[Roughneck]

Originally Posted by Joborule

If you're analysts for why they shouldn't get a new arena because it'll be too costly and they wouldn't get enough revenue from it to cover the expenditure of building a new arena and spend up to the cap in the future, then that shows why Winnipeg is unsustainable in the first place.

It's not that the revenue wouldn't eventually pay for it, it's an issue of making enough to justify spending that amount of money while you currently have a modern, profitable building with upwards of 30 years left in it's life.

They may get money from the other events that occur in the venue, but they're still potentially losing on more money from their most frequent tenant. I'm giving Winnipeg the benefit of the doubt that if they could build a new venue with more seating and luxury suits (which is the big one here), it would give the franchise a lot more security thanks to the added flexibility.

The luxury suits is where the team would make the greatest gains in a new arena.

If it was enough to replace a 10 year old arena, the Flames would have done the same thing instead of undergoing the big reno to add suites and take out seats, because the Saddledome was more out of date as a 'revenue maximizing venue' in 96 than MTS Centre is now or will be in 10 years.

Plus, you're now arguing that the Jets need to expand their luxury suites while also criticizing the team's sustainability because their corporate support is the lowest. Hard to argue it both ways.

The nosebleeds would allow the Jets to give cheaper tickets to fans that don't want to pay the high value ones night in, night out.That's more revenue their making now then they were before.And then if the buzz dies down and the market doesn't want to pay one of the most expensive tickets in the league anymore, they have the extra capacity, plus the new luxury suits, that can allow them to adjust their pricing so they can still get the same revenue now, or at least close to it.

First, why should they care about fans who don't want to pay the going rate for tickets? They're a business, not a charity. Those seats will cost the most to build, you don't base your decision on a new arena for them.
Second, if the buzz dies down, the larger capacity is not an advantage because it means the value of tickets drops faster. If they're at the point where they're in a new and expensive arena and are only getting the same or similar revenue, they're in a worse off financial position.

There's a reason the Flames stopped selling PL seats in the dark times, only having 17,000 available tickets is better when the arena isn't filling up than 19,000.

It would be costly now to build a new arena, but it could help them tons down the road.

No it won't. They're turning a decent profit right now. Building a new arena would mean that extra profit would have to go to financing the cost of the arena, something that isn't cheap (the Oilers and Flames have been pushing for public money and they've got some pretty deep pocketed owners in the fastest growing cities in the country). For comparison, Jobing.Com arena's financing is $12.5M a year, which means that for the Jets to be better off with a new arena than with MTS, the arena would need to double the team's profit. Those are some pretty lofty goals just to get to slightly better than where they are now. That's without the team spending more to be competitive.

If Jets are going to be in Winnipeg for the long term, they're going to have to build a new arena at some point anyway since the MTS will reach outdated standards at some point.

Well this can also be said of every single team in the league regarding their arena, regardless of how old it might be, so this point is meaningless.

Why not build a state-of-the-art facility that will last three decades now while the support is at it's highest, rather than possibly having to do this 5-10 years from now?

Because they don't need to do it 5-10 years from now either. Hell, they probably don't have to start really thinking about it for at least 20. MTS is a modern, albeit small, arena that is making the team money, has a good deal with the city, maximizes the possibilities for non-hockey events and is an appropriate size for the market as a whole. There's a reason you build arenas with the hope to last ~40 years, it takes a long time to start seeing the real returns and at the end of it's life it is essentially worth nothing so building a new arena is basically just starting over which is why TNSE isn't going to abandon an arena that has quickly reached it's prime profit years in order to go back to the start line two decades before they need to.