The Montreal Canadiens cannot lose.
Whether the coaches are good or bad, the players great or awful, the trades and draft picks brilliant or catastrophic, it matters not. The Canadiens simply cannot lose.
Oh, they can lose on the ice and have, with two ugly losses this week. But the Canadiens are clear winners at the only game that really matters, the one played out in boardrooms across the National Hockey League and presided over by one Gary Bettman.
According to NHL valuations released by Sportico.com on Wednesday, the Canadiens are now worth a cool $2.93 billion (all figures in U.S. dollars), which ranks the CH third in the league after the Leafs ($3.66 billion) and the Rangers ($3.25 billion).
Across the league, valuations are up a staggering 37 per cent in the past year, with the Canadiens at a relatively puny 29 per cent, well behind the one-year increase of the small-market Edmonton Oilers (up 51 per cent) with the Islanders and Dallas at 49 per cent.
Why is Bettman, the longest tenured commissioner in North American pro sports, still in power, despite handing stewardship of the game to a bunch of backward-looking, biased hacks like Colin Campbell, Mike Murphy and George Parros?
Put it this way: If your money manager was increasing the value of your portfolio by 20 per cent to 50 per cent a year, would you fire him for tracking mud on the carpet? Hardly.
The Canadiens have come a long way since George Gillett Jr. purchased 80 per cent of the team and the Bell Centre from Molson Breweries for $180 million US in January 2002, a deal reached when the late Molson CEO Daniel O’Neill had a ski chalet near Gillett’s home in Colorado.
It was one of the all-time bargains, even in the heady speculative world of sports franchises. Eight years later, Gillett flipped his investment, selling to the Groupe CH consortium headed by the Molson family for $575 million.
Although there were rumours Groupe CH was overburdened with debt early on, within five years the team’s value zoomed past the $1 billion mark. Today, the Canadiens are worth more than five times what the Molson group paid in 2009.
With every major sports league now up to its elbows in gambling and major streaming platforms such as Amazon and Apple vying with traditional outlets for the safest product in television, it would take a financial cataclysm on the order of the Great Depression to slow the upward momentum of the franchise market.
When the New York Yankees met the Los Angeles Dodgers in a disappointing World Series, it was a collision of baseball’s two most valuable clubs, with the Yankees current value pegged at $7.55 billion and the Dodgers at $5.45 billion.
Ownership of a team in any of the major leagues is now a virtual license to print money. Despite the soaring value of franchises, the old blackmail game still works: “Buy me a new arena or I’m moving the team to Irkutsk.” In the NFL, even small-market Buffalo is worth an estimated $5.35 billion, yet owner Terry Pegula and his wife, Kim Pegula (who also own the NHL Sabres), have persuaded taxpayers to put up $850 billion of the $1.4-billion cost of a new stadium for the Bills.
Jerry Jones, who appointed himself president and GM, owns the underachieving Dallas Cowboys, the most valuable team on the continent. The ‘Boys haven’t won anything since the last millennium — but CNBC’s valuation has Dallas at a cool $11 billion, with annual revenue of $1.22 billion.
It would be difficult to find a more inept or despised owner than former Washington Commanders boss Daniel Snyder, yet Snyder bought the team then called the Redskins for $800 million in 1999 and sold it in the spring of 2023 for roughly $6 billion.
No example of the value of ownership is more telling than that of the late Eugene Melnyk, who bought the Ottawa Senators for $92 million in 2003. Following Melnyk’s death and after two decades of chaotic and tight-fisted ownership, Michael Andlauer (previously a highly respected member of the Groupe CH consortium) paid slightly more than 10 times that amount to purchase 90 per cent of the team from Melnyk’s estate.
The deal for the Senators also marked the resolution of one of the two most pressing issues for the NHL, finding viable ownership for the Ottawa team. The other was resolved when the Coyotes relocated to Salt Lake City and Bettman’s Folly became the Utah Hockey Club, an entity better and more stable than the Arizona club ever was.
Closer to home, Geoff Molson’s stewardship of the CH has improved considerably since he learned some hard lessons from the Logan Mailloux draft. He’s a local owner who knows and cares about hockey — but for good owners and bad alike, it’s a win-win game.
The Canadiens have their own state-of-the-art facility, in an excellent, if narrow location downtown. The only way it can get better is if they can reap the revenue from two or three playoff rounds year after year — but it hardly matters.
In the ownership game, you win even when you lose.