A Cold Day In …

Last Friday afternoon, this meat popsicle had ice on the brain, and not just because sheets of frozen crap were falling out of the sky.

As it shivered in its office while the week wound down and co-workers got the hell out in a desperate attempt to avoid rush-hour accidents, the Strip kept thinking about the multimillion-dollar ice cube that Kansas City taxpayers might have to cough up someday soon.

And if you haven’t heard anything about it, that’s exactly the way Mayor Kay “Ms. Penguins” Barnes apparently wants it.

You see, Barnes has been promising for, oh, two years now that the $250 million we spent on the Sprint Center would be the end of any money we’d have to pay to attract a sports team to fill the place. In fact, that pledge is written into the city’s contract with Anschutz Entertainment Group, the Los Angeles-based company that will manage the new arena. That contract says AEG is responsible for attracting a team “at no cost to the city.”

AEG officials spent a few hours on January 3 courting the owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Knowing that the Penguins play in the oldest arena in the National Hockey League, AEG suitors promised the Penguins’ owners that they could move into the gleaming new Sprint Center without paying any rent. What’s more, AEG offered to go halvesees with the Penguins on cash from ticket sales, concessions, luxury suites, parking, naming rights and all sorts of other moneymakers.

Even if it’s news to you that Penguins officials came to Kansas City, you don’t need much time to figure out that they made the trip so that politicians back in Pittsburgh would wake up and build them a new arena. They call it leverage. The Strip calls it getting used like a barroom whore.

Anyway, Kansas City leaders looked cautiously optimistic, knowing they’d laid out a deal that was pretty hard to refuse.

At a January 4 press conference, AEG President Tim Leiweke said he didn’t want to create unrealistic expectations. “We’re the underdog, and we’re going to act that way,” he said.

This meddlin’ meat patty was stunned by what Leiweke said next. When one of the reporters asked about critics who had the nerve to point out that it might have been just a teensy bit risky for the city to build an arena without an anchor tenant, Leiweke blasted this newspaper.

“I read the Pitch, and they’re dead wrong,” he said, referring to (“We’re Pucked”,) a September story by the Strip’s extremely knowledgeable colleague, Justin Kendall. “The reality is, when they want to come and put $54 million into the arena and take risks, then they have the right to offer that kind of criticism.”

Easy now, Tim. All Kendall was sayin’ in September was that Kansas City voters had agreed to pay for a brand-new arena based on a lot of pro-team hype that probably won’t come true any time soon.

That, and, uh, the fact that we wouldn’t have to pay anything more than what we’d already paid.

But at the same press conference, here was Leiweke, suddenly suggesting that the city could be asked to contribute something more to lure a team, though he declined to explain what that might be.

As readers of the Pitch‘s Web site know by now, the Strip was hanging out with some of its friends at the Hereford House last Wednesday, listening to Barnes give a speech to the Downtowners organization. Someone asked Barnes about the possibility of the Pittsburgh Penguins coming to town. During her answer, she said the city “may build a practice facility for a team.”

Maybe those Hereford House burgers distracted the mayor, but this skeptical sirloin is pretty sure that Barnes didn’t mean for that juicy little bit to slip.

A mayoral aide who has been involved with the Sprint Center negotiations said he wasn’t sure whether the city would negotiate the costs of a practice facility or how the city could afford it. The deal-making would be up to AEG, Greg Williams said.

But here’s something to chew on: Cleveland is paying $21 million to build a 50,000-square-foot practice facility for the NBA’s Cavaliers. In New Orleans, the NBA’s Hornets have threatened to leave if the city doesn’t build them a multimillion-dollar practice palace.

When the Penguins visited Kansas City, local big shots took them to a couple of places to discuss possible practice facilities. One such spot may have been the ice rink at the Line Creek Community Center. The manager there, Dan Smith, says one of his employees noticed a couple of suit types walking around his rink on the day the Penguins were in town.

“They were saying stuff like, ‘Yeah, this would work’ or ‘No, this wouldn’t work for this reason,'” Smith tells the Strip. Smith says his 185-foot-by-85-foot rink probably wouldn’t work as an NHL practice facility. It’s 15 feet too narrow for a regulation NHL rink.

Who knows where else the Penguins waddled. Barnes and her peeps haven’t returned calls from the Pitch since she spilled the news.

But this sizzling sirloin hopes they took a look at a place with a sweet regulation rink, a place where the city has already spent a lot of money: the Sprint Center’s forgotten older cousin down in the West Bottoms. Yes, we’re still paying off the $18.6 million the city spent in 1997 to upgrade Kemper Arena and the $20 million used to build a 988-space garage — a great place for the new Kansas City Penguins to park!

As the Strip pondered all of this last week, it endured a different type of flurry — not white stuff from the clouds but crazy stuff from other reporters’ dreams.

KMBC Channel 9’s Jim Flink reported that a handful of pro hockey and basketball teams are now thinking about moving to Kansas City. Flink claimed that AEG’s offer to the Penguins, which amounted to $27 million in incentives, was enough to lead teams — including the Los Angeles Clippers —to consider Kansas City.

The Clippers? Dude, the Clippers just signed a long-term lease, and the team is building a $25 million practice facility in Los Angeles.

With all due respect, TV boy, the Strip is pretty sure you got smoke blown up your ass.

Likewise, there’s been talk for months that the Nashville Predators may move if fans don’t start paying attention to them. (Back in July, The Kansas City Star‘s Randy “I’ll Put KC in Front of Any Team for a Headline” Covitz reported that the Predators could end up in Kansas City.)

Let’s hear from Predators owner Craig Leipold, who made this comment to The Tennessean last Friday: “There’s no way we’re going to Kansas City. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in the world. There’s nothing going on. This is the Nashville Predators franchise, and that’s where we want it to be.”

Hasn’t Leipold heard about the sweet deal Kansas City is offering to any team that will come? We’re talking a regulation-size practice facility and everything! That’s one handsome piece of ice.