True North Sports and Entertainment Buys Thrashers; NHL Heading To Winnipeg

by lee on 31. May, 2011 in Featured

True North Sports and Entertainment has been working to purchase the Atlanta Thrashers, and finally on Tuesday the deal was finalized.

The Thrashers have been a struggling NHL franchise looking for better days, and True North believes that they can help them find those.

Atlanta just isn’t a “hockey place”, as it has now lost two teams in 31 years.

Bringing the Thrashers to Canada will make them the 7th NHL team (Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators, Toronto Maple Leafs, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Vancouver Canucks).

They will play at the MTS Centre in Winnepeg which seats just over 15k people.

The total money involved is $230 million dollars. Of that, $60 million is for relocation fees that the rest of the league will split, and the other $170 million is for the purchase of the team.

The is also a lot of question of whether or not the team’s name will stay the same. The consensus is that it won’t.

The NHL commissioner, Gary Bettman, is quite pleased with this move back to Winnipeg. The divisions will remain the same for the upcoming season.

The Thrasher were suffering from financial problems in Atlanta, and just couldn’t get any serious interest int he team to keep it there.

They couldn’t fill the stadium, they couldn’t sell much memorabilia, and they couldn’t win many games.