Post by GoVoysGo on Oct 6, 2015 15:16:49 GMT -5
Jugs Already Reporting Losses, Sources Say
TFHN - Daniel Ronel, Oct. 6
Seattle, WA • Tomorrow, the Seattle Juggernauts will kick off the season on the road, yet the team is already reporting losses.
Owner Daniel Ronel — well-known for freaking out and losing hope very quickly — has announced that the team will lose money by the end of the season. Seasons ticket holder sales look like they are going to miss last year's numbers slightly, and Ronel is calling for the end of the world.
"I don't get it. I'm a passionate owner. I love my team, my fans. I'm all about icing a good product and focusing on expenses later, something you don't find too often. My aim is to make watching a hockey game in Seattle a wonderful experience at a relatively low cost.
"Where did I go wrong?"
Now, the team has not played a single home game yet, and won't for the first few weeks. It's hard to realistically come to any single-game sale conclusions yet. Still, Ronel remains adamant that his franchise is hitting a bump in the road.
This comes as no shock; Ronel is notorious for being rash (in September of 2013, in anger over trading away Sidney Crosby for Phil Kessel and Jamie Benn, he immediately dumped Benn, along with Zach Parise and Taylor Hall, for Milan Lucic and Logan Couture). Since that exact incident, Ronel vowed to change his ways, and after several more brutal trades that year, he actually kept to his vow the next season. In fact, he became so stressed trying not to screw up that he fired himself as GM.
While his recent track record is much more stable, who knows what Ronel might spontaneously do. He has already relocated the team twice since establishing the franchise in San Diego. The team is set to finalize their new lease with KeyArena in Seattle at some point next week, and have already sold tickets in Seattle — without securing any kind of stable market/fanbase elsewhere — so it seems highly unlikely that Ronel would be so gutsy as to move the team for this season.
Even Ronel surely isn't that stupid. The team made top three in attendance last year, and should be alright. Eventually, Ronel will realize that Seattle is fine to ice a team, and will forget any kind of crazy contemplation of moving. Until then, it won't be really possible to move the team anyways.
Of course, this is under the guise that relocation really is on his mind. But when it comes to an imaginary hockey league — where teams don't actually play together but rather use the statistics of the players to imitate success, and all of the staff are either parodies of real people or teenagers pretending they're businessmen — anything is possible. ∆
