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“Two years ago, you weren’t really thinking about this,” said Rob Tilliss, chief executive officer of Inner Circle Sports, a boutique investment bank that works within the sports and entertainment spheres. The company has worked with several professional sports teams, including the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens. “Now (as a business executive with a Canadian team) you’re thinking about hedging strategies. You’re thinking about how much of my revenue is contractual season tickets versus day-of-game tickets. “As the Canadian dollar declines, you have to adjust your budget. They’re all probably reassessing their budgets for the next year or two.” This might be a particular issue for the Toronto Raptors, the lone Canadian NBA team. Rogers’ purchase of Bell’s shares in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Raptors, Maple Leafs, Toronto FC, among other teams and facilities, is expected to close in the middle of this year. That deal will give Rogers 75 percent control of MLSE. Rogers also owns the Toronto Blue Jays, although not under the MLSE umbrella. Rogers is a publicly traded company, and its stock price has fallen from more than $50 in December, to currently being under $40. Raptors president Masai Ujiri has never complained about MLSE’s financial support for the team, but these are unfamiliar, if not unprecedented, times.
Grousbeck and partner Steve Pagliuca led a group that purchased the Celtics in 2002 for $360 million. Franchise valuations have since skyrocketed, with the Phoenix Suns being sold for $4 billion to Mat Ishbia in February 2023, the Milwaukee Bucks being sold to Jimmy and Dee Haslam for $3.5 billion several weeks later, and the Mavericks being sold to the Adelson and Dumont families for $3.5 billion in December 2023. The Celtics are one of the iconic franchises in professional sports, with an NBA record 18 NBA titles -- trailing only the New York Yankees (27) and Montreal Canadiens (24) among all North American professional sports leagues.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander enjoys playing at Scotiabank Arena. For him, returning to his Ontario roots never gets old. “It’s amazing to play in front of people that are from where I’m from, grew up the way I grew up, [and] seen the same things I’ve seen,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “It’s like a little connection, even if I don’t know them or not. It’s cool. I’m proud to be Canadian. To play in front of the Canadiens is a special feeling, whether I know them or not.”
Montreal Nets!?! Buried in the Long Island Nets press release on next season’s schedule is a note that Long Island will play six home games at Place Bell in suburban Montreal, two each in January, February and March. The release did not provided details on reason why the games won’t be held at Nassau Coliseum, saying only “updates will be released at a later date.” NetsDaily has been told in fact that the update will be released Wednesday. One strong possibility: the Nets, with their aggressive international marketing campaign, will use the trips to extend the team’s brand to Montreal, just as they did in Paris last season with the NBA Paris Game with Brooklyn-flavored events. Place Bell, located in suburban Laval, has a capacity of 10,000 for hockey and is the home of the Laval Rocket of the American Hockey League, an affiliate of the Montreal Canadiens.
Nearly a year later, the Raptors are indeed at the next level, ahead two games to one in the first NBA finals in franchise history — and McDonald’s is out more than two million medium-size orders of french fries. That’s nearly three times the 700,000 orders the company projected its Ontario restaurants would give away during the promotion. Coolen said they based the forecast model, in part, on a previous fry giveaway program with the Montreal Canadiens.
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As the Bruins and Canadiens faced off in the Winter Classic on Friday, Celtics coach Brad Stevens said there were once at least cursory discussions about his team playing an outdoor basketball game someday. “I’ve heard it being bounced around here, that we would do an outdoor game in early October or something to that nature,” Stevens said. “And that’d be fun if it was done right and you could ensure that the playing surface was as good as the playing surfaces we play on every day.”
It will be a complex and risky move that will require difficult negotiations with cable operators and advertisers alike. Sports industry executives say a search committee formed by Maple Leaf Sports to find its next chief executive is considering a former Montreal Canadien for the job. Pierre Boivin, a highly regarded veteran of the sport industry, was the Canadiens president from 1999 until earlier this year. He also worked as chief executive of Bauer Nike Hockey and now works with Claridge, a Montreal firm that manages the interests of the billionaire Bronfman family. Maple Leaf Sports is searching for a new leader because chief executive Richard Peddie will retire by year’s end.
In our just-completed NHL valuations, the league’s aggregate operating income was $160 million for the 2009-10 season. But without the combined operating income ($177 million) of the Toronto Maple Leafs, New York Rangers and Montreal Canadiens the league would have lost money. Thus Toronto is worth a league-high $505 million while 16 teams are valued under $200 million. In the NFL, the three most profitable teams (Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins, New England Patriots) earned an average of $105 million during the 2009 season, more than three times the league average. No surprise then that Dallas, Washington and New England are, on average, worth $1.6 billion, 60% more than the typical NFL team. The NBA had total operating income of $234 million during the 2008-09 season (our 2010 valuations and profits will be published in February). But three teams (Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons) accounted for 64% of the league’s profits and 12 teams lost money. So billionaire Michael Ilitch is reportedly pondering buying the Pistons for some $400 million while Michael Jordan snapped up the money-losing Charlotte Bobcats for just $175 million in March.
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