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rynthetyn -> RE: NHL 2007-2008 (11/28/2007 12:21:07 AM)
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And, the Lightning may very well be seriously screwed. The sale of the team just fell apart, part of the potential ownership group is suing Hollywood producer dude for $50 million, and the rumors that Palace Sports wants to gut the team are back in full force. Reading between the lines, it appears that Hollywood producer dude and his $500 million dollars from the Saw franchise is the only one who actually had any real money, but Real Estate Developer dude and Doug McLean were going to be the ones getting all of the profit out of the deal and controlling the team, which Hollywood producer dude didn't like since he was going to be the one fronting all the money and securing the financing. So, Hollywood producer dude goes behind the other dudes' backs and tries to negotiate his own deal, which was in direct breach of his contract with the other dudes, so now he's getting sued for breach of contract and fraud.
At the moment, the best case scenario is for Hollywood producer dude to reach some sort of deal out of court to pay of the other guys, and then to buy the team himself, since if Palace Sports sticks around, they're going to go into fire sale mode and then bye bye Vinny.
The Lightning ownership situation has always been a bit of a joke. First we had the Japanese dudes and Kokusai Green, who Phil Esposito found at the last minute to save his bid for a team (famous quote, "the more we drank, the more it made sense. We said 'hockey', they thought we said 'sake'"), with the owner that no one, possibly not even Bettman, ever met and who's existence no one to this day is sure about, and who may or may not have been using the team to launder money because they may or may not have had Yakuza ties. And, if nothing else, the team president in that era, one Steve Oto, was a lawyer who did work for Yakuza operations in the US. Along the way, the Maloofs acted like they were going to buy the team, test drove it and ruined all the draft picks one year, some phony duke pretended he was going to buy the team and scammed them out of a bunch of money, Art Williams bought the team on a whim while on vacation in France, then thought he knew how to run the team because he had once coached highschool football and would give lengthy "motivational speeches" to the team, embarrassed everyone by calling Vinny Lecavalier the "Michael Jordan of hockey" and giving Vinny a ridiculous "I'm A Stud" t-shirt, then stupid idiot Gary Bettman convinced Bill Davidson to buy the team, where they've spent the last however many years as the red-headed step sibling of the Pistons and whatever Davidson's WNBA team is called (and I'm pretty sure Davidson pays more attention to the WNBA team), and now this whole purchase fiasco. And this in a team that's only existed for 15 years.
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