[troutman]

Brunt on Monday:

Are Winnipeg’s NHL prayers about to be answered?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sport...rticle1931713/

The Glendale politicians, who must be right up there with the most obtuse in North America, opted to gamble that there would be no 11th-hour intervention. They had legal opinions to back up their claim that the arrangement with Hulsizer was legal, although if you read the actual bond offering, you learn that those opinions are predicated on the veracity of consultants’ reports about potential parking revenues. But the politicians’ core belief must have been that when push came to shove and a deal seemed imminent, Goldwater would simply walk away.

That’s a bad bet to make when you’re playing against zealots.

So all that’s left is the bleating, and some fabricated estimates of the economic impact of losing the Coyotes. ($500-million? Come on. Even the folks in the business of spinning crazy numbers to try to justify crazy public investment in sport with bogus multiplier effects would have a hard time coming up with a number like that based on a hockey team that plays 41 sparsely attended regular-season home games a year.)

The lawsuit, if it is indeed ever filed, is going to take time, and it’s going to be messy, and neither time nor mess are things the NHL governors can tolerate any longer without having to again reach into their own pockets. So anywhere NHL hockey was being played this past weekend, the chatter among reporters and agents and team officials was that the announcement of the Coyotes’ relocation to Winnipeg was both inevitable and imminent.

(The NHL jumped through hoops to block a guy who would have overpaid for the Coyotes (or the Predators, or the Pens) and written Glendale a cheque for $50-million)