Photo by Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Fuck Eugene Melnyk. Fuck him and his billionaire sports owner ilk. Fuck the greed that has rotted their souls beyond recognition, hollowed out their chest cavities and replaced their hearts with a compulsion to squeeze every last dollar from everyone in their wake without prejudice or fear of consequences.There's something especially vile about Melnyk and the timing of his threatening words to fans Friday, one day before his Ottawa Senators would host the city's first outdoor game as part of the NHL's ongoing 100th anniversary celebration. The former pharmaceutical CEO with a net worth of $1.15 billion, according to Canadian Business magazine, chose that moment to blackmail the people of Ottawa with a threat of relocation, essentially saying, "Nice sports franchise you have here, hate to see anything bad happen to it."With your average decrepit billionaire that's been disconnected from normal society for too long that wants nothing more than to shake every dime possible from customers, it's par for the despicable course; but for Melnyk, who would literally be dead if not for a Senators fan giving him a new liver, it's especially heinous to question whether there are enough fans in Canada's capital to support an NHL team.Since this isn't a movie, Melnyk did not gain a newfound appreciation for life or have his perspective changed on the value of money when it could do nothing to save him; instead, it took two years after his life-saving surgery to question the loyalty of a fan base that donated him a fucking organ before what should have been a positively wonderful evening at Lansdowne Park.
Attendance is as low as it's been since the mid-1990s and it's down from a year ago when the Senators came within a goal of the Stanley Cup Final. But it's not as though this fuckwit was spending money when 19,000 people were packing the building routinely. As an owner, this is a time when you can look inward at your business model and attempt to discern if your organization can do something to appeal to fans that may be slipping away.Or you can float the idea of relocation a day before 34,000 people pay insane sums of money to watch what is currently a god-awful team play in temperatures so cold you could transport a liver for emergency surgery in them.You have to be a special breed of billionaire dipshit to gripe about money after chastising your franchise's best player for expressing his desire to fair compensation on his next contract. I won't pretend to know what alienates hockey fans in a Canadian market but I have to imagine that sequence events isn't bringing more people to the arena on a weeknight except maybe to protest the owner.Eugene, you are worth more money than 99.9 percent of the world, so perhaps consider shutting the fuck up about being cash poor and unable to pay players or scouts. It's the only thing fans want to hear about less than reporters' airport problems or hotel points system. If you can't afford to run a team in Ottawa because you want to be buried with your cash, sell the team for more cash to fondle in what I'm guessing is an extremely tacky master bedroom with a painting of yourself riding a horse above the bed.
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Attendance is as low as it's been since the mid-1990s and it's down from a year ago when the Senators came within a goal of the Stanley Cup Final. But it's not as though this fuckwit was spending money when 19,000 people were packing the building routinely. As an owner, this is a time when you can look inward at your business model and attempt to discern if your organization can do something to appeal to fans that may be slipping away.Or you can float the idea of relocation a day before 34,000 people pay insane sums of money to watch what is currently a god-awful team play in temperatures so cold you could transport a liver for emergency surgery in them.You have to be a special breed of billionaire dipshit to gripe about money after chastising your franchise's best player for expressing his desire to fair compensation on his next contract. I won't pretend to know what alienates hockey fans in a Canadian market but I have to imagine that sequence events isn't bringing more people to the arena on a weeknight except maybe to protest the owner.Eugene, you are worth more money than 99.9 percent of the world, so perhaps consider shutting the fuck up about being cash poor and unable to pay players or scouts. It's the only thing fans want to hear about less than reporters' airport problems or hotel points system. If you can't afford to run a team in Ottawa because you want to be buried with your cash, sell the team for more cash to fondle in what I'm guessing is an extremely tacky master bedroom with a painting of yourself riding a horse above the bed.