Big Lead Sports Bar

10/05/2006

Penguins happenings, McClatchy Back, and a Pacman Party

It appears that the Pittsburgh Penguins will be sold to Jim Balsillie, chairman and co-chief executive officer of Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. Meanwhile, Dan Onorato continues to publicly flog the Pens for not agreeing to a new lease. If any of you out there have thoughts on the arena/casino situation, I would love to hear them.
Kevin McClatchy will be back as the Pirates owner in 2007. I guess that would disappoint one Bob Smizik, who wrote in January of 2004 that "McClatchy Must Go, and Soon".
ESPN.com's Bill Simmons did a live-blog of all four opening playoff games over the last two days. If you have an hour or so to kill, check it out here.
Pacman Jones is having another party. I mean, if you can't celebrate an 0-4 start capped off by a teammate getting the longest game-related suspension in NFL history, what can you celebrate?

Make sure to wear your collard shirts. Does that mean they have to be green?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think both sides have to have some blame put on them for the whole arena thing.

In the beginning, I felt that the politicians were solely to blame. I mean they were for dragged their feet on the arena for so long.

When this arena issue first surfaced in the late-90s, the Penguins were the most successfull team in recent Pittsburgh history. Yet the Steelers (who probably did deserve a stadium) and Pirates (who deserve nothing but a warm pile of poo) got stadiums, and the Pens got nothing.

Then when you threw in the fact that not many politicians got behind the Isle of Capri arena plan, it made them look even shadier (as in, the guys in office didn't want IOC to get the slots license because IOC wasn't giving the politicians enough money).

So then we have the "Plan B" thing. Plan B is obviously not as good as the IOC plan (it's pretty tough to beat a free arena), but it's not like it's a totally ridiculous plan. Most other NHL teams don't get free arenas and have to go with something like our "Plan B". So in that respect, Plan B is your standard, decent arena deal. It's main flaw being that it's not as good as a free arena.

This is where I blame the Penguins ownership. They've basically stonewalled this whole Plan B thing, and it makes them as bad as the politicians. I'm willing to bet someone in the Pens hierarchy has a financial stake in IOC, and anything that would take pressure off of the commission to award the slots license to IOC (like... say, agreeing to work with Plan B if the IOC plan falls though) is not good for them. I even heard that one reason the last guy backed out of buying the Pens is because he wanted to talk Plan B with the city officials, and the Penguins wouldn't permit that.

So right now, all the Penguins really have to do is say "If our awesome deal with Isle of Capri falls though, we'll go ahead and work with Plan B to get our arena done", and that'd be it. They'd be staying. No more worrying.

But they won't do that, so that's some blame I have to put on them.