Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
The other two are arenas in Vancouver and Ottawa: Rogers Arena, and the Canadian Tire Centre. What these two privately funded arenas have in common is that their construction and operating costs were so high they forced their owners to sell them, along with their hockey teams. When the Griffiths family built Rogers Arena in 1995 the population in metro Vancouver was around 1.8 million. Were the Flames owners to commit a half-billion dollars of their own money to build a new arena I have little doubt that the same thing that happened to Griffiths and the Canucks would happen to them.
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This just isn't true. It wasn't the facilities that forced those owners to sell, it was other, terrible business decisions that did them in.
Arthur Griffiths decided to buy an Expansion NBA franchise, buy out his siblings, and buy out his business partners with borrowed cash.
Bryden used every shady financial borrowing scheme he could think of and made several catastrophically bad investments in things other than the arena and team, culminating with a multi hundreds of million dollar loan from a subsidiary of Enron. He did that at a time of absolutely terrible currency devaluation.