The Ottawa Senators hockey club was bought for almost a billion dollars.

A record-breaking deal involving the purchase of a club took place in the NHL. Billionaire Michael Endlauer purchased the Ottawa Senators for an amount close to $1 billion. Mr. Endlauer got a middle team that had not made the playoffs for a long time, but a middle team that seemed to have quite a lot of potential.

NHL Club Owners Council approved the sale of the Ottawa Senators to a consortium of entrepreneurs led by billionaire Michael Endlauer. The founder and head of the Andlauer Healthcare Group, which supplies medical equipment, received 90% of its shares. The remaining 10% will be kept by the daughters of the former owner of the club, Eugene Melnik, Olivia and Anna. They initiated the process of selling Ottawa last November after the death of their father.

Various sources – ESPN, TSN — they estimate the transaction amount to be approximately the same, in the range from $950 million to “almost $1 billion.” In any case, it became the most expensive in NHL history.

The previous record was set by Fenway Sports Group. The purchase of the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2021 cost $900 million.

Ottawa turned out to be an extremely striking example of the rapid growth in the demand for sports business in North America. Eugene Melnick bought “Ottawa” relatively recently – in 2003. But the price of the club at that moment looked simply ridiculous compared to the current one: 20 years ago it did not even reach $100 million. At the same time, it cannot be said that during the period that Mr. Melnik owned the team, it actively increased its capitalization with its performances. Quite the contrary: Ottawa actively supported the image of a not very attractive asset.

In fact, over these two decades, it experienced only two takeoffs. In 2007, Ottawa reached the Stanley Cup final, in which they lost to the Anaheim Ducks, and in 2017 they almost repeated the success. She was stopped in the semifinal playoff series by Pittsburgh. Moreover, it stretched to the maximum distance, seven matches, and Pittsburgh put the squeeze on the Canadian club only in the second overtime of the seventh. Since then, Ottawa has never made it to the playoffs.

However, there are signs indicating that Michael Endlauer, who already had experience in the hockey business (in 2009, he became a minority shareholder of the enormously popular Montreal Canadiens, and for some time owned the American Hockey League club, the second in status in the Northern America, the Hamilton Bulldogs and even once won a championship with him), made a not-so-bad acquisition. In fact, even in the previous season, “Ottawa” did not look like a hopeless middle peasant without ambitions and until the end of the regular championship fought for the playoffs, only six points behind the “Florida Panthers”, which reached the final series. And most importantly, she seems to have excellent prospects.

Ottawa’s roster includes a whole group of highly ranked hockey players.

This is, for example, defender Thomas Chabot and several offensive line players. There are many hockey players in it who are highly productive. This includes Tim Stuetzle, who was among the top 20 best scorers in the NHL in the previous championship, Brady Tkachak and Claude Giroux, Drake Batherson and Shane Pinto, who were slightly behind him, and the famous Russian forward Vladimir Tarasenko, who moved to the club in the summer and finished last season in “ New York Rangers.” It is important that a number of these club leaders – Stützle, Chabot, Tkachak – are still young. It is not surprising that ESPN’s latest forecast regarding Ottawa’s prospects in the championship starting in October sounds quite optimistic: in any case, it confidently promises them “moving forward,” albeit without guarantees of a magical breakthrough.

Alexey Dospehov