Years after discovering the emperor has no clothes, The Kansas City Star has written a column about the incredibly slim chances of Kansas City ever landing an anchor tenant at Sprint Center.
Oklahoma City steals KC’s thunder as Sprint Center still searches for a pro team
READ THIS COLUMN!!!
Sam Mellinger lays it all on the line. This column stuns me, considering someone at The Star wrote it. It is well-research, it is accurate, it has a great hook, it doesn’t have a quote from NHL21…it’s really, really good. Not since The Pitch did a column about four years ago has one been written so objectively with just the right amount of cynicism to get to the truth about a NHL team coming to Sprint Center. I don’t think Sam Mellinger will be granted any press passes to games at Staples Center any time soon.
Leiweke and Sprint Center general manager and senior vice president Brenda Tinnen did not return messages for this story — they’re sensitive about the topic
Curious that AEG didn’t have any comment. Perhaps they knew that Mellinger wouldn’t reprint their typical spin and weren’t happy.
One curious part of this article is that Mellinger seems to imply that the only person to come forward as a potential owner for a NHL team in Kansas City, Boots DelBiaggio, being fitted for an orange jump suit was out of AEG control. I suppose Boots cutting and pasting his name to someone else’s financial statement (yes, he really did that) was out of AEG’s control, however they are 100% responsible to make sure they are doing business with someone reputable and it is 100% their responsibility to “recruit” an owner with whom KC residents can be proud. There are rumors floating around the blog world that Phillip Anschutz gave Boots a huge loan so that he could become part of Nashville’s ownership group and also AEG’s mole within the Nashville organization. Boots would have, essentially, been working from the inside to set it up so that the Predators had to move to KC. Not sure I can believe that — still, how could a company like AEG get so snowed by someone like Boots?
Look, nobody is saying Sprint Center was a bad idea. It’s a great attraction for our city. But, the campaign to get the hotel and rental car tax passed was built on a completely false pretense — that Kansas City can attract a NHL or NBA team. I’m just a hockey fan (albeit an extremely avid one) and I knew it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.
At the time the Penguins were vulnerable, however Gary Bettman has proved time and again that he is going to protect the 30 markets he created and would have protected Pittsburgh, too.
An AHL team would provide more than 200,000 people to downtown for at least 41 dates, but AEG doesn’t seem interested in bringing the second best league in the world to KC — a city that already has three major league sports franchises and a NASCAR track (potentially two Sprint Cup races). The NHL or NBA is too much. AEG could bring an AHL team to KC by the 2011 season…they won’t.
The seemingly strained relationship between Cordish and AEG probably doesn’t help. Remember, Cordish called Sprint Center “a disaster”. Bringing an AHL team to Sprint Center would help Cordish, it wouldn’t necessarily help AEG. There is bad behavior all around between Cordish’s greed and AEG false promises.
Bottom line – support what we have. Go to Sprint Center concerts, go to the Ice Breaker tournament in 2012, go to Mavs games and support our ONLY LOCALLY-OWNED MAJOR LEAGUE FRANCHISE — the Wizards and completely forget about this “anchor tenant” business because it’s not going to happen for awhile.
