Hot on the heels of a second article by Jim Kelley at Sportsnet.ca on what was said and not said yesterday by the Buffalo Sabres management, Managing Partner and Minority Owner Larry Quinn is going to be on WGR550 this evening before the game versus the Lightning to clarify the situation beyond the scope of the statement, terse as it was, he released yesterday.
Kelley, ever on the attack, especially when it comes to the Golisano-owned Sabres, refused to back down, writing another thousand plus words to educate all of us in the art of disinformation. In that article he makes the salient point that Golisano has not said anything at all.
For instance, lost in a spate of denunciations is the fact that no one in the Sabres organization denied the original point of the story that the team is for sale. What minority partner Larry Quinn said was that, "We are not in negotiations to sell the team." Quinn neither named the "we" nor did he say that team owner Tom Golisano, the man most likely to be in the discussions to sell the franchise he purchased out of bankruptcy in 2003, was or was not involved. In fact, Golisano is said to be at the winter meetings in Florida but nowhere to be seen or heard. The owner made no public appearance after Day 1 of the Board of Governors meetings despite the fact he winters in Florida and the other 29 owners have, essentially, come to his house.
Golisano made no media appearances and issued no statement.
Is Golisano's silence as deafening as Kelley makes it out? I don't know. But the story continues to have legs in Hamilton. This morning's report from the Spectator focuses on the sharing of Sabres home games between the two cities along with the nuances of the less than cordial relationship between the Commisioner and Research in Motion CEO Jim Balsillie.
Now, we all know that Gary Bettman is as much the Jedi Master of doublespeak as anyone in the public eye, so applying Kelley's rules of interpretation, the quote in the title could be roughly translated as, "Tom Golisano is not presenting involved in the completion of the sale of the Buffalo Sabres." If there's no contract on the table and due diligence being done then the process of selling the team is not occuring. Ergo, Bettman's statement is true and precise.
I guess all of us in Sabredom will be listening closely to the words that come out of Larry Quinn's mouth this evening. The actual words and not the ones we think we want to hear.
Ta,
