I love how you manage to infer exactly what all of this means. In fact, the NHL has been very careful in what it has said. It has said that all of the potential buyers are “interested” in keeping the team in Phoenix. That’s not even close to saying that they are committed to doing so. You assume that any concessions that they get from Glendale mean that they are locked into staying there, without considering that the team could end up back in bankruptcy in two years, and, with the NHL oh so reluctantly saying that it isn’t working, and they will have to move the team. You talk about how the city has agreed to a new partnership, without noting that the city hasn’t said anything publicly about that, and hasn’t taken any steps to secure the political approval necessary to allow such a deal to go through.

I don’t think we need to argue that anyone has perjured themselves, given the number of ways that the team could follow the NHL’s path and still end up leaving Phoenix without a single one of their pleadings actually being false.

Total expenses for Phoenix were $24.4 million higher than they were for Nashville. You try to break it out into a bunch of categories and then obfuscate what the total was. My above assumption is that Phoenix, over five years, can trim this by $20 million. I think that more accelerated reductions aren’t very likely. Still, let’s say that they get there after one year.

Note that your source never thinks about one potential reason why Phoenix’s debt service costs are higher than Nashville’s, namely that it is considered a much riskier enterprise to loan money to. I suspect that some of it is the interest paid to Moyes, but not all of it. Further, I don’t buy the argument that Moyes receiving an ownership interest means that he can’t be a creditor. That combination happens all the time.

I also assumed that revenues would increase by $20 million over five years, when they are currently about the same as Nashville’s. I think that this is extremely generous, given the likelihood that they are going to go down dramatically this year. Let’s adjust my thinking by saying that revenue declines by $5 million this year, gets back to last year’s numbers next year, and then rises by $5 million each of the next three years.

The immediate savings on expenses is the lease modification. That, by itself, lowers next year’s losses by, call it, $15 million (your statement as to what the city offered, though the city has said that it didn’t agree to anything, and they can’t definitively agree to anything without public action). Revenue loss adds $5 million to them. We’re working from a start of $35 million in losses. That means that, instead of my projection of $30 million in losses next year, we have $25 million. That means that, after 5 years, the compounded losses would be going up by about $3 million a year, rather than $3.5 million. That’s not going to make a huge difference to the long range forecasts, particularly since an internal rate of return of 8% is pretty low for an investment like this; what rate do you think someone would be charged if they asked to borrow all of the money to finance the purchase of the Coyotes and cover their operating losses in this environment? I’d be really surprised if they could do it for 8%, and then you have to put liquidity risk and normal profits on top of that.

The reason that I keep insisting that I don’t believe that anyone thinks that this is a good long term investment in Phoenix is that I can’t find a way to juggle the numbers that make it a reasonable risk to take.

As for the Sheehan report, I haven’t found an actual copy of it, but what I have read suggests that it contains a number of unjustified assumptions itself. It argues that the Coyotes can just make a bunch of their expenses go away. It assumes that they can both cut the marketing budget and increase the effectiveness of the marketing, which I don’t see as well supported. Look, it was an argument filed by one of the parties in a court case. I expect it to lean as hard as it can to support that side. One of the very big problems I have with your arguments is that you consistently take the pleadings of one side in this case at face value, while deriding the pleadings of the other side. Your utter lack of skepticism as to what the NHL and the City of Glendale have said means that it’s impossible to take you seriously.