The sale of the Prince George Cougars is not official yet.
It still has to be approved by the head office of the Western Hockey League and then passed by the league's board of governors, made up of the owners of the other teams, but it's a done deal.
The Brodsky family, made up of owner Rick, daughter Brandi, the team's vice-president and marketing manager, and son-in-law Dallas Thompson, the team's general manager, weren't talking to The Citizen over the weekend or again on Monday after our story on the sale.
Local businessman Greg Pocock and a group of investors that includes Eric Brewer and Dan Hamhuis, both former Cougars playing in the NHL, bought the team for close to $7 million, several reliable sources close to the deal told Citizen reporter Ted Clarke over the weekend.
Brandi Brodsky was talking to other Prince George media outlets Monday, however, emphatically telling them the team hasn't been sold.
Who to believe?
For starters, if another media outlet had broken this story, we would have dutifully called the Cougars on Monday morning and we'd be running our own story stating that the owner insists the team hasn't been sold. That's the way the game is played.
Second, this same team hasn't had a good track record for quite some time on the reliability of its public pronouncements.
They are still insisting they're not out of the playoffs yet, even though their odds of making it are about as good as daffodils blossoming in the Hart this week.
The Cougars are four points behind the Tri-City Americans for the final playoff spot, but Tri-City has three games in hand on the Cougars. The Cougars would need to win their last four games for eight points, while the Americans would need to lose six of their last seven. In short, any combination of Tri-City wins and Prince George losses adding up to three and the Cougars are done.
This will be the third consecutive season and the seventh time in 11 years the team hasn't made the playoffs. Yet each August for more than a decade now, Prince George's hockey faithful have been told (and The Citizen has enthusiastically reported) about how optimistic the team is for a fantastic year and how the great group of youngsters coming up this season will challenge the Kelowna Rockets and other perennial league powerhouses.
And each year, there has been little but disappointment, except for 2007, when the Cougars beat Kamloops in the first round and then upended the highly-touted Everett Silvertips in the second round before losing to the Vancouver Giants.
That Cougars team was powered by Devin Setoguchi, now of the Winnipeg Jets. The Cougars picked up Setoguchi in a trade in October 2006, a trade that was first reported in The Citizen two days before it was made official as a "sources have told The Citizen" story.
So much has changed since then.
The Cougars now average just 1,688 spectators per game, worst in the WHL and not even 30 per cent of capacity at CN Centre. That stands in sharp contrast to the late 1990s, when the team had a season ticket base of 4,500 and was a standing-room only ticket every night. The community was so supportive that MasterCard featured the Cougars in a commercial about junior hockey fans across Canada.
The Brodskys stand in sharp contrast to the Hamiltons, the owners and operators of the Kelowna Rockets. The Rockets moved to Kelowna from Tacoma in the same year the Brodskys relocated the Cougars to Prince George from Victoria. In the 20 years in Prince George, the Cougars have had only five seasons where they won more regular season games than they lost. Meanwhile, Rockets owner and GM Bruce Hamilton, with his brother Gavin as vice-president of business development and sister-in-law Anne-Marie handling marketing, has led the Rockets to four league titles and one Memorial Cup championship. This year's Rockets are again one of the top junior teams in the country, with just nine regulation-time losses in 65 games this season.
The Brodskys have tried hard in Prince George but, in both sports and business, the only marks that count are for success. Effort is irrelevant.
Hopefully, the new ownership group - once they're unveiled officially after the season is over on March 15 - can turn the Cougars around and make them succeed again, both on the ice and at the gate.
