It's like revenue sharing, no one knows what teams pay or receive what little we read is based completely on assumption.
Why not just release the numbers to the public, we lost hockey for a full season to put a financial system in place?
One article a few days ago said the Islanders were losing at least five million, another twenty five million. Fact is these writers have no idea beyond Mr Wang's comments as early as 2004 when he used to give interviews about this.
The same folks doing many of these articles could not even get it right on someone who may be selling as we saw with Tom Golisano who within a day went from selling his stake in the Buffalo Sabres to not selling?
It's worse than the trade rumors with many of these reports.
We see the same things with George Gillette who owns the Canadians.
Folks can write what they want about the Islander finances but if Mr Wang has the financing to build the Lighthouse it's logical to write he has the resources to take losses owing his hockey team.
The Devils and Rangers have been taking huge financial losses for years with the Garden reportedly losing more than any club entering the lockout in what will soon be the leagues oldest building when the Pens move into a new building.
Charles Wang wants to tell the public how much he is losing owning the Islanders we can revisit it, but for now can the media tone down the articles he is cash-strapped because if he was he would not be part of a two billion dollar project.
I saw this from the Calagary Herald today here from Bruce Downbiggin and I have to ask how does know the Islanders are losing 25m?
What does he know about any of the clubs he is making these assumptions about, if he wanted to impress me tell me about the Flames books being that is the club his paper covers.
Aside from that a bad team in an old arena writing checks on an owners vanity project we could say that about Detroit for many years, Cablevision for a good part of a decade and most of the teams at one point or another. Not even the Devils played to as many open seats as the Wings in the conference finals a few years ago.
Mr Downbiggin has a short memory how things were not good in Calgary for a lot of years, unless he wants to call up teams and get quotes or produce documentation about what clubs are specifically losing he should give it a rest along with all of the writers doing articles about this.
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Very bad news of the day is the New York Dragons who Charles Wang brought here from Iowa early in his tenure as owner and sold this summer will likely not be playing games.
The AFL apparently is suspending operations for the upcoming season.
Updated:
Looks like the league owners have decided to play afterall according to Neil Best of Newsday here.