Is a Third N.Y. Baseball Team Feasible?
Imagine a baseball playoff race involving the Yankees, the Mets, and another team anchored in northern New Jersey. The Mets or Yanks would battle with the third team, sort of like the Dodgers and...
View ArticleThe Race Is On For the 2016 Olympics
It's that time again: Cities around the world have begun the biannual process of promising the greatest show on earth to the voting members of the International Olympic Committee. They'll hope that the...
View ArticleCanada Gains Expansion Value With Loonie
People who follow sports don't necessarily look up currency rates. But a significant benchmark was reached last week when the Canadian "loonie" was valued at slightly more than $.99 compared to the...
View ArticleNightmare Off-Season Leaves Stern Unscathed
NBA commissioner David Stern's summer of discontent is finally over. Fortunately for him, the memories of a referee scandal, arrests of players and an owner, the Anucha Browne Sanders sexual harassment...
View ArticleDolan's Problems May Affect Prospects of New MSG
The chairman of Madison Square Garden, Jim Dolan, may be the most polarizing owner in sports today, and that could mean big trouble for him in the near future. Dolan wants a new MSG, but he may have...
View ArticleNFL's New Hot Market Is North of the Border
The owners of the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts want a NFL franchise, according to an article published last week in the Toronto Globe and Mail. With this announcement, David Cynamon and...
View ArticleLucrative Possibilities Loom in Europe for the NFL
The true world series of sports is not being played in baseball this week: It's taking place in London, where the Giants and Miami Dolphins will cap off an invasion of North American sports that...
View ArticleCable Deals, L.A. Expansion on NFL Owners' Plate
The NFL's field trip to London is now done, and while officials clearly enjoyed their venture to Britain, it is time to get back to the business of the NFL in America. This means getting a cable deal...
View ArticleFinal Chapter Begins In Sonics vs. Seattle
For the owner of the Sonics, Clayton Bennett, the endgame has begun, as he attempts to land a new arena, funded by mostly taxpayer dollars, somewhere in the Seattle area. Bennett's pronouncement to the...
View ArticleNHL Expansion Rumors Travel North and West
It is widely assumed that Las Vegas and Kansas City are the next two cities in line for either an NHL expansion team, or as a location for a financially failing franchise, such as the Nashville...
View ArticleThanksgiving Game Has Deep Roots in the NFL
The National Football League never had any road map that led it to the financial success and status it has today. Instead, the league arrived at its station in life not because of any great planning by...
View ArticleSteroid Scandal Can't Faze MLB's Rising Revenues
It is decision time in Bud Selig's office: The commissioner of Major League Baseball, along with his president and chief operating officer, Bob DuPuy, and the rest of the administrative staff, will...
View ArticleNFL Network Can't Beat Cable Industry
It must be galling to the money machine that is the National Football League that it has met an opponent that keeps stopping it from gaining any yardage in its quest to get the NFL Network carried on...
View ArticleCities Can't Handle Cost of the NFL
Football is arguably the most popular sport in America, but in the past two weeks, the league has been told by both Los Angeles and Anaheim that those cities aren't interested in spending huge sums of...
View ArticleWhen It Comes to Sports, Politicians Are Just Talk
It doesn't take long for congressmen and women to get involved in sports issues. This December has seen politicians latch onto sports issues, such as steroids in baseball and the lack of widespread...
View ArticleFour Industry Legends Who Belong in Cooperstown
All the votes are in and counted, and the Cooperstown Class of 2008 will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 29. While there will be considerable debate on whether the voters were...
View ArticleNew Football League Takes Aim at College Fans
The end of college bowl season is a bittersweet time for seniors, as a vast majority of them are done playing football. There are hundreds of colleges that offer football on various levels, and there...
View ArticleIn '08, New Orleans Tops Stern's List of Concerns
It is that time of year when the State of the Union, State of the State, and State of the City speeches are delivered. In about a month, the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, will be delivering his...
View ArticleGiants, Jets Helped Make Super Bowl What It Is Today
There may have been better football games than the 1958 NFL Championship Game and Super Bowl III. But without the Giants-Baltimore Colts overtime game in 1958, and the Jets' upset of the Colts on...
View ArticleThe Super Bowl & Arizona Politics
The Super Bowl has returned to the Valley of the Sun but instead of the game being played in Tempe, where it was played in 1996, the contest will take place in Glendale, which is 10 miles from downtown...
View ArticleMove to Toronto, Spying Top Goodell's Offseason List
This is shaping up to be a spring of discontent for the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, and his 32 owners. At least two senators and one Congressman are monitoring the business activities of...
View ArticleGlobal Fever Spreads To English Premiership
Has the globalization of big-time sports hit a roadblock? It appears that the English Premier League, one of the top soccer leagues in the world, has drawn the wrath of FIFA and regional soccer...
View ArticleEconomics Behind Sonics Move Is Inconsistent
Next Tuesday will be critical, not only for presidential candidates, but also for Seattle SuperSonics owner Clayton Bennett, as Oklahoma City voters will either say yes or no to a tax increase that...
View ArticleAmerican Sports May Soon Face a Foreign Invasion
The owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, had an interesting observation last Friday when he asked on his Web log: When will foreign ownership of American sports teams start? Actually, foreign...
View ArticleTo Get Yankee Stadium Game, NBC Must Re-Up NHL
There has been much speculation that the Rangers will close out Yankee Stadium with a New Year's Day hockey game against, perhaps, the Boston Bruins, with NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol pushing for...
View ArticleEveryone but the Players Makes Money Off Madness
The NCAA men's college basketball tournament is going to generate a lot of money for a lot of people in the next three weeks, from the NCAA, to schools and conferences, to CBS, and to coaches. Seems...
View ArticleSubprime Crisis Sends Ripples Through Sports World
The fallout from the Bear Stearns meltdown and the drop in interest rates have not impacted sports in New York in terms of ticket sales yet. But that doesn't mean that Mets owner Fred Wilpon; the...
View ArticleCards' Collapsed Deal Bodes Ill for Owners
You can't blame local owners if they did a double take when they learned that the ownership of the St. Louis Cardinals took a huge hit last week when the Centene Corporation refused a deal to become...
View ArticleSeattle Hanging On to Sonics by Thinnest of Threads
Next week, NBA owners will gather in Manhattan and tell one of their own Seattle's Clayton Bennett that he has their approval to move his Seattle Super-Sonics to Oklahoma City in time for the...
View ArticleOlympic Protests Could Have Economic Effect
For the chief executive officer of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, these are not good times. GE's first-quarter earnings fell nearly 6% in 2008 when compared to the first quarter of 2007. As well, he...
View ArticleDraft Contracts Could Offer Clues to NFL's Future
The contracts handed to the draft class of 2008 may provide details of the battle between owners of high-revenue teams which include Dallas's Jerry Jones and Philadelphia's Jeffrey Lurie, as well as...
View ArticleNewark a Good Backup Plan for Nets
The Nets' ownership still insists it plans to play games at the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn sometime in the foreseeable future. But there is now some doubt that Bruce Ratner will actually move the...
View ArticleHorse Racing's Savior? Increased Gambling
Before the proliferation of television in American homes back in the late 1940s and early '50s, the American sports landscape was dominated by three sports: baseball, boxing, and horse racing. Decades...
View ArticleBolstering NFL Network Top Priority for Owners
This is a big business week for the NFL: The Lords of the Gridiron also known as the owners may decide to opt out of their collective bargaining agreement with their players. At the same time, they...
View ArticleAfter Bumpy Start, NBA Season Ends on Question Mark
This was supposed to be a season of ruin for the NBA. When referee Tim Donaghy was being investigated in a betting scandal that involved league games, there was much said and written about how the...
View ArticleWith Triple Crown Over, Attention Turns to Slots
In a good many ways, what happens in the days after the Belmont Stakes is far more important to the future of the thoroughbred horse racing industry in New York than whether Big Brown won the Triple...
View ArticleWomen Owners Slowly Gaining Traction
If you take a look at the list of the 29 classes of inductees into the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame, you will find one category of honorees has gone missing, in comparison to Cooperstown...
View ArticleOwner Woes, Europe on Bettman's Summer List
The commissioner of the National Hockey League, Gary Bettman, apparently isn't too concerned that Tiger Woods said that "I don't think anybody really watches hockey anymore," nor is he worried that...
View ArticleNew Stadiums Set High Bar for Rest of the NFL
If St. Louis loses its NFL team after the 2014 season, it can be pinned on the new stadiums being built by the Cowboys and Jets/ Giants. Since these facilities will utilize every sort of...
View ArticleThe Birmingham Games? Long Shot City Makes Bid
The 2008 Beijing Olympiad is a little more than a month away. But one American city in the Southeast has already caught Olympic fever, and would like to host the Summer Games in 2020: The mayor of...
View ArticleSeattle Move Shows That Fans Just Don't Matter
In the aftermath of the deal between Oklahoma City-NBA franchise holder Clayton Bennett and the city of Seattle, which allowed Bennett to break his lease with the city's "financially inadequate"...
View ArticleTwo Local Stadium Projects Face Different Futures
Now that the city's experience of baseball's All-Star Game has come and gone, is New York in a position to host a future NBA or NHL All-Star Game in Brooklyn or Manhattan? If you take Mayor Bloomberg...
View ArticleOff-Field Difficulties Loom for NFL
John Madden once said winning is a great deodorant, as it covers up whatever internal problems a team might be having. On the national level for the NFL, Brett Favre's retirement has quickly turned...
View ArticleDoes a Globalized NBA Need Its Stars in Beijing?
The commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, has a dilemma on his hands. As commissioner and in having a close ally in Val Ackerman, who runs USA Basketball and is a former commissioner of the WNBA ...
View ArticleFeud Brews Between NHL, Russian KHL
It is fairly safe to assume that Russian oilman Alexander Medvedev, the founder of the new Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), is not on the NHL's most-favored people list. The KHL is actually the old...
View ArticleEbersol's Experiment May Radically Change Viewing
Dick Ebersol has probably changed the way television audiences watch professional football. Earlier this year, Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Universal Sports, along with the commissioner of the NFL,...
View ArticleFor Owners, Teams Are Just Part of the Portfolio
It wasn't surprising when David Howard, the Mets' executive vice president for business, said on a Bloomberg Radio program, "Our vision is not to be just a successful baseball team, but to be a...
View ArticleEurope Provides Players With Lucrative Second Option
It has been 33 years since high school, college, and the NBA had a legitimate choice when it came to where they wanted to play professional basketball. In 1975, a high school player could go to college...
View ArticleNFL Players Association Finds Itself at a Crossroads
The NFL season begins tonight, and there is no talk of labor strife or negotiations between the owners and players even though the owners want a new collective bargaining agreement. There are three...
View ArticleWhat the Wall St. Crisis Means for Sports
While lawmakers refine the Wall Street bailout plan, the American and global sports industries are watching closely. The fallout of Treasury Secretary Paulson's $700 billion bailout plan could...
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