The Atlanta Spirit group featured one of Turner's sons as a part-owner, which had a thing or two to do with why Turner Broadcasting broke a verbal agreement they had in place with David McDavid to sell the Thrashers, Hawks, and Philips Arena to him, Now, prior to that agreement, Atlanta Spirit didn't want the Thrashers, but when it was announced that there was an agreement in place, they convinced Turner Broadcasting to sell to them instead by offering to take the Thrashers.
Once the purchase was complete, Atlanta Spirit *immediately* began trying to sell the Thrashers for relocation. A trade the Hawks made, however, put a damper on that as the majority owner (Steve Belkin) disagreed with it and walked away, filing a lawsuit for control of the assets on his way out. As the ownership of the Thrashers was then in question at that point, no one had any rights to sell it to anyone else.
Once the almost six year legal battle came to an end though, the race was on to sell. There were a lot of local suitors lining up to take a crack at buying the team, but it all fell apart when they got to the whole "negotiating a lease" part. Why, you might ask? Because they were predatory, leases that no one in their right mind would pay, that even if an ownership group was desperate to keep the team in town and were willing to legitimately *pay anything* to do so, they still wouldn't pay the lease. And Atlanta Spirit could do it too, because Philips was the only NHL rink in town. Yeah, there's the building here in Duluth, but that's a whole other can of worms, and the league probably wouldn't have allowed it to be used until a new building was constructed.
So no... at least in terms of Atlanta, your paragraph is empirically false. Furthermore, I know you've seen this story before, so you should know better.
