Mantha Jr. Reflects

If Moe Mantha Jr. had a chance he says he wouldn’t change anything in regards to the way he and his investors went about attempting to purchase the Mississauga Ice Dogs franchise and bringing it to North Bay.

Mantha Jr. is back in his home in Anne Arbour, Michigan after a hockey season he likely won’t forget anytime soon.

The assistant coach with the AHL’s Rochester Americans officially announced in early December that they had put a bid in to acquire the homeless Mississauga Ice Dogs who went up for sale when Eugene Melnyk purchased the franchise with the intent of moving his current club, The St. Michael’s Majors from downtown Toronto to the Hershey Centre which he purchased as part of the Ice Dogs deal.

After three failed attempts to move the team to Niagara Falls in January and February of this year, the rumour mill seemed to be pointing directly at North Bay as the only viable location for the franchise to re-locate.

Even OHL commissioner David Branch stoked the North Bay Flames on TSN’s “Off the Record” when he named North Bay as the city that most deserved a CHL franchise that didn’t already have one.

But in mid April the Mantha termed, “OHL soap opera,” pretty much came to an end as Newmarket investor Bill Burke purchased the franchise and is currently in the process of moving the franchise to the aging and “sub OHL standard” Jack Gatecliff arena in St. Catharines.

Mantha Jr. says he’s been told by OHL sources that the deal will be made official at the next OHL board of governors meetings in early June.

While Mantha Jr. and the Capital Sports Management group owned by Melnyk never seemed to officially cross paths and seal a deal, ironically their paths intersected recently in Buffalo.

Mantha Jr. was working with Sabres prospects after his Americans were eliminated in the AHL playoffs when he met face to face with Capital Sports Management CEO Roy Mlakar who was there in Buffalo with the Ottawa Senators and was the key negotiator in the Ice Dogs sale.

All about money

After the St. Catharines deal was announced, rumours circulated that the Mantha group simply wasn’t offering enough money to get the deal done with Capital Sports. After the sale Mantha Jr. admitted his group wasn’t interested in paying what his group felt was an “inflated” price that Capital Sports was asking for.

Mantha questions OHL credibility

Now that summer has officially arrived, Mantha Jr. will soon head back to his summer home on the beautiful Laurentide Golf course in Sturgeon Falls owned by his family.

Like the game of golf, he’s unsure if it’s worth taking another shot at trying to bring an OHL franchise to North Bay, but he wasn’t afraid to “tee off” on the OHL for the way it handled the deal in the first place.

“I question the leadership in the OHL,” Mantha Jr. said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon from his Anne Arbor home.

You could sense the frustration in his voice as he talked about OHL league deadlines that weren’t upheld and, in his opinion, concessions constantly being made for the billionaire owner of the St. Michael’s Majors and the NHL’s Ottawa Senators.

What’s next?

So instead of running an OHL franchise out of North Bay next fall, Mantha Jr. will have to instead focus on his job as an assistant coach with the Rochester Americans.

Seeing the Ice Dogs in the Niagara region isn’t what many North Bay hockey fans hoped for but the Mantha bid helped get North Bay hockey fans excited about the game again and may have helped vault North Bay into the top spot in the 2007 Hockeyville competition.

Perhaps the Mantha chapter has closed in North Bay’s search for an OHL franchise, but who knows, with all the passion the community has shown for the OHL, maybe another chapter will open in the near future…