Yorken Bay said:
Buffalo's arena is 30 years old and it sounds as if their may be some funding issues brewing: Erie County plans to walk away from KeyBank Center lease when it expires in October | wgrz.com https://share.google/SQGrjnT1kVVmRztrA

It's why I wonder about some sort of arrangement where the Sabres play a portion of their schedule in Hamilton on a permanent basis.

The NHL may be asking 2B, but will they get it?
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The whole lease thing in Buffalo will be resolved. And their arena is still more than a decade younger than Hamilton's. And has a dedicated suite level, with a large number of suites. And the building has more square footage. And they just re-did the roof and added a new scoreboard.

Having the Sabres play a portion of their games in Hamilton might be decently well received in Hamilton, but it would not go over well in Buffalo. Look at what happened with the whole Senators / Quebec City thing recently.

Re: the $2 billion, I am guessing that there is a good chance that Dan Friedkin in Houston may not be ready to pay that amount. If he / his group were ready to do that, we may have heard about a Houston team already.
 
ericmacm said:
The Ottawa Senators are not an average team in terms of valuation, they are very much below average. They are currently 29/32 in the valuation rankings at $1.18B USD. The average is close to $2B USD.
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I don't know exactly how Forbes constructs its valuations, but they are not based on profit-and-loss fundamentals. It's all been about who is willing to pay what. The Utah guy apparently paid a total of $1.2 billion for the Coyotes, and as far as I know that is the highest amount ever paid for an NHL team. to this point. The league probably will ultimately get the hoped-for $2 billion, but let's see. I am guessing that is it giving a lot of prospective owners pause.
 
BCTed said:
Agreed that the "right owner" is the key.
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Yup, they won’t just let anyone buy a franchise. We have to remember the huge stain on the NHL’s reputation from the string of franchise bankruptcies from 1995-2011 (LA Kings 1995, Pittsburgh Penguins 1998, Ottawa Senators 2003, Buffalo Sabres 2003, Arizona Coyotes 2009, Dallas Stars 2011) to see why the NHL is so reluctant to expand again and why they take their time waiting for the right group to come along.
 
They weren't lying when they said they wanted to make the venue concentrated on music events.
 
Live Nation, for all their many, many ills, is pathologically focused on maximizing utilization of the venues they book. OVG's deep pockets, experience, and professionalism, CEO scandal notwithstanding, and scope of the renos, coupled with Live Nation's booking monopoly, is going to yield a complete transformation of the facility's utilization and impact on the city. It's very promising and I think the City, for once, nailed it with this project.
 
Milaisacat said:
Live Nation, for all their many, many ills, is pathologically focused on maximizing utilization of the venues they book. OVG's deep pockets, experience, and professionalism, CEO scandal notwithstanding, and scope of the renos, coupled with Live Nation's booking monopoly, is going to yield a complete transformation of the facility's utilization and impact on the city. It's very promising and I think the City, for once, nailed it with this project.
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But what will be done about the state of York Blvd? I wonder what Paul McCartney will think about that as he is driven into the stadium...
 
TheHonestMaple said:
But what will be done about the state of York Blvd? I wonder what Paul McCartney will think about that as he is driven into the stadium...
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He literally won't care, and even if he did...so what? He's got better things to do than worry about specific streets in specific places. It's not as if he's going to go back home and complain about it.
 
Mihairokov said:
He literally won't care, and even if he did...so what? He's got better things to do than worry about specific streets in specific places. It's not as if he's going to go back home and complain about it.
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lol are you serious? It's not only embarrassing, but it's a serious problem for this city and the venue. Good luck booking him back for a third time once he sees this disaster. That place needs to be knocked down, yesterday.

I'm not sure what's worse, the homeless drug addicts that occupy the downtown core of our city - or people who deny that it's a problem.
 
I wouldn't say it's not a problem, but I usually go to Hamilton once or twice a year to see some kind of similar event, and can't say I've noticed anything that seems particularly worse than anywhere else (for example, the immediate area near the Brampton GO station), and certainly nothing that would cause me to never return. At the risk of sounding a little 'NIMBY', my major annoyance with that kind of situation is the continual disruption of public transit and TTC subway delays, though also not a fan of the guy who carries around a large Ikea-type of bag with bottles and rocks he throws at cars and through windows while yelling at the invisible demons in his mind.

As I've said repeatedly in other threads, the ones who are the most problematic to themselves and the rest of us need to be put (involuntarily if necessary) into psychiatric (or long-term health or drug treatment) institutions, and not left out there to be wandering around on their own in our cities.
 
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The area around York Boulevard is pretty troubling right now, but I think it’s worth keeping two things in mind…

1. There are active conversations about relocating the Salvation Army shelter. This has now been confirmed publicly. It’s not going to happen before Paul McCartney comes to town, but I bet it will happen before too long.

2. The arena redevelopment and Core Urban’s Coppley redevelopment are going to attract more people and change the whole feel of the area. Part of the problem today is not just the presence of drug addicts, but the absence of other kinds of people. That’s going to change.
 
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