Around the League 47: Vancouver Collects All The Petterssons

[CandyCanes]

interesting but not surprising. I'm guessing said Atlanta group was not the Turner group that ended up getting the expansion Thrashers considering Turner was basically printing money at the time until the AOL-Time Warner merger. I'm wondering if that was while the Whale was still owned by Baldwin or if that was PK already trying to get out from that purchase, I'd imagine the former since PK still had decent cashflow with Compuware until the mid 2000s but you can never be sure.

Yeah different ownership group for Atlanta. He said that ownership group was kicking themselves shortly after as a few years later the expansion fee for the Thrashers was $80M. I believe PK was the follow up transaction when the Atlanta deal fell through.

 

[bleedgreen]

interesting but not surprising. I'm guessing said Atlanta group was not the Turner group that ended up getting the expansion Thrashers considering Turner was basically printing money at the time until the AOL-Time Warner merger. I'm wondering if that was while the Whale was still owned by Baldwin or if that was PK already trying to get out from that purchase, I'd imagine the former since PK still had decent cashflow with Compuware until the mid 2000s but you can never be sure.

The state bought the team to make sure they didn’t move and put the CDA in charge of the sale, and they bought it from Richard Gordon who bought it from Baldwin. Baldwin has been a clear supporter of the team staying in Hartford to this day - even being part of the movement to bring them back. I’m guessing this is during the Gordon days, and this possible deal likely led to the state buying the team from Gordon so they’d have control of what happened instead of getting surprised by a deal like this. That would make this around 92-93 I would guess?

It was PK vs Downing in the CDA organized sale. With Downing swearing after he got screwed out of the negotiations that PK wouldn’t even honor the four years he was promising while Downing had promised 20 years and wasn’t allowed to rebid after a closed door meeting between the CDA and PK. He was clearly right.

Multiple people on the CDA (Connecticut Development Authority) ended up on PK’s Compuware salary books. This was discovered about a decade later.