Hobbes said:
Isn't a large part of the problem due to the location of the arena? When you have to pack a lunch and cross the River Styx just to get there it's not a great start. How much of that is attributable to Melnyk vs to Ottawa's willingness to partially fund a new rink? I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that they recently had a deal with the city but then Melnyk did something asinine to make it fall apart...again.
I think the location of the arena is a good example of how "the problem" both involves Melnyk but is also bigger than him and intrinsic to the situation.
Kanata obviously isn't the ideal place for an arena(although Melnyk didn't put it there) and a new downtown arena would be for the best but if memory serves the deal you're talking about to build a downtown arena that fell through last year was an entirely privately funded deal in large part because Ottawa is a small city where the local industry is the federal government and so can't really put public money into a new one(and can you imagine the reaction from Alberta Separatists if Ottawa got any federal money for a building?).
So is Melnyk a complete moron for not being able to put together a private deal to finance a new arena? If so, that's a standard that most owners in the league wouldn't be able to meet. Calgary and Edmonton got theirs by crying poor and threatening to move the team and Winnipeg just moved into the local AHL rink which was only NHL standard-ish because they were owned by someone worth 35 billion or so.
Because that's inherently the problem with these arenas. They don't tend to make private sense so they need what amount to public handouts to be built. The smaller and poorer the city(or, in cases I'll discuss in a second, the less interested in hockey) the less viable those arenas become. Ottawa also has the unique problem of potentially only being the third most popular hockey team in their own region which further complicates trying to convince anyone to think building an arena for hundreds of millions of dollars makes good business sense.
If you look at some of the other worst attended teams in the NHL, the Panther or Coyotes, you see other examples of teams that didn't really make sense financially and where the conventional economic plan didn't really work because of existing arenas and low interest in the sport. After all, how do you sell the city of Miami or Phoenix on a hockey team being a economic driver to revitalize a neighbourhood when nobody cares about hockey and you already have a downtown arena for the local NBA team? So they both got moved outside of the city as part of what were basically real-estate development cons pulled on smaller nearby cities that ended up disastrous. So, like Ottawa, they can't really use "But we're outside the city" as an excuse.
A new owner may be more of a deal maker. He may be better at running the team on ice. But I don't know that a new owner fundamentally changes the economic viability of privately funding a downtown arena.
