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Is it time to turn down the Heat?

By Tim Drake, Opinions Editor

hen it comes to the
relationship between
professional sports

franchises and the cities they ply
their trade out of, there has always
been a love/hate element to the often
rocky romance. An organization,
regardless of sport or league, is
typically relocated or expanded to a
new municipality, more often than
not with rose coloured glasses firmly
covering the eyes of local politicians,
and because of the unending desire
by those politicians attempting

to forge a legacy for themselves,
sweetheart deals are written in

order to entice teams to the city in
question.

At first, these deals are generally
waved off by the public and the
media as simply the cost of doing
business in a modern landscape,
and are swept under the run amidst
the excitement generated by the
incoming club. That was certainly the
case over a year ago when the AHL
minor league affiliate of the Calgary
Flames, the then Quad City Flames,
picked up stakes and moved out west
to Abbotsford and were rechristened
as the Heat.

The city of Abbotsford went
to great lengths to land the Heat,
and they certainly didn’t exempt
themselves from reputations of city’s
past doing whatever they deemed
necessary to seal the deal with a
sports team

However, what Abbotsford and
its city council have been doing in
order to keep the Heat around long
term has been, for lack of a better
word, extraordinary. After signing
a decade long pact with the Heat,
the city of Abbotsford guaranteed
the losses of the team’s owners for
amounts up to $5.7 million. They
also wrote an extremely generous
clause into the contact by stipulating
that if the Heat are unable to garner
that amount of money by the squad
over the course of the year, then
Abbotsford taxpayers will up the
tab for the remaining total and city
council will waive the $200, 000
arena rental fee.. Between the club’s
rookie and sophomore years, the
team was only capable of generating

$5.3 million, meaning taxpayers

are currently staring in the face of a
projected $400, 000 plus bill for the
year. Needless to say, Abbotsford
citizens have been nothing short of
irate at what is turning out to be an
assault on their bank accounts, and
they have a right to be. There are
some real concerns with the Heat
franchise right now. When the club
left Illinois to come to Abbotsford,
both Abbotsford city politicians and
media pundits salivated at the thought
of a second professional hockey team
within the province to complement
the Vancouver Canucks.

Keith Seabrook

However, even with playing in a
province that is one hundred percent
hockey focused one hundred percent
of the time, the Heat have a lot going
against them. They’ ve only been able
to draw approximately 2, 000 people
at home games in a stadium that
seats thousands more than that. Then
there’s location. While Abbotsford
is a growing city, not many other
B.C. residents, particularly those
from the Lower Mainland, are now
willing to part with their cash to
drive all the way out to Abbotsford,
only to witness a team that is built
to develop and feed players to the

 

 

 

Calgary Flames, one of the Canucks’
biggest interdivional rivals. Couple
those factors with the fact that good
tickets to a Heat game aren’t exactly
inexpensive, and you’re a recipe for
disaster written all over it.

How this all shakes down is
yet to be determined, but hopefully
this entire ordeal with the Heat will
serve as an example to other cities
that, as Peter Pocklington once said,
“government should not be in the
business of doing business”.

Judging from the track records
of cities crisscrossing North America
though, I wouldn’t bet on it.

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