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As the Stanley Cup Final captures national attention and the Carolina Hurricanes wait patiently for what could be the most prolific draft in franchise history later this month, the team’s ever-controversial owner Peter Karmanos Jr. is back in hot water.

According to court documents filed in Oakland County, Michigan, last week, Karmanos is being sued by his three eldest sons (out of seven) for $105.7 million for failing to make a single payment on a June 2013 loan out of the family’s trust fund.

The Hurricanes are directly mentioned on several occasions in the document, including immediately in Karmanos’ one-sentence background section and later for “various loan and credit agreements … used to support the Hurricanes” between 2000 and 2013.

But they’re never mentioned in regards to the impetus for the lawsuit: Karmanos defaulting on his 2013 loan. Despite a editorial by The Raleigh News & Observer yesterday claiming that, per the headline, the “lawsuit raises serious questions about … Hurricanes future,” there’s no direct tie between the Detroit millionaire’s latest financial crisis and the hockey club.

So how much of a concern should this development be for the relocation rumor-swamped Hurricanes?

It’s rather difficult to tell.

The team has consistently lost money in recent years and its decline to the bottom of the league in attendance has been oft-reported. The recent success of Ron Francis’ rebuilding efforts and the promising signs of the 2015-16 season, however, has increased new ticket sales by 87 percent and total ticket revenue by 40 percent in early offseason data.

But that doesn’t change that the team has been struggling financially for the entire term (so far) of Karmanos’ 2013 loan.

According to Forbes NHL valuations over the past three years, the franchise has spent roughly $290 million and made about $260M in revenue, for a net loss of $30M. Karmanos, whose ownership portion in the franchise was roughly 70 percent as of 2014, would thus have paid $203M in expenditures and received $183M in revenue, for a net loss of $20M.

Nevertheless, the Hurricanes are far from the only major investment for the former Compuware founder, who stepped down from his position in the company in 2013.

The man with an estimated net worth ranging from $700M to $1B — fairly small by Big Four sports league owner standards yet quite substantial nevertheless — is still “involved in several tech start-ups,” per the Detroit Free Press. And he’s taken in roughly $99M by selling out of several ventures in the past few years: a $52.5M stock award at the time of his Compuware retirement, an additional $16.5M award later in arbitration court and an approximated $30M for selling his OHL franchise, the Plymouth Whalers, and their arena last year.

That $99M alone could have paid for almost half of Karmanos’ entire Hurricanes expenditures over the last three seasons.

As has been well-reported in recent years, Karmanos has been trying to sell some of his ownership stake for quite some time, probably partly due to his age (73) and also due to the team’s financial issues.

But given his still-abundant investing activities, significant cash inflow, sheer net worth and the simple fact he hasn’t filed for bankruptcy, it seems safe to assume that Karmanos’ bank account remains well-endowed.

Family strife, instead of financial ability, is the increasingly unanimous explanation for why Karmanos is ignoring paying off his 2013 loan.

Per the same court document, Karmanos took out two loans from the trust fund prior to this most recent one: a $180M loan in 1999 (to be paid in installments until 2029) and a $69.7M loan in 2009 (to be paid in installments until 2017).

Neither of those loans are scheduled to have been paid off already and, presumably, Karmanos has been making those payments on time, as no complaints are made in regard to either in the lawsuit. Mathematically, he should have paid roughly $104M in payments so far on the 1999 loan and $68M in payments so far on the 2009 loan — sums that further reinforce conclusions about the lushness of his bank account.

That implies the timing of the 2013 loan may be important.

During the same NHL offseason in which he took out that loan, Karmanos’ son Jason, one of the lawsuit’s three plaintiffs, was abruptly fired from the Hurricanes’ front office. Jason now works for the Pittsburgh Penguins alongside former Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford, who was inexplicably ravaged in an explosive, now-infamous Karmanos press conference last summer.

While presumably making full, on-time payments on his 1999 and 2009 loans, Karmanos has allegedly made absolutely no payments at all, rather than merely insufficient payments, on the 2013 loan. The perplexing disparity between these two patterns indicates that the latter may be because of disinterest in paying rather than inability to pay.

Furthermore, since the lawsuit is being classified as a “contract dispute,” it wasn’t filed in Michigan’s tamer Probate Court, which usually handles trusts, but instead in more general Circuit Court, from which decisions are more often eligible to be appealed.

On Thursday, Karmanos himself went on the record to dispel the newest wave of relocation rumors and called the lawsuit solely “a family matter that has nothing at all to do with the Hurricanes.”

NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly also backed that statement.

“I view the public litigation to be more along the lines of a family squabble than anything that would raise material concern for the league in and of itself,” Daly told Sportsnet. “You have to understand the entire situation, and we’re obviously, on the whole, comfortable with the entire situation of what’s going on in Carolina.”

So the Karmanos family doesn’t appear likely to host a warm-and-fuzzy Hawaii reunion anytime soon.

But the ties between this lawsuit and the instability of the Hurricanes are equally tenuous.

What seems most likely is that this latest controversy will simply go down as the latest bump in a financially eventful, tumultuous decade for Karmanos, regardless of how it is eventually resolved, and not as the last straw in the Hurricanes’ existence in Raleigh.