First bolded :
I'm sure he can (and has) gotten loans against his assets without much issue. The cash flow issue becomes SERVICING those loans.
The majority of their holdings in PSE are irregular cash flow entities. The hospitality side is closer to 'regular' cash flow, but that industry does have a cyclical nature to it.
In the current state of affairs :
- They cannot generate any cash from the gas business because the NG price is still depressed.
- They are barely generating any cash from the hospitality businesses because of COVID.
- They are generating none of the normal cash flows from the sports franchises because they cannot have fans, can't really sell season tickets, and aren't getting their piece of the concessions.
It's accurate that COVID-19 could not have been predicted. What they COULD and SHOULD have done is slowed down on investing buckets of cash in certain investments ( like the land out west for JKLM ) , to make sure they had plenty of buffer to carry all the irregular cash flow organizations.
They didn't, and they got bit hard. They are just trying to ride things out at this point until gas recovers. (Which it is starting to looking at the futures contracts, but still not much above the profitability line. )
Let's ignore most of PSE's holdings. Because in the "scheme" of things, the Bills are probably about 80% of its value, The Sabres are probably 15%, and the other properties might add up to 5%. They Pegula's bought the bills for 1.4B in cash.
Pegula Sports and Entertainment - Wikipedia.
The Bills now have a "value" of 2.05B.
Buffalo Bills on the Forbes NFL Team Valuations List
As previously discussed, he purchased the Sabres for 189M...and are now worth 400M (also per forbes)
So, overall, he's "gained" 800M of potential equity that he can tap into. Also should note that each NFL team makes around 255M from the TV Deal, which dwarfs the gate totals the Bills receive (around 55M a year per Forbes).
So, the "big ticket" PSE item (the Bills) is likely a break even proposition this season. Maybe a bit of a paper loss, but they can use that to lower tax bill on future years.
The Sabres, on the other hand, are big losers in the COVID era. Gate Revenue represents a big part of their revenue. They will still get 20M in TV deals and they also have 20M coming from the Seattle expansion, though I imagine, that was already planned for and probably spent, so its probably not a figure you can use to offset 2020 losses for the team. But, a cap team could easily lose 50-70M this year if gate revenues drop to 0.
And let's assume all his PSE properties lose maybe 20M total. That's a 90-110M net loss on the year for PSE. However, that's.....not a lot in the scope of the teams value. Now, you are right, the Pegula's have cash tied up else where, but, it's doubtful 100M is going to move the needle a ton for them. While it's a massive on paper loss, they can use the losses to reduce tax burdens at a later time, which will return reduce the net losses. Unless the Pegula's have severely over leveraged themselves, which, I don't think they have, this loss will hurt, but in the large scheme of things, it's something they will be able to move past, especially once revenue begins to flow again.