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Dazzle

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Everything posted by Dazzle

  1. The other thing I can't figure out is, despite Melnyk's claim that the Sen's foundation has brought in $ 100 million https://www.nugget.ca/news/local-news/live-ottawa-senators-owner-eugene-melnyk-set-to-make-significant-announcement There is another source that appears to contradict this significantly. https://ottawacitizen.com/sports/hockey/sens-foundation-to-become-ottawa-gatineau-youth-foundation Launched in January 1988, the registered charity raised funds and provided more than $35 million in grants to charitable organizations in Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec. Earlier this year, however, the National Hockey League club, from which the charity operates at arm’s length, indicated it was reviewing its relationship with the foundation. By the terms of the agreement between the two, that relationship ends on Friday. In 2018, a survey conducted by Charity Intelligence Canada gave the Ottawa Senators Foundation a C-minus rating, indicating that only 51 cents of each dollar raised by the charity went back into the community. “That’s considered really low on average,” Anthony Leblanc, the club’s president of business operations, said in June. “Most organizations want to be north of 70 to 80 cents of each dollar. All that did for me was show that’s not really acceptable and there clearly are areas where we can make improvement that could happen.” The Ottawa-Gatineau Youth Foundation will be overseen by a volunteer board chaired by Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, and vice-chaired by Ian Sherman of Ernst & Young. Roxanne Bouchard, VP and marketing manager at BMO, will act as treasurer. Other board members include former Senators player Brendan Bell, educator Tara Borowiecki, who is married to Senators alternate captain Mark Borowiecki, and philanthropist Barbara Crook. --- Seriously, one needs to give pause and understand that Melnyk probably wasn't the most honest man - not even close.
  2. (continued from the link above) Melnyk is the kind of guy who has been a resident of Barbados, which just so happens to be a great tax haven, since 1991. There is currently a lien out on a private jet registered to a company of his called “Clean Beauty Collective” because of nearly seven hundred grand in late payments. He has owned horse-racing operations and fragrance companies. He says he was accosted this summer at a Rolling Stones concert by a member of Ontario provincial parliament who called him a piece of $&!# and a loser, though he can take solace in the fact that his honor sometimes gets defended by a bunch of brand-spankin’-new Twitter users with questionable syntax! The thing about the silly and passionate love that people have for their sports teams is that the majority of the absolute nonsense constantly swirling around Melnyk could probably be overlooked by fans as semistandard “Yep, that’s our owner!” eccentricities—if it weren’t also for the myriad ways Melnyk has, over the years, torpedoed the Senators. Melnyk may have “saved” Ottawa from bankruptcy in 2003, but from the start, much of his wealth was tied to his pharmaceutical company, Biovail, which had been plagued by issues for years. (A 1998 Forbes article described Melnyk as “a smooth, well-tailored entrepreneur with only a medical publishing background, who has made a number of announcements about his company’s pending drugs that have yet to prove true.”) The same year Melnyk bought the Senators and their arena for $92 million, he also told investors—fraudulently, it was later ruled—that subpar Biovail profits were a result of a fatal truck accident in Illinois that had delayed shipments. Over the years Melnyk has relied on a daisy chain of loans to finance the Senators, the most recent being a $135 million line of refinanced credit announced in the summer of 2018. All this has had ripple effects on the franchise. It was bad enough to lose team legend Daniel Alfredsson in the twilight of his career in 2013 in order to pinch pennies, but it was worse when Alfredsson was alienated for a second time after he returned for a front-office position. (It also wasn’t super reassuring when Melnyk explained his team-building strategy to the Ottawa Citizen after Alfredsson’s departure: “It’s no different than the horses,” he said. “You’ve got your superstars up here, then you’ve got the other 80 per cent.”) It was totally unnecessary when, on the eve of what was supposed to be a happy, low-drama outdoor hockey game in 2017, Melnyk said he’d consider moving the team if attendance became “a disaster,” and it seemed like gaslighting when he later complained about people bringing up relocation. Melnyk is so distrusted in Ottawa that even when he underwent a successful liver transplant in 2015, it was not without controversy. The Ottawa Senators 2017 playoff run roster, only 25 months later. pic.twitter.com/DKm7VLac2P — jagmeet singh liker (@ryanclassic) July 30, 2019 It was only three seasons ago that Ottawa was a goal away from the Stanley Cup final, but it seems like an eternity. Rebuilds are inevitable, but the Senators have been home to and mismanaged some great talent of late. Erik Karlsson, one of the league’s best defensemen, was a player so important to Ottawa that an angry Melnyk vowed to use “forensic doctors”(?) against an opposing player whose skate blade cut Karlsson’s Achilles tendon in 2013. And yet the team balked at paying their captain market value in 2018, trading him instead to the San Jose Sharks. Ottawa engaged in a “blockbuster” trade to acquire forward Matt Duchene in 2017, only to trade him away within a season. These sorts of erratic moves haven’t been limited to the team’s roster, either: With the February 2019 collapse of longtime plans for a major arena and real estate project near downtown Ottawa, Melnyk also botched the development of much of the surrounding city. Needless to say, a lawsuit and a countersuit are underway. With their payroll only barely scraping the league’s mandated salary floor (and a good portion of it devoted to cap-geek workarounds that enable the team to effectively pay even less) the Senators are maybe operating within the letter of the law, though probably not the spirit. A Statement released by the Senators, concerning comments by owner Eugene Melnyk at a corporate event last night in Toronto... pic.twitter.com/wLOVuABmcO — John Shannon (@JShannonhl) February 7, 2019 In February, Melnyk unveiled a grand vision. The next few seasons, he allowed, would be dedicated to more rebuilding, but it would all pay off before long! The Senators’ plan, according to a statement the team released, was to be “all-in again for a five-year run of unparalleled success—where the team will plan to spend close to the NHL’s salary cap every year from 2021 to 2025.” It was a very Melnykian statement: somehow both blustering and pathetic, one hypothetical enough to be meaningless. It sounded a lot like the way he was described in Forbes more than 20 years ago, back when he was making those announcements about that company’s pending drugs, the ones that never wound up being true. The Senators are 0-2 in their first two games, but both the good and the bad news is: There’s a long season ahead. --------------- I don't understand why people warp history now to shape the way they want to see this guy. This guy had shades of Trump by withholding payments to people, owing a ton of money, and just seemingly doing some shady activities (i.e. allegedly hiring hackers to discredit a blogger). Moreover, the guy spent a lot of his time in a tax haven, all the while being notorious for being "the worst" hockey team owner. Specifically, the way his Organ Project foundation was run was just awful. For a billionaire, did he really not know how to run one? How did so much of those revenues end up going to administration, while approximately $5,000 (!) only went out. Like how?
  3. https://www.theringer.com/2019/10/8/20904509/eugene-melnyk-ottawa-senators-worst-sports-owner-in-north-america Have you heard the one about the powerful weirdo—a guy who got rich by extracting millions from shady businesses—who was accused of commissioning dark Ukranian forces against one of his many detractors? No, the other one. His name is Eugene Melnyk, and he has owned the Ottawa Senators since he purchased the team when it was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2003. He is possibly (in a crowded field that is truly rich in generational talent!) the worst owner in North American sports. Related The 2019-20 NHL Season Entrance Survey Metro North: The Devils, Rangers, and Islanders Are Ready to Rumble Sure, the competition is fierce. Just this week, the Washington Redskins’ Dan Snyder, who once left tubs of flavored ice cream on a coach’s desk because he thought his defense was “too vanilla” and who is associated with more than one online astroturfing campaign, summoned his head coach to a 5 a.m. meeting to fire him. Madison Square Garden’s James Dolan has banned reporters (and fans, and beloved former players) critical of him. The Mets-owning Wilpons are tightwads. The Bengals’ Mike Brown is worse than just a bad owner: He’s a boring one. The Phoenix Suns owner, Robert Sarver, keeps threatening to relocate, a long and storied tradition among these types. But you know those thought experiments where you try to pick and choose various skills from different players in order to construct the ideal professional athlete? The speed of Usain Bolt with the accuracy of Tom Brady and the mustache of Lanny McDonald, that sort of thing? Melnyk is that, except substitute “franchise owner-destroyer” in the equation. He is more Mr. Potato Head than Voltron, a guy who combines: The suspicious origins of someone investigated by two countries for accounting fraud (his pharmaceutical company, Biovail, settled with the SEC for $24.6 million in 2008, a year after settling a class action for $138 million, and that’s not even the extent of the various lawsuits associated with the enterprise); with: A complete ongoing inability to ever read the room, best exemplified when he recorded and released a bizarre video last September that was theoretically meant to be motivational but instead led off with his characterizing the team he’d owned for 15 years as “in the dumpster”; and: The shameless moxie it takes to get sued for nearly a million bucks by the Mohegan Sun casino over, effectively, bounced checks from a 2017 St. Paddy’s Day gambling spree, and then claim that it’s not fair because he totally had tried cashing out when he was ahead but the casino wouldn’t let him; as well as: The petty shortsightedness necessary to ban one reporter from the team plane (because the reporter had covered the existence of a video posted by an Arizona Uber driver that showed some visiting Ottawa Senators talking $&!# about an assistant coach) and tell another reporter “I’ll bury you” (because the reporter had asked whether it was true that Melnyk hadn’t paid out bonuses to employees); oh and neither last nor least: The time, inclination, and global dark web connections to (aLlEgEdLy!) sic Ukranian hackers on a hockey blogger’s website in 2013 after said blogger began exploring the Potemkin village that was Melnyk’s—and by extension, the underperforming Senators’—financial structures. (A convincing gumshoe deep dive into Melnyk’s probable links to the hack involved a charity called “Help Us Help the Children” and a phishing attempt with “On-Paul-MacLeans-Offensive-Zone-Strategy” in the faux URL.) There's a whole lot of dirt on this guy, but people are choosing to ignore this because he died. He's not a great man.
  4. https://www.hockeyfeed.com/nhl-news/eugene-melnyk-hits-new-low-as-senators-foundation-splits-with-team https://www.silversevensens.com/2020/6/8/21283815/eugene-melnyks-charity-under-fire-ottawa-senators The most damning bits of information from Gibbons’ piece are sourced from publicly available information: the CRA. It’s not like the Sens Foundation has never given to Melnyk’s private charity, either. Back in 2018, they wrote a cheque for $100k, and offered up another $15k in sponsorship. So perhaps Melnyk has a very good explanation for what is going on here, but it will be hard to explain this away (forgive the long block quote): According to Canada Revenue Agency filings, the Organ Donation Project generated $991,708 in revenues in 2018, primarily thanks to a big charity gala it staged in Toronto. No doubt, that $100,000 Senators Foundation cheque helped. So what happened to all that money? Again, according to CRA filings, The Organ Project invested barely $5,000 of the nearly $1 million it raised on organ donor awareness. For those without a calculator, that’s 0.49 per cent, or less than half a cent for every dollar raised. And yet the Sens Foundation is being attacked for investing about 50 cents on every dollar it raises on programs. The hypocrisy is stunning. So, where did all The Organ Project money go if not to worthy causes? According to CRA, a whopping $779,464 went to cover fundraising costs. Another $238,118 went to management and administration. According to Gibbons’ article, Melnyk and the Sens’ Foundation are poised for an acrimonious battle before the July 31st deadline. More on this story as it becomes available. https://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/opinion/2020/06/08/its-hard-to-be-charitable-with-eugene-melnyk-fans-and-the-senators-own-foundation-agree.html Never mind that Melnyk owns a franchise valued at about $445 million (U.S.), according to Forbes, or that he’s often found himself on lists of Canada’s wealthiest individuals. In the past year alone he’s piled up enough negative business-page headlines to last a lamentable career. Where do we start? Last summer, a casino in Connecticut sued Melnyk for attempting to pay a bill worth about $900,000 with five bank drafts that were “dishonoured” by the bank. That was around the same time Melnyk had to go to court to get his company’s private plane back after an aviation company seized it over what it said was an unpaid debt of about $690,000. Not long after that, there was the story of the former pilot of said private plane mounting a legal push to retrieve some $13,000 she claimed was owed by the company that oversees the Senators. And let’s not even talk about the big talk of a downtown arena that’s ended in a thud. Let’s not even talk about the revolving door in the Senators’ C-suite, including the March departure of CEO Jim Little after all of a couple of months at the helm, and the 2016 exit of a chief marketing officer who filed a hefty lawsuit alleging abusive behaviour from Melnyk. And let’s just stay very far away from the alleged financial chicanery of Melnyk’s slightly more distant past — like, say, the time in 2008 that the chief American subsidiary of Biovail, the Toronto-based drug company Melnyk once ran, paid a $24.6-million fine to settle kickback and conspiracy charges brought by authorities in the United States. https://deanblundell.com/sports/nhl/the-ottawa-senators-foundation-just-fired-the-ottawa-senators-because-eugene-melnyk-is-a-dick/ RUMOR is owner Eugene Melnyk hasn’t lived up to many promises he’s made to the Sens Foundation. He’s neck-deep in debt which would surprise no one after Casino’s and Private Jet companies started publically shaming Melnyk last year to pay his bills and outstanding debt in the millions. No matter the impetus, being fired by their official charity in a time when charitable giving is down 98% in Canada is another brick in the embarrassing wall of perpetual shame Melnyk has built around a once-proud franchise.
  5. In spite of that, I do recall Melynk helping out Mike Fisher's trade so that he could go to Nashville to be with his wife Carrie Underwood. It was a good gesture.
  6. https://www.thescore.com/nhl/news/1976361 Eugene Melnyk's charity previously directed a small fraction of the money it generated toward its intended cause. The Ottawa Senators owner created The Organ Project - a private, Toronto-based not-for-profit foundation - in 2016, with the goal of ending the organ transplant waiting list and "changing the current environment so that, in the near future, nobody in Canada will die while waiting for an organ transplant." However, while it gained $991,708 in revenues during 2018, it contributed barely $5,000 of that to organ donor awareness, according to Postmedia's Rick Gibbons, who cited filings from the Canada Revenue Agency. Melnyk's charity is separate from the Senators Foundation - the team's charitable arm - which announced its intent to sever ties with the club last week. The Senators Foundation budgeted $100,000 toward The Organ Project but eventually decided against donating it, Gibbons added. Of the roughly $1 million taken in by Melnyk's charity, it spent $779,464 on fundraising costs and another $238,118 on management and administration, according to the filings obtained by Gibbons, who was informed that these types of figures are "almost certain" to be scrutinized by tax officials. Unlike the Senators Foundation, the Organ Project doesn't require a board of directors to oversee operations, and according to Gibbons, the latter entity appeared to be directed solely by Melnyk. However, it shut down in 2019 and didn't fulfill a promise to reopen this spring. The Senators and their foundation will formally part ways if they're unable to resolve their dispute by July 31.
  7. Just think that Seattle could've taken Domi from the expansion draft. Just think that they took Bayreuther instead, who they let walk for free. Just think there are people who think Seattle did fine in the expansion draft.
  8. Their team overall is like swiss cheese. Goaltending is kind of an easy blame, but I don't think all players are on the same page for defense.
  9. Hard to believe that there's people in this fanbase that think Benning is the 'worst' GM since Milbury. It's not even close to that point, but ignorance is bliss for some people.
  10. She (a woman) has given up so much more money than 99.99 percent of all men. Should we not be happy that a billionaire is trying to improve the world? Every other billionaire has pretty much opted to expand their wealth, or to spend it on luxury goods like luxury cars, huge mansions, and what not. Being rich, she can do whatever she wants. She can be selfish and live her life with money flying around. She is choosing to give back (sure, maybe for the PR purposes), but she's giving it almost right away, not like some other billionaires that take their sweet time in letting go of the money. And then there are some billionaires like Bezo that have donated very little (if at all)..... One more thing I just remembered. She's secure enough to re-marry a regular dude. https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/Billionaire-MacKenzie-Scott--Bezos--Ex--Marries-Seattle-Science-Teacher/5-2432799/
  11. This is not entirely inaccurate. Vancouver's media/fanbase has always been pretty fickle about its team. Look no further than the sudden attendance drops after 2011. The Leafs' loyalty, on the other hand, is genuine, to a fault. Then you look at everyone who has left the city, including management. The analysis of Benning was often one-sided. Sure he drafted well, but there's always this 'excuse' to blame him for something. The most inexplicable was the drafting, which was so much better than Gillis. Yet people were so in love with Gillis that they were willing to severely overlook/ignore GIllis' greatest flaws because of the so-called glory days. Then you look at Vancouver being perceived as 'stuck-up', compared to the rest of Canada.
  12. You do realize that new management has kept Benning's team intact, right?
  13. Myers, Miller, Schenn, Pearson Nice character guys too that you conveniently omitted.
  14. I think there's multiple parts to this. This Canucks team was one of the most devastated by COVID. Having someone come in and be hesitant about COVID, despite the abundance of experience that the other players had with the virus might not have sit well for those people. It's one thing to 'educate' yourself. It's another to ignore the experiences of others who had actively dealt with the virus. At some point in time, you'll have to defer to the people with the most experience. I should clarify that I'm not sure where Hamonic actually stood with the virus/vaccine, aside from being supposedly hesitant to the vaccine.
  15. Yikes. That must feel awful knowing that you are THAT disliked by other people, but it also begs the question as to how many people disliked Hamonic, or why this story came out, as if to justify the trade.
  16. Yeah. And seriously, if Calgary is getting all of our players, we are getting all of the former Leaf players. LOL.
  17. I think the angle of this article is particularly interesting... Correct me if I'm wrong here, Karlsson's Skellefteå AIK team is in a league that is one tier above Dahlen's... Dahlen purposefully went back to his old team to play for two more years before breaking out in the NHL. Now I'm not suggesting that Karlsson is going to break out in a massive way, but I think it's rather dishonest of the article to mention that Dahlen "may be the better player in the NHL" because we only have one NHL season to look, but several seasons of Timra where Dahlen did not improve over his previous year in a second tier league. Who's to say that Karlsson can't produce more points than Dahlen? The difference in age is 2 (Karlsson being younger), and Karlsson has outproduced in a better league, while also playing against men in a defensive league. And while Dahlen had an incredible start to the season, he has cooled down significantly. As a comparison between rookies, our Podkolzin has fewer points with more games played, but his +/- is significantly better (+5). I think it's safe to say (at this point) that if Dahlen isn't scoring, he's not helping his team. Of course, these two players play different games, so a comparison of this sort will be debatable in all sorts of directions.
  18. Just because he broke it at 22, instead of 18 19, doesn't mean he's not going to break out one day. It shows a ton of promise because a ton of SHL men do not score in that league.
  19. So if that's the case, we'll have another situation where we get no return...
  20. But my criticism about Timrafan was his total defense of Dahlen. At no point did he ever blame the player, and blamed everything on the Canucks, which doesn't seem right. His argument about Utica is a smokescreen, which had nothing to do with Dahlen, and how his agent, JP Barry, acknowledged the talk about a trade, which Benning said was done because some players thought they deserved a spot. Dahlen contradicted himself by saying he didn't ask for a trade. Someone lied, and Timrafan never addressed the contradictions.
  21. Don't kid yourself. Dahlen proved nothing until this year. He broke out, and it had nothing to do with the AHL coaching. In fact, he was still performing at the same level in his second tier league.
  22. Because we run the risk of losing value for Miller, especially if there's some injury. You see how the Blackhawks cashed in on Fleury, and they flipped him for a nice return. Given how we did this deadline, we are not showing that we can do the same thing.
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