuses me to do so. Yours are not particularly difficult to dismantle, so I welcome you to stay as long as you can continue to provide new arguments to replace the ones that are dismantled, such as your Del Baggio attempt above was. Of course, if you just stick your fingers in your ears and repeat things without acknowledgement... well, I can deal with that as well.
I will suggest for your next post again... not for any benefit, just out of simple spite because now I know it something that gets under your skin. How about you start using some real data or examples to back up your stance. Stop personalizing the issues and just get back on point.
Nothing gets under my skin, and thank you for admitting you are trolling. It will be handy should the time come to put some brakes on your posts if you cannot keep your irritation under control.
..... You singled out a few teams as "always making money anyway"?. We've figured out the dealeo with the Pens' & Caps' to some extent, so moving on to New Jersey, the Devils took over the running of the Prudential Ctr from AEG last year & of course have the Nets for tenants (temp). Investors who own the Devils are heavily leveraged, and without deep playoff runs over the past 3yrs (out in Round 1) they were hurtin units. However, they secured a really decent deal with MSG for broadcasting rights. Back in the black. I think finding any team in any sport making substantially more profits than they were 3yrs ago in the teeth of the recession would be impossible, yet collectively apparently, league revenues as whole have increased and at a pretty healthy clip.
Oye.... I never stated Bettman was wrong to do anything. He doesn't chose the owners... the BOG's are the ones who vote.
