Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
https://deadspin.com/what-can-we-lea...suc-1829659467
This is a good Deadspin article about what to look for in a new arena deal.
Ironically for Edwards and Co, the two newest members of the NHL, Seattle and Las Vegas, play out of entirely privately funded buildings.
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I feel like this is a point that has been made before in this discussion, but an entirely privately funded arena in the Calgary market is likely not economically feasible. One will notice that successful buildings which are built with private money are also buildings set in very large—predominantly US—markets. There are only two arenas in Canada that were built with public money: Calgary's Saddledome from government Olympic funding, and Daryll Katz's penis-shaped palace in Edmonton. The buildings in Toronto and Montreal were built in the two largest cities in the country, and host arguably the most revenue-rich teams. This fact probably disqualifies both as useful comparisons to the situation in Calgary's significantly smaller market. The MTS Centre in Winnipeg is arguably not an adequate NHL arena owing to its microscopic size, and it was built at a cost of $135 m. Since Calgary will need a considerably larger arena that will cost three times the amount of money, this also is not a close comparable from which to draw. (And while the Jets are a hot ticket now, the size of the MTS Centre potentially creates problems for the team in the future when they will inevitably cycle into another rebuild: if the arena is not operating at capacity, the team cannot draw enough revenue to survive.)
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.