[BoLevi]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

Then you want the Flames to go out of business. Understood – but don't go telling Murray Edwards to go blowing his money on a losing proposition.

By the way, ‘can't control its own expenses’ is an insufferably moralistic way of phrasing the problem. The Flames don't have control over their own expenses, because the CBA dictates how much money they have to spend on player salaries. If they don't abide by those rules, they don't have a team in the National Hockey League. They aren't just spending money because they're too stupid to be cheap.



The value of the Flames' franchise is an opinion, nothing more, unless the team is actually sold. It would be a foolish lender who accepted such an obviously illiquid and intangible asset in lieu of hard collateral.

As for the intrinsic value of the building, there really isn't one. Privately funded arenas in Canada have a history of going bankrupt, because those arenas are very expensive to operate and can't be repurposed without losing most of their revenue potential.

Every major Canadian city has seen major-league arenas turn into white elephants. Some of those buildings are kept empty and maintained at considerable expense; some of them have been demolished at far greater expense. Two of them have been repurposed. Maple Leaf Gardens is now a supermarket with a university arena above it; the Montreal Forum is a multiplex theatre. Neither one of those uses generates anything like enough free cash flow to justify converting a $500 million building. Those sites are only economic to maintain because the construction costs in the 1920s and 1930s were much smaller, the buildings had long since been paid for and written off, and the repurposed structures only had to pay for the cost of the renovations.

In a city the size of Calgary, building an arena with private money is a stupid investment and everyone in the industry knows it.

Are you suggesting that the Flames have no value whatsoever?