No, I have loads more.
The NHLPA has never agreed with Levitt's figures and for good reason and nor has anyone else who has looked at them closely and evaluated his methodology. Here was the NHLPA reaction to the Levitt Report:
The NHLPA said fine , we do not believe your figures but we will structure an offer with a 24% rollback which will mimic the claimed losses. Bettman looked like he had been punched in the stomach if you caught the news conference. Shock and awe would be a good description when the NHLPA dropped this bombshell. What employer in its right mind would not have grabbed those concessions and ran. Not to mention the other concessions offered up. But for the NHL it was salary cap or bust.
Levitt is not independent under any reasonable definition of the term. Nor is he an auditor or even an accountant - he is a Wall Street broker. He was head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged with watching out for the consumer investor. On his watch there were the Enron and World.com scandals as well as numerous other scandals and accounting irregularities. Looks like just the guy the NHL needed.
His work of fiction is no longer even mentioned by the NHL in its recent PR spins. Bettman quit referring to it after he was roasted over his description of the report as a "super audit" - it was not a regular audit or even a baby audit. Not under any accounting defintion except perhaps that known to Gary Bettman.
Even Levitt allowed this was not an audit but simply a report. A report for which one side hired him and paid him. Actually let's be clear Levitt was not hired by the NHL, he was hired by the NHL's outside legal firm, Proskauer Rose (Bettman's old New York law firm) who supplied the abrasive Bob Batterman to attend the latest meetings with Linden. Why do that you ask??? Well if it comes to determining what precise instructions Mr. Levitt may have been given the NHL can always claim solicitor-client confidentiality and say talk to our lawyers - they retained him. And the lawyers if asked - well solicitor-client confidentiality is pretty much absolute. we do know how to insulate our clients from those uncomfortable questions and future examinations for discovery.
Levitt never provided a team by team breakdown and was not prepared to so it is rather difficult for the lay person to get any real sense of whether it is true.
He offered the NHLPA to review the numbers upon which he based his report - since he did not go beyond the URO's that would not have been useful. Since it was the URO's and the players already knew they were not accurate, why waste the time? The NHL knew the URO's were bogus from their 1999 and 2000 review of the Montreal, Boston, LA and Buffalo. See my quote above when the NHLPA responded to Levitt.
"We've always said it's not an accounting issue of making sure the numbers add up," Ted Saskin said, "but a much more complex task of how one defines the revenues in a business with many related parts and complicated corporate structures. There's no way to tell because they continue to refuse to give you individual team financial information."
That's why the union has little faith in the URO process. The NHLPA doesn't believe it accurately reflects the financial state of the teams.
"Absolutely not" said Saskin. "
The financial reporting you get from the National Hockey League is only as good as the information they get from each team in what is an unaudited and voluntary submission. And the old adage 'Garbage in, garbage out' is unfortunately an apt description of the current system they have in place. We have numerous examples of teams simply putting down 'zero' for luxury suites, concessions and other items. You can't take that kind of reporting seriously."
Forbes Magazine slashed Levitt's numbers by half and they are not known to be union friendly by any stretch of the imagination. They were only able to use publicly available documents and sources. Who knows how far they would have cut back the losses if they could have got in and dug around. Forbes was very conservative in attacking Levitt's numbers. Forbes credited the Canucks with a $1.7 profit when the team by its own admission made over $25 million that season.
The President of the Flyers told a Philadelphia newspaper that contrary to the claim of Ed Snider the Chairman of the Board the Flyers did not lose money as determined by Levitt. After the Levitt Report came out, Philadelphia Flyers chairman Ed Snider revealed his team was one of the 19 NHL teams the report said lost money in 2002-03. Team president Ron Ryan said the Flyers weren't among the teams whose lost money HUH???????? Must be two Philadelphia Flyer teams, right?
Interestingly since divulging the two sets of books to the newspaper, Ron Ryan has not made another public statement. Big surprise.
Award winning investigative sports journalist (and Pulitzer prize nominee for his expose of Eagleson), Russ Conway skewered the Levitt Report as well recently having several outside accounting experts look at the report and methodology.
If you want a line by line criticism of the Levitt Report, check this out by New York economist Dubi Silverstein who publishes the Blue Shirt Bulletin:
And here is Silverstein on the issue of Levitt's so-called independence:
And his conclusion:
http://ordinaryleastsquare.typepad.com/dubi/2004/03/reading_compreh.html
Now do you understand why when the claim of Levitt's independence was made my response was "
"?
Stick a fork in Arthur Levitt and his report, they are done like dinner. (to borrow a phrase from the immortal Dave "Tiger: Williams)