It's kind of a shame that it's come to that - that when thinking of new sports team owners you have to start looking at lists of billionaires.
That being said, as I look at lists of Canadian billionaires trying to find any with ties to Ottawa, I have a contender: founder of Shopify Tobias Lutke. He's worth a reported $9.8 billion, and while I don't know where he lives exactly Shopify is based in Ottawa. Downside - he was born and raised in Germany although he now has dual citizenship, so no idea how much of a hockey fan he might be.
Would be a great contender...unfortunately he has stated several times that he has zero interest in hockey, or owning a sports team, and will not be buying the sens.
Leading candidates will be Desmarais, Ruddy, Greenbergs, some unknown billionaire out of US that see's the potential for 20% YoY valuation increases as NHL rev goes up, Ottawa grows rapidly (porjected to be 1.5 mil metro within next 20 years), new downtown arena, what happened to Edmonton value after sale/arena, state of the roster, etc.
Garrioch estimates that 650 mil is the low end and they are looking more like 800 mil. That would seem a bit high considering they still have a decent amount of debt and it will cost at least 200 mil for the new stadium (assuming they can work out a similar deal to Edmonton).
However, NHL revenues continue to grow. NHL has the lowest rev to value multiple of all the major sports, very little risk as most revenue is not tied to gate anymore (sens is likely less than 30% gate rev at this point.) In short, it's one of the rare investment opportunities where demand continues to grow (both in fans and corp dollars) and supply (games/teams) is relatively capped. As crazy as it sounds, even small market NHL franchises could easily be worth well over 1 bil in the very near future.
No billionaire is buying this for vanity. This is an asset that legitimately has a chance to beat the market in return over the next 15-20 years.