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Tom Hicks denies report team received advances from NHL

Image (1) TomHicks-thumb-200x300-10401.jpg for post 1290

As expected, Tom Hicks has vehemently denied yesterday’s report by David Shoalts that lumped the Dallas Stars into a group of teams that needed advanced money from revenue sharing and/or television money. That’s not to say that the Dallas Stars deny needing advanced money. According to Hicks, per Mike Heika of the Dallas Morning News:

Asked by e-mail if the Stars had received money from the NHL, Hicks wrote: “We did not. We received advances from our banks.”

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly confimed this, saying that “the Stars aren’t entitled to revenue sharing, so there is no revenue sharing to ‘advance.’ There is no money owing from the Stars to the League.”

If the Dallas Stars did indeed receive cash advances from the banks, and not the NHL as reported, then what banks did Hicks go to? Hicks Sports Group was already in default on $525 million in loans last March; I doubt they were willing to fork over any more money, no matter how much it might have been. Hicks himself claims to have forked over $85 million of his own money to Hicks Sports Group, not exactly a situation the banks are going to just going just readily walk into again.

From now until Tom Hicks sells the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars, I’m not going to believe anything he says regarding the team’s finances. He claimed that the Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers finances are separate, yet his need to sell the team belied him. He’s worked overtime to try and publicly sabotage the worth of the Dallas Stars franchise, which was most puzzling, and the word is that he’s done all he can to slow the sale of the Texas Rangers. For a man whose company is about to go into bankruptcy, he sure isn’t in any hurry to get his finances squared away.