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DarkJourney

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Posts posted by DarkJourney

  1. Even among NFL owners, Jerry Richardson is a particularly odious man. It's inexcusable that a guy who played in the league would have so much contempt for the people who play in it now. But aside from all that, a relative small fry in Charlotte has no business being on the relocation committee. It's like Peter Karmanos wielding significant power in the NHL because he's hung around a long time.

    and the dude only played 2 years in the NFL before calling it a career and becoming rich off of Hardee's and Flagstar. Every time he makes a public appearance all I can think of is an episode of Matlock. Seersucker suits anyone!

  2. Watch the NHL give an expansion team to the group in a suburb of a city that doesn't even really want hockey over the ready-to-go arena in the hockey hotbed of Quebec City. Just watch it happen.

    I'm expecting just that. Vegas & Suburbeattle get the teams while we wait around until 2035 when Bettman & The Yotes go kicking & screaming into Quebec City.
  3. Ten years from now, will Oakland have lost all of their teams?

    Didn't the A's sign an extension on their lease at the Coliseum? If so, how long does that run? Still any rumbling of the heading to San Jose pending the legal spat with the Giants?

    A's to San Jose is all but dead. The Giants aren't budging and the league seems inclined to let them hold their line. On top of that a transfer of the SJ stadium land from the city to a successor agency has been deemed in violation of the law so it may be thrown out. And SJ has lost 2 court rounds on their anti-trust litigation. On top of that the A's signed a 10 year lease on the Coliseum this off season.

    The Raiders plan on the other hand is "gurgling blood" and will be dead by July. After that they'll likely announce they're heading to LA probably for 2016.

    The Warriors are already gone. Their arena plan in SF just got an environmental impact exemption and their only opposition was outed as a couple of malcontent developers, not the grassroots group they claimed to be. They've got full city support (which is nearly unheard of in SF politics). So they'll be in SF by 2018.

    Plus San Jose is dealing with the Sharks situation as well.

    From Field of Schemes:

    San Jose could be about to approve $100m+ in lease breaks for Sharks in exchange for diddly-squat

    The San Jose city council is set to vote tomorrow on a lease extension for the Sharks on their current arena while talking about whether to build a new one. You can read the proposal here; it’s a bit convoluted and I haven’t made sense of it all yet, but Marc Morris of Better Sense San Jose has sent along his analysis, which is this:

    1. The Sharks get immediate relief from previously obligated rent payments (total reduction is $7.25M = $2M for the Arena and $5.25M for the Ice Center, where the Sharks and their new AHL farm team practice).

    2. Starting in 2018, the Sharks stop paying any rent at all (that’s $0 per year) for the city owned Arena, down from roughly $5M per year.

    3. The City in the short term kicks in $6M and then, starting in 2018, pays $2.6M for ‘capital and modernization needs’ for the Arena. That of course will be financed by the $0 a year rent.

    4. The Sharks get to spend a lot of this ‘capital’ money for revenue enhancing improvements; for its efforts, the City gets precisely none of the enhanced revenue.

    5. Just to rub it in, the agreement also explicitly prohibits the City from getting any new revenue from its own Arena, like maybe adding a ticket tax.

    6. It appears that the City will take on the interest rate risk for the bonds on the Ice Center, making the current ultra-low rates the new baseline for the rent calculation. After all, there’s little to no probability that rates will go up in the next 10 to 20 years.

    7. And, although this never gets mentioned, the City will continue to pay over $10M a year in interest on the bonds that paid for construction of the Arena in the first place. In the best case, the net loss to the City from the Arena is over $8M a year.

    Like I said, I haven’t done the math on this myself, but if Morris is correct, that could easily be more than $100 million in concessions that the city would be providing to the Sharks — all for a team that doesn’t have an immediate alternative option to play in, and which isn’t even agreeing to a long-term lease deal in exchange. (They’d have to stay put through 2025, but it’s unlikely they could get a new arena built much before then anyway.) That’s the kind of thing you might think you’d want to have a hearing on, or even a financial study, before voting on whether to approve it, but that’s apparently not the way the San Jose city council rolls.

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