Edmonton Oilers owner Daryl Katz made headlines in all the wrong ways when news surfaced of his potential intent to relocate the team to Seattle.
Katz visited the Key Arena in Seattle a few weeks ago, a trip that quickly became the centre of discussion and public backlash in Edmonton.
This comes in the midst of a hiatus in the seemingly endless negotiation between the Katz Group and the City of Edmonton to bring in a new $475 million arena that will replace Rexall Place, and I think Katz just got caught bluffing.
Let’s not forget, the Key Arena used to be home to the Seattle Thunderbirds of the Western Hockey League, that is, until they deemed it unusable in 2009 and moved to the ShoWare Centre 20 miles south in Kent, Washington.
According to Tyler Hemstreet of NorthwestMilitary.com, the Key Arena was “ill-suited for hockey, as the sight lines were designed for basketball and the ice surface was so far off center that the scoreboard hung over the Thunderbirds' offensive zone instead of center ice.”
Does this sound like a viable place to house an NHL team? It doesn’t to me, so what’s Katz’s angle? It appears that this was a bargaining strategy that he hoped would result in the City of Edmonton giving into his every demand, one that backfired due to a lack of tactfulness and respect for Oilers fans and the people of Edmonton.
While Katz took out a full-page ad in the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun to apologize for his actions, he stated that he “reacted by trying to send a message to City leaders that they should not take (his) support for a new arena for granted.” Essentially, he was toying with the hearts of Oilers fans, and then he followed that up with a comment in a radio interview that just bewildered me.
In the interview, Katz said, “there was probably a little too much Messier and not enough Gretzky in the way that we conveyed things.”
Granted, many fans surely felt as though they had been blindsided into the end boards by a man as big as Messier when they heard the news, and I’m sure many would have preferred a nice, graceful pass of the information rather than to have it shoved down their throats by a visit to Seattle’s arena, but the way he worded this proves his case is flawed.
The fact that he name-dropped the top two all-time points scorers in NHL history in a sentence that sums up his pitfalls in respectfully addressing his desire to relocate the Oilers, a team with one of the most storied histories of the expansion era, is ridiculous to me.
The Oilers have an unforgettable history, and Katz acknowledged that in his statement. Even those fans born outside of its dynasty years know of it’s renowned past, and despite a string of lackluster seasons, the Oilers have a very promising future.
On top of this, Katz insists that the Oilers are losing money, but Forbes.com says that the team, worth $212 million, pulled in $17.1 million in profit last year.
It just doesn’t make sense to uproot them at this stage in a rebuild, and I think Katz never really intended to do so. I believe his plan was rather to threaten the notion in an attempt to sweeten his side of the arena deal.
In reality, I think Katz just shot himself in the foot. It’s going to be very hard to find support for immediate relocation of the Oilers after this fiasco, which concluded with him stating in his apology that “The simple fact is that the Oilers need Edmonton, and Edmonton needs the Oilers . . . Each is an integral part of the fabric and identity of the other.”
Katz will have a hard time trying to make anyone believe he is serious about moving the team after he has made it public record that he believes the Oilers in fact need the city of Edmonton.
