Business Aspects

I first subscribed to Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer newsletter in the 1980s, after I began writing for WWF Magazine, before the lawsuit with the World Wildlife Fund that forced the World Wrestling Federation to become WWE. Although the Wrestling Observer has a significant online presence, I still look forward to the paper edition each week, an exhaustive collection of wrestling history, match results, business analysis and gossip in single-spaced seven-point type. Meltzer, who has lectured at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, also popularized a star rating system for major matches, one that even the performers who claim to hate him take extremely seriously. While working on this book, Meltzer and I were guests on a public access show in which he was asked about his taste in movies and bands. He paused and fumbled for words. A movie?  But when it comes to professional wrestling, not to mention MMA and old-school Roller Derby, nobody knows more – or ever will.

In May, 2017, Meltzer was asked on Twitter about whether Ring of Honor, the primary, American indie league during that period, could draw more than 10,000 fans. “Not any time soon,” he responded. Cody – the youngest son of the “American Dream” Dusty Rhodes, and an indie prince since he parted ways with WWE the year before– then Tweeted, “I'll take that bet, Dave.”

For the next 16 months, Cody and the Young Bucks, brothers Nick and Matt Jackson, began working to both prove that Dave Meltzer could be wrong, as well as create All-In.

The effort became “a worldwide movement for professional wrestling (and) everyone that wants an alternative,” Kenny Omega, who went into All-In wearing the vaunted IWGP Heavyweight Championship for the New Japan Pro-Wrestling promotion, told the group's website. “Especially in America because in America, you're kind of forced to believe that WWE is the best.”  All-In, he continued, became “a rally to show support for people who have a different vision.”

Initially, the group rejected outside efforts to fund the experiment, and relied on their families and friends. Cody's sister, Teil, created the name “All-In,” the Bucks' father, Matt Massie, Sr., the musical score. Alabama mortgage broker Conrad Thompson, a wrestling podcaster who married the legendary Ric Flair's oldest daughter, Megan, coordinated Starcast, the fan convention surrounding the event. Both Cody's wife, Brandi – a WWE-trained wrestler herself –  and Matt Jackson's spouse, Dana, were deeply involved in organizational decisions.

Like Cody, WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett had grown up in the wrestling business, learning promotion from his father, Jerry Jarrett, and step-grandfather, Eddie Marlin, in the old Memphis wrestling territory. “I love to see guys take risks,” he observed. “Sometimes, that gets you into big trouble. Sometimes, it pays off. Reward is always measured by your level of risk. But when I saw All-In lining up, I felt they had a pretty good chance. The concept was good. The independent wrestling revolution started quite a few years ago. Now, we were on the cusp of a wrestling boom.”

Introduction

Russell Wilson might be the most recognizable and successful player in the NFL. The quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks has led them to a Super Bowl win and regular playoff appearances in his first five seasons in the Seahawks uniform. Because of his commercials, Wilson is instantly recognizable to tens of millions of football fans. His dating life is the stuff of non-sports curiosity, too. His divorce and subsequent relationship with singer Ciara have engaged people who might not know a thing about sports.

Wilson is the ideal package for the media-savvy NFL. And the league is doing everything it can to turn him and his Seahawks into losers.

Jonathan Toews is the star captain of the Chicago Blackhawks. A three-time Stanley Cup champion, he embodies all the virtues that the NHL loves in a player. Hard work, success and charitable ventures off the ice — Toews couldn’t be more perfect for a league always short on star power. He’s bilingual, too, speaking English and French flawlessly.

The NHL should want one hundred Toewses in the league. But it does everything it can to make sure that he doesn’t win another Stanley Cup.

Steph Curry, the star of the Golden State Warriors, is the face of the modern NBA. He’s revolutionized the game with his outside shooting, defying the traditional notion of the NBA as a big man’s league where titles are supposedly won under the hoop. Boyish, but with a killer’s eye in big games, he’s taken the Warriors to the NBA Finals multiple times, winning in 2015. He holds the record for most three-point shots made, breaking Ray Allen’s record of 269 with 272 in 2012–13, 286 in 2014–15 and a mind-boggling 402 in the 2014–15 season. Off the court, he’s in demand for commercials, charitable events and promotions across the globe.

Steph Curry is the NBA’s vision made real. The transcendent son of a former player and coach, he has turned a generation of young people on to the league. But the NBA is putting every impediment it can in front of him as he tries to author a legendary career.

Why are pro sports leagues in North America — leagues that live or die with their promotional savvy and communications genius — doing this to their most marketable stars? Moreover, how are they stunting the legacies of players known internationally for their star power?

“I don’t know of any space other than the world of sports where there’s this notion that we will artificially deflate what someone’s able to make, just because,” said NBPA director Michele Roberts talking about a collectively bargained policy that has constrained team spending in the NBA since 1984–85. “It’s incredibly un-American. My DNA is offended by it.”

The answer is called parity. These leagues are propping up a business model from a generation ago with a system of parity that holds that every town with an owner rich enough deserves a team. And that every owner also deserves a fair shot at holding the Vince Lombardi Trophy or Stanley Cup or Larry O’Brien Trophy.

That’s a complicated task in a world where, as Boston GM Harry Sinden once told me, there are 30 teams and just one Stanley Cup. Keeping team owners, players, fans, broadcasters, sponsors and others happy is a tricky business. Because just a few markets are large enough, or just a few owners are wealthy enough, to do whatever it takes to assemble the best team, the rampant capitalists of pro sports felt they needed to create a drag on the worth of their star employees. A handicapping system. A way to make sure every dog could have his day.

The latest, and supposedly greatest, leveler is called the salary cap. And it’s the most regressive thing that could have happened to the product in the NFL, NHL or NBA. Or to Russell Wilson, Jonathan Toews and Steph Curry. In the service of parity, salary caps dismantle successful teams, reward inept management and rob the fan of the chance to see the very best play the very best without armies of mediocre players and stultifying coaching strategies.

Put simply, the salary cap uses a Soviet-style scythe to level competition in the service of parity. Owners and players decide on a figure for league revenues and then cap salaries by placing a limit on spending by the teams. Each league’s salary cap has nuances and differences that only a lawyer could love. In the case of the NHL, teams are given a maximum amount they can spend and a minimum amount that they must spend — a “salary floor.” The NBA gives teams previously employing a player a “hometown advantage” to re-sign that player and maintain continuity. The NFL has provisions for a “franchise tag” that allows a club to keep a player for one more year if they pay him the average of the top five players in the league at his position.

You may have noticed that we haven’t mentioned Major League Baseball yet. America’s pastime, that bastion of “tradition” and “unwritten rules,” is more progressive than its competitors, if only marginally. It doesn’t use the salary cap. Despite the strenuous efforts of MLB owners through eight labor stoppages dating back to the 1970s, baseball has settled for something called a luxury tax. This system sets a top end for team salaries but also allows clubs to go over that figure if they pay a tax on the overspend. The NBA has managed to create a byzantine system that has both a salary cap and a luxury tax, but it really operates more like the capped leagues.

The salary cap was touted as the best way to allow for even competition among small and large markets. But in the leagues that have harnessed themselves to the salary cap, the percentage of small- and medium-market teams that win is similar to the MLB’s. So there appear to be more ways than salary-cap parity to get desired results.

The impetus for salary caps was the franchise model that leagues embraced back in the 1960s. Before that time, leagues would be comprised of teams in no more than a dozen cities. Fans accepted that teams in big markets had advantages. But mostly they recognized that the best managers and the best players should win most of the time. The business model for pro sports ownership before the ’60s was an eclectic mix of sponsorship by regional beer companies, cars and men’s products (like razor blades), combined with whatever tickets could be sold at the gate. National revenues were almost nonexistent.

But the media and communications revolution of the ’60s presented fertile new ground for sports owners looking to expand their profits. Thanks to the ability of new jetliners to carry people from coast to coast in five or six hours, new horizons presented themselves. If the established teams — largely huddled in the northeast corner of the USA — could build toward a continent-wide presence of regional markets, they might just get TV and radio networks to pay impressive figures to broadcast the games nationally, not just regionally. Where once it was only the World Series that commanded a national audience, now leagues could attract advertisers to a regular “game of the week,” shown nationally, which could come from three time zones away.

Major League Baseball began the experiment, pushing the New York–based Dodgers and Giants to California, establishing a truly national footprint with franchises in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The NFL, too, went west to establish a beach head on the Pacific coast. As the leagues hoped, the TV money came rolling in. Soon, the NBA and the NHL — eager for the TV money — made it to the west coast, too. By the 1970s, there were fans in over 20 more cities rooting for a local team.

Better than the flood of TV money to established owners was the lure of hefty expansion franchise fees from millionaires anxious to have their own teams in the big leagues. The dream was sports as IKEA, spreading the brand of football, basketball, baseball or hockey to eager consumers as if it were cheap Swedish furniture. Look at the result: An NHL expansion team went for $2 million in 1967; it cost $500 million for the new Las Vegas owners in 2016. (All dollar amounts in this book are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise specified.) There have been no new NFL teams since expansion to Houston in 2002, but there have been relocations. Even the fees for relocations are astronomical, with the NFL’s Rams and Chargers paying $600 million each to move to Los Angeles in 2016 and 2017 respectively and the Raiders paying $350 million to move from Oakland to Las Vegas. Values for teams can range from $935 million for the Buffalo Bills to $3.2 billion for the Dallas Cowboys. The NBA’s L.A. Clippers sold for $2 billion in 2014.

The only problem with expanding to as many as 30 or 32 teams is the inequity it creates between markets. How could Kansas City or Winnipeg compete evenly with New York City or Los Angeles for players? Who wants to lose all the time or play in a smaller market? In a free market, the established wisdom was that all the best players would gravitate to a few prestigious teams.

In the early years of sport — until the 1950s and ’60s for all professional leagues except baseball — teams were allowed to restrain on players through the reserve clause, a system initially supported by the US Supreme Court. In particular, MLB was granted an exemption from American antitrust laws in the 1920s by that court — a situation that persists to this day. With the approval of the judges in several landmark cases brought by athletes, the leagues were able to skirt laws on restraint of trade and monopoly status. Using the baseball example, sports with antitrust exemptions were allowed to define player contracts as open-ended documents, tying players to a team in perpetuity, killing their market value. Although Babe Ruth was able to command a salary driven by his value in the 1920s, few athletes enjoyed the same leverage for the next half century. Any competition for players was quickly stomped out by the leagues.

The 1950s and ’60s brought a new generation of athletes and their agents (another innovation). They saw the leagues’ increasing profitability and were determined to get a piece of the action that reflected their importance to the product. They sought to shame the courts into enforcing the laws. The players in the NFL, NHL and NBA were successful. Oddly, the most famous of these pioneers were the ones that were unsuccessful before the courts: MLB Players Association director Marvin Miller and star outfielder Curt Flood, who challenged baseball’s reserve clause in the courts in 1969, losing before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 — an event that we’ll cover later in the book.

Though unsuccessful in overturning MLB’s antitrust exemption at the time, Flood’s case was a signal for impending free agency in all the major team sports as leagues were engaging in collective bargaining with player unions. Within a decade, the expression “market value” was firmly implanted in the lexicon of the sports business.

Owners did not submit meekly as the first free agents were granted the right to negotiate freely. Faced with having to pay market value for players, the leagues first engaged in scare campaigns, telling the public that free agency was the end of competition as they knew it. If a star player could leave for another team after having completed his obligations under his contract, all the best players would gravitate to the biggest financial centers. The owners’ propaganda worked for a time. Fans and players both agreed that maybe this free-agent stuff was dangerous to the sport as they knew it.

But starting with Catfish Hunter’s free agency in 1975 (see part 2), the public saw free agency and liked the freedom of players to move to their favorite team. Players, at first reluctant to disbelieve what they’d always been told by owners, soon realized that someone had just opened a bank vault to them. In one sport after the other — hockey finally succumbing in the early ’90s after years of collusion with its union — free agency conquered the market. Stars became rich and owners became nervous about controlling the salary spiral.

In their desire to win as quickly as possible, owners were their own worst enemies, creating scarcity where none had existed before. Faced with a shot at a championship, they proved incapable of disciplining themselves when a premium player appeared on the open market, spending more than they ever had before. What was to become of competitive balance if the smaller markets lost all their players to large markets? With the courts suddenly of no help in interpreting contracts their way, owners would need something new to control the insatiable need for one more big contract to guarantee a title or even just a playoff spot.

Enter the salary cap. It allowed leagues the simulacrum of a free market while punishing the marketability of the Russell Wilsons, Jonathan Toewses and Steph Currys. As we’ll see, leagues only achieved the salary cap as part of bitter collective bargaining. Players accepted caps in exchange for freedom within the system — along with other perks such as independent arbitration in salary and disciplinary matters.

In their haste to get control of payrolls, owners didn’t much concern themselves with how a socialist-style system would affect the quality of play. In a bid to save themselves from each other, they left the details to coaches and general managers who were eager to save their own jobs first. Owners also didn’t pay attention to what would happen when the franchise model gave way to a new master: global communications. The sports economy has been changed by the communications revolution that carries games and players’ images around the globe. No longer does a league need a team in every town to spread its product.

Cap in Hand is about how the law of unintended consequences diluted talent and dispersed skilled players over too many teams. Sports executives also didn’t forsee that under a salary-cap system tied to universal drafts teams might actually deliberately lose — “tank” — for four or five seasons to corner the best talent. The recent example of how the Houston Astros went from worst to first — laughingstock to World Series champ — is sure to be emulated by other franchises who will subject their fans to a lousy product in the hope that they can replicate the success of the Astros.

Leagues are now dominated by coaches obsessed with video and game planning, not inspiration and creativity, who coach not to lose instead of to win. In the words of former Detroit Red Wings star Pavel Datsyuk, “There are not many creative players now … It’s less and less every year. There’s lots of talent, but teams are playing more systems … Hockey is so different now.” The same can easily be said for all the team sports except basketball, where the small rosters still allow for teams to concentrate stars on a team. No wonder the Golden State Warriors and the NBA have captured a worldwide audience.

Cap in Hand also proposes a way out of this mess. Soccer has demonstrated that the sports world has morphed from the overstocked inventories of the franchise model to one based on matchups of elite teams populated by elite players. Without a salary cap, the beautiful game has allowed for the growth of super-teams in smaller leagues. There is no parity in soccer, just the unending quest for the best product possible. As a result, the sport has finally made a breakthrough in North America with a new generation of fans intrigued by the great Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Pogba and Harry Kane.

The story of the salary cap is one played out over generations of contracts and labor decisions. Perhaps the best way to understand the owners’ mania at suppressing market value in sports (as opposed to entertainment) is to follow the money. And the money started with Babe Ruth.

The McDavid Effect

ONE

CONNOR MCDAVID WAS NINE YEARS old in 2006, the last time the Edmonton Oilers reached the NHL playoffs. It was a season that lives on in memory for Edmonton’s long-suffering fans, one in which the Oilers became the first eighth-seeded team to reach the Stanley Cup Final. They began the playoffs with a stunning defeat of the Detroit Red Wings, the league’s most dominant team, in six games. The hockey gods continued to smile as the Oilers defeated San Jose and Anaheim in the next two series. They hadn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1990—seven years before Connor was born—and the city was delirious at the prospect of another championship. The good fortune continued through to Game 7 of the Final but, in the end, it wasn’t enough. The Carolina Hurricanes defeated the Oilers, ending an unlikely postseason run that few had foreseen.

A slight kid who was so talented he had to play against boys several years older to feel challenged, McDavid was a hockey prodigy along the lines of Sidney Crosby, the NHL superstar who perfected his shooting as a kid by taking aim at the clothes drier in his family’s home in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia.

Even at nine years old, Connor was becoming a prodigy. Twenty-three inches long and ten and one-quarter pounds at birth, he was three years old when he skated on the rink his father flooded in their backyard in Newmarket, Ontario, an upper-middle-class community less than an hour north of Toronto. It is a tidy neighbourhood with well-manicured lawns, flowers that spill out of the window boxes and kids playing street hockey in culs-de-sac. Half as tall as a hockey stick, Connor spent hours on rollerblades in his basement, slapping pucks at nets at either end. He and his brother Cameron, who was nearly four years older, waged epic battles in their underground arena. Twice during their skirmishes, Connor incurred wounds that needed stitches, but he remained undeterred. He would hound Cameron until he was exhausted, then Connor’s mother, Kelly, would take over and play goal. When she grew tired, Connor’s grandmother would fill in, eventually to be followed by his dad, Brian.

“It wasn’t long before Connor was elevating his shots, and it got to be too scary for us,” Kelly recalled. “Brian would take over, but he always put on lots of gear.”

Connor’s parents registered him for organized hockey for the first time at age four. Technically, he was too young to play, so Kelly and Brian fibbed about his age, saying that he was a year older. By then, Connor was clamouring to join Cameron as his father taught his oldest son drills in the garage.

“We’d all be in there together, and Connor would stare and insist he be allowed to play,” Brian remembered. “It was fun, a dad playing with his boys, but Connor took it very seriously. He knew what he wanted to do. He emulated his brother and understood everything we were doing.”

At five, Connor started wearing a dress shirt and tie like the older boys when he attended Cameron’s hockey games, and would listen attentively to pregame speeches in the locker room. A year later, the hockey association in his hometown refused to allow Connor to play at a level above his age group, so his parents registered him in neighbouring Aurora, where he competed against nine-year-olds. After that, Connor joined the York Simcoe Express, a team that was coached by his father. They went on to win four straight Ontario Minor Hockey Association championships.

By the time he was eight, Connor was sharpening his skills on an obstacle course that Brian set up along the length of the driveway outside the family home. The youngster would be out there for so many hours that neighbours began to fear for his welfare. Some thought that Brian was overbearing and forcing Connor to train too much, but that was never the case. Connor loved it, and, by then, was already talking about playing in the NHL.

Connor was always single-minded. Once, when he was ten, his dad dragged him out of a dressing room to pose for a picture with Mario Lemieux during a peewee tournament in Quebec. Afterward, Connor complained, saying that the photo opportunity with the NHL Hall of Famer had interrupted his pregame routine.

In his many hours of rollerblading on the driveway, Connor began to develop extraordinary stick-handling ability. First, he learned to control a puck while navigating around paint cans. Then, he created an obstacle for himself by attaching the ends of discarded hockey sticks to the paint cans, and pretended they were opposing players he needed to outmanoeuvre. When it became too easy for him, he taped the cans to a skateboard and used it to teach himself how to toe drag, deke and dangle beneath and around a moving object. As Connor practised, he timed himself, recorded the information and kept track of his improvement.

“The neighbours thought we were nuts,” Brian said.

When Connor was ten, he began training with Joe Quinn, a hockey skills instructor from southern Ontario who has fashioned a lucrative career out of teaching elite players to maintain possession of the puck while skating in close quarters at top speed.

“I still remember him as a skinny, freckle-faced little boy,” said Quinn, who coached Connor when he attended the Premier Elite Athletes Collegiate School, a private sports academy in North York, Ontario, where the tuition is more than $20,000 per year. “He was the youngest of fifty-two kids in the school, playing against boys three and four years older, and he was better than all of them. He was young, but right away you could recognize he was special. He could stickhandle in a telephone booth.”

After playing for his father’s team, Connor joined the Marlboros of the Greater Toronto Hockey League, where he excelled for three years at the bantam and minor midget levels. During the 2011–12 season, he scored seventy-nine goals and had 130 assists in eighty-eight games, receiving the award as the league’s top player.

By the time Connor was thirteen, scouts were regularly showing up at his games. NHL agents, meanwhile, began predicting that he would become one of the sport’s biggest stars.

Bobby Orr, a Hall of Fame defenceman and one of the greatest players of all time, remembers seeing Connor as a teenager at an invitation-only hockey camp in Toronto. Connor had not been invited, but Cameron had, and Connor tagged along and then joined his older sibling on the ice.

“I arrived a bit late, and noticed this little guy out there and said, ‘Holy crap, who is that?’ ” Orr said. “It turned out that Connor was the one I was watching. My first thought was, ‘Wow, does that kid ever have great hands.’

“Looking back at it now, I think I was a pretty good judge of talent.”

Not long after that, Orr visited the McDavids at home on a Sunday morning. Beforehand, Connor was calm, but Kelly was a basket case. Eventually he told her, ‘Mom, you really have to calm down.’ ” After meeting with Orr, the family agreed to allow his sports agency, the Orr Hockey Group, to represent the young prospect. Specifically, he would be represented by Jeff Jackson, a former NHL player who once served as assistant general manager for the Maple Leafs.

Jackson, who ran his own agency before he joined the Orr Group, first heard about Connor from one of his other clients, Sam Gagner. Then a centre for the Oilers, Gagner was training during the summer of 2011 at a rink in Oakville, Ontario, when McDavid approached and politely asked if he could join him on the ice. Gagner agreed, and was dazzled by what he saw.

“Afterward, Sam called me,” Jackson recalled. “He said, ‘You have to find this kid. I’ve been in the NHL for five years, and he can already do things I can’t do. His name is David O’Connor.’ ”

Although he transposed the name, Gagner remembered that the youth had told him he was about to begin playing for the Midget AAA Marlies. So, Jackson, who had just established his own agency, called the club and inquired about him.

“I asked about the O’Connor kid and the guy chuckled,” Jackson said. “He said, ‘Oh, you must mean Connor McDavid.’ ”

Jackson tracked the young talent down and told Brian he would like to represent the budding star. However, the McDavids had already agreed to sign with Orr. Later, Jackson was invited to join Orr’s firm, and by coincidence was appointed to be Connor’s agent. As Connor continued to develop, Jackson and Orr could only marvel at the young man’s potential.

“Watching him is a joy for me,” Jackson said. “Connor will make a play, and Bobby will ask me, ‘What did he just do?’ I tell him, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how he does the things he does out there.’ ”

At fifteen, McDavid was granted exceptional player status by Hockey Canada, which allowed him to join the Ontario Hockey League one year earlier than the official entry age. At the time, he was only the third player ever granted permission to enter the league as a fifteen-year-old, after John Tavares, now with the New York Islanders, and Aaron Ekblad, of the Florida Panthers.

The OHL teams were all desperate to land McDavid, and the Erie Otters wasted no time in choosing him as the first overall pick in the 2012 Priority Selection Draft. For the next three years, Connor would be playing in the hardscrabble city of one hundred thousand people in western Pennsylvania.

Of course, as a teenager, Connor wasn’t going to live alone. He was billeted for all three years with Bob and Stephanie Catalde, living in their household alongside their daughters, Caisee and Camryn, and young son, Nico. The Cataldes had never billeted anyone, but they were good friends with Sherry Bassin, then the general manager of the Otters, and Sherry convinced them to take in their prized rookie.

“I like to think we have a good home and a nice family, and I thought it would be a good environment for him,” Catalde, a lawyer and youth hockey coach, said. “It wasn’t long before things started to sink in and I knew how special he is.”

At their first meeting, Catalde made it clear that he expected Connor to behave properly, especially around his daughters. At the time he moved in, Caisee was fifteen and Camryn, who was named after the former Boston Bruins right wing Cam Neely, was twelve.

Connor quickly became a member of the family, an older brother to the girls and a mentor to Nico, then seven. McDavid would play knee hockey with Nico in the family room, skate with him and his teammates at practice and occasionally sit on the bench with them during their games. He even attended one game with his face swollen, a day after having his wisdom teeth removed.

“The experience we had with him turned out to be everything we hoped it would be and more,” Catalde said. “Connor talks in terms of how he owes a debt of gratitude to myself and my wife, but I see it as the other way around.”

On game days, Catalde cooked for Connor, always preparing the same meals. For breakfast, Connor would eat eight scrambled eggs, a large helping of organic berries and a whole-grain bagel. For dinner, he always asked for grilled chicken breast lightly brushed with olive oil, with brown rice and quinoa.

After he was done eating, Connor would rise from the table and put his dishes in the dishwasher every time.

“None of my own kids would do that,” Catalde said.

McDavid kicked off his first season with the Erie Otters by putting together a fifteen-game scoring streak that began in just his second game. He won OHL Rookie of the Month honours for October and November, and eventually finished the year with twenty-five goals and forty-one assists in sixty-three games. That was good enough to earn the title of the league’s top rookie.

All eyes were on McDavid from the outset that year. During the season, Wayne Gretzky called and told Connor he was rooting for him, and Lemieux invited him to watch a Penguins game with him in his suite in Pittsburgh, which is about 125 miles from Erie. The hockey world recognized the immense talent that was budding in Connor, and seemed to be opening its doors to him.

In his second season with the Otters, McDavid was named a second-team OHL All-Star and, as he began his final year in Erie, the hysteria around him continued to grow. Every rink the Otters visited over the second half of the season was sold out, and fans waited for hours to meet him. As teammates climbed aboard the bus following games, McDavid would wade into the crush of people and sign autographs. Eventually, the team hired a retired police officer as a bodyguard.

“It was beyond anything you could imagine,” said Sherry Bassin, who was involved in hockey for fifty years, including a stint as assistant general manager of the Quebec Nordiques. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Signing autographs could have been a full-time job for him.”

McDavid couldn’t go to a restaurant in Erie without being mobbed. When he would arrive at the Cataldes’ home late at night, the dining room table was piled with photographs for him to sign.

“There was one extremely cold night in Guelph where I suggested to Connor that he should go out a side door and hop on the bus instead of navigating through the crowd,” Bassin recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘No, Bass, I was a little kid once, too,’ and went out into the cold and signed autographs for forty-five minutes. How many seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds, when given an out, would say, ‘No, I was a kid once, too’?

“He’s an unselfish person both on and off the ice. He made a point to come to my wife and I’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party, and stayed to the end.”

In Connor’s final year with the Otters, the team lost in the OHL finals, but McDavid shone throughout, accumulating forty-nine points in twenty playoff games. In one game in the second round, McDavid scored five goals against the London Knights: snapping in the first, tucking in the second, wrapping a third around the goalie for a natural hat trick, flipping the puck over the net minder for the fourth and tapping in a rebound from an impossible angle for the last. He was nearly unstoppable.

“I’ll cherish the moments I was able to watch him and the fact that I was able to coach him,” Chris Knoblauch, his coach for two and a half seasons in Erie, said. “As you watch him, you realize at times that you have become a fan. He does remarkable things, but never acts like he’s different from anyone else. He’s almost embarrassed when he pulls something off.”

That attitude extended beyond the ice, too. While setting records and building a reputation as the player of a generation, Connor was also excelling in school. In his final year of high school, on top of a grueling hockey schedule full of workouts, games and travel, he also held down a straight A average, studying everything from algebra to creative writing to digital design. Unwilling to be the stereotypical star athlete, Connor applied himself to his schoolwork with the same combination of diligence, integrity and hard work that he brought to the rink.

Connor’s peers and coaches recognized that mixture of skill, intelligence and modesty, and he was rewarded for it. At the end of Connor’s final year in junior hockey, he was selected not just the Ontario Hockey League’s top player, but also the top player in the Canadian Hockey League, the umbrella organization that represents the three Canadian major junior hockey leagues across the country. He also won the CHL’s Student of the Year. Twice. In a row. By the time Connor was done in Erie, he had racked up ninety-seven goals and 285 points and had become the most decorated player in the history of the OHL.

“There is a difference between being liked and respected, but he is respected and loved,” Bassin said. “I’ve been around hockey for a long time, but feel blessed to have spent three years with him. One of the ways I judge a person is by asking if I like who I am when I’m around them. I love who I am when I’m around Connor McDavid.”

There was little doubt that Connor would be the first player selected in the 2015 NHL entry draft. The question was, by whom? Each year, a lottery is held to determine who gets the first overall pick, with the weakest teams having the greatest chance. Beleaguered fans in Toronto were overjoyed by the thought that Connor could land with the Maple Leafs. Some suspected that Arizona and Buffalo, the NHL’s worst teams, might have tanked near the end of the 2014–15 season to improve their chances of getting him. Whether or not there was any truth to that conjecture, it spoke volumes that people were rooting for their favourite team to give up a chance at success just for better odds at having McDavid on their team.

In the analysis and speculation leading up to the draft, the Oilers were a possibility to win the lottery, but nobody was predicting that McDavid was on a collision course with the team. Once one of the most successful sports franchises in history, the Oilers hadn’t made the playoffs since 2006 and the team’s roster of young talent had yet to produce the results that the fans and front office expected. And, besides that, the Oilers had won the lottery in three of the last four years. Nobody thought that it could happen again.

IN 2006, AT ABOUT THE same time that Brian McDavid began telling his wife that he thought their son’s hockey skills were supernatural, Daryl Katz began thinking about buying the Oilers.

The shy son of a pharmacist, Katz had grown up in an upper-middle-class family in Edmonton and, like just about everyone else in the city, was a huge hockey fan. He was twenty-one in 1984 when the Oilers won their first Stanley Cup, and he came to socialize with Gretzky, Mark Messier, Kevin Lowe and other stars, which made the Oilers even more special to him.

After graduating from law school at the University of Alberta in 1985, Katz articled for a local firm and was hired by another before setting up his own practice specializing in corporate and franchise law. In 1991, in a partnership with his father, Katz paid $300,000 for the Canadian rights to the U.S.-based Medicine Shoppe chain, and in 1992, the Katz Group of Companies—now one of Canada’s largest privately owned enterprises—was founded.

In 1996, Katz purchased the fading Rexall pharmacy chain, which by then had only a few dozen stores in Canada, and the following year he acquired the 134-store Pharma Plus outlet for $100 million. By 1998, the Katz Group’s portfolio included eighty Rexall stores, thirty Medicine Shoppes, all of Pharma Plus’s holdings and a few smaller independent retailers.

Over the next half-dozen years, Katz amassed billions through one acquisition after another and, by 2006, he began making a concerted effort to buy the Oilers. In May 2007, he made a $145 million bid that was rejected by the team’s ownership group of thirty-eight investors, and he was spurned again two months later when he increased his offer to $185 million. On January 28, 2008, Katz raised the ante to $200 million, an offer that was accepted, pending approval from the league. In June, Katz received permission from the NHL, and on July 2 he was officially introduced as the team’s owner during a news conference at Rexall Place.

Katz hoped, of course, that the Oilers would return to their spot among the NHL’s elite, but his interest in the team was more than a heartfelt gamble and an attempt to revisit the fond memories of his youth. It was an investment in something much bigger: a vision he had for the city.

Before he acquired the Oilers, Katz had quietly begun purchasing land in Edmonton’s downtown core. The city centre was suffering from the same urban blight as other major municipalities, but the demise of downtown had been exacerbated in 1981 by the opening of the West Edmonton Mall, the largest shopping complex in North America. Alberta’s top tourist attraction, the mall is home to more than eight hundred stores, as well as hotels, a giant waterpark, amusement park, a casino, a skating rink and an aquarium with penguins and sea lions. It was spectacular and, when it opened, it diverted shoppers from downtown and discouraged development in the city’s core.

Recognizing the need to bring the Oilers and the city into a new era, Katz talked about the necessity of building an arena to replace Rexall Place. The rink opened in 1974, and ranked as the second oldest in the NHL behind Madison Square Garden, which underwent a $1 billion renovation in 2013. Located a few miles to the south of downtown, Rexall Place was once the jewel at the centre of a bustling shopping district. Over the years, however, the neighbourhood had faded, and Katz believed that a new team needed a new home if it were to rejuvenate the city.

At the time that he bought the Oilers, Katz said he was prepared to spend $100 million exploring the possibility of building a modern arena, a process he had already begun by seeking property downtown that was suitable for development.

“I didn’t have to be in the hockey business, but I saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime to do something for the city,” Katz said. “I would never have considered buying the team without the challenge and opportunity of building an arena and using it as the centrepiece for revitalization that would make us proud of our downtown again.”

Upon taking over, Katz left the Oilers in the hands of managers he admired, including Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish, key members of those teams that had formed a dynasty. Leaving the business of hockey to his trusted lieutenants, Katz began pursuing in earnest his dream of building an arena. It was a protracted process that played out in public, requiring years of negotiations with the city and often heated debate. At one point, when talks were at a standstill, Katz even visited Seattle to meet with officials there who were anxious to acquire an NHL team. That move infuriated detractors who opposed using taxpayers’ dollars to help bankroll the billionaire’s building project.

Slowly—and, at times, agonizingly so—snags were resolved. Finally, on May 15, 2013, Edmonton’s city council approved the final piece of funding for the arena, and construction on Rogers Place began the following March.

As part of the deal that was brokered, the Katz Group agreed to provide $161 million in financing for the arena, with the city contributing $279 million. The rest of the money came from a variety of sources, including ticket surcharges and a community revitalization levy. The city also required Katz to spend $100 million to help stimulate development around the arena. Katz agreed, and didn’t stop there; in short order, he committed to spending more than $2 billion.

As Katz had envisioned it, the arena would be only a small part of a much bigger project. As plans emerged and development spread, the arena became the anchor of a sports, entertainment, retail and residential corridor. Called the Ice District, the area would cover twelve million square feet—roughly the size of twenty football fields—and include Canada’s tallest office towers outside Toronto. The construction would take years and, at its height in 2015, it was the largest private real estate development in Canada and the second-largest in North America, behind only Hudson Yards, a commercial and residential district on the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

“We did exactly what we said, and more,” Katz said. “It’s a public–private partnership, and because we have been so successful, I think it’s a model that other people will follow.”

The centrepiece of the Ice District would be the new Rogers Place. Katz laboured over plans for the arena, which was complicated by his insistence that it be built in the shape of an oil drop in deference to the energy in­dustry.

“That’s Alberta, and that’s Edmonton,” Katz said. “I wanted it to be iconic. This city deserves that.”

By summer 2015, Katz’s plans for rebuilding Edmonton were well under way. Cranes dotted the skyline and construction in the downtown core was incessant. It seemed like Katz’s vision of a new heart of his city was coming together. His hockey team, meanwhile, remained a work in progress. From 2008 to 2014, the Oilers had finished twenty-eighth, twenty-eighth, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth and last (twice) in the thirty-team league. Katz knew that something had to change; the product he put on the ice at the new Rogers Place had to match the quality of the facility they were building.

“My biggest wish was that the hockey team would be beginning to make a turnaround when we moved into the building,” Katz said.

And so, in June 2014, the team owner brought in Bob Nicholson, previously the president of Hockey Canada for sixteen years, as Vice-Chairman of the Oilers Entertainment Group. Nicholson’s first assignment was to examine operations on and off the ice and determine what was needed to take the team from a basement dweller to a playoff contender.

It was clear that major changes had to be made, but at the time there seemed to be no reason to rush. The Oilers had rebuilt their roster with a handful of number-one draft picks during their tenure at the bottom of the league: Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Nail Yakupov had each shown that they were highly skilled players, even if the team as a whole had been slow to improve around them.

The Oilers finished the 2014–15 season with a disappointing 24–44–14 record; at one point, they only recorded two victories in a span of forty-nine days. They ended the year as the third-worst team in the league, leaving them with a slight chance of winning the NHL lottery and the right to pick McDavid. Few believed the Oilers could get that lucky.

“I thought for sure that Toronto’s name would be called,” Katz said. “I thought it seemed like destiny.”