Quote:
Originally Posted by The Yen Man
The reality of it is this. Calgary's a small market city with 1.2M people. No team owner is going to be willing to privately 100% fund an arena because the economics of it doesn't work with a city so small. We aren't New York or LA, where their arenas are constantly overbooked due to all the different events that occur throughout the year.
Come summer time, the arena pretty much sits empty most of the time. Now, you can argue that's the price owners pay to have a hockey team in a city like Calgary. But the alternative (other than moving the team) is they just keep playing out of the oldest building in the league, and owners eventually stop spending money on the team other than bare minimum to stay competitive (see Ottawa). We lose all our good players to UFA, and we'll probably have even less draw for mid tier UFAs because of outdated facility. Eventually (if we aren't there already), we get the McMahon stadium equivalent of hockey arenas.
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Almost no owners anywhere, with any amount of people, are willing to 100% fund their arena because it's been consistently demonstrated that municipalities will cave to their tactics. So why would they?