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Suffice to say there were enough Melnyk spinoramas to leave an entire fan base flat on its backsides wondering what just hit them.

This is not a winning strategy to get bums back into all those empty seats at the Canadian Tire Centre. It might accomplish the opposite, further diminishing both the team’s financial wherewithal and the city’s already struggling reputation as a lousy sports town with terrible fans.

And that’s the real shame here: Ottawa fans are taking the brunt of criticism for the antics of an increasingly unpopular absentee owner who makes things worse every time he opens his yap.

Just turn on any Toronto-centric sports broadcast and you’ll be treated to all manner of contempt for Ottawa and its fans. What they don’t appreciate is that Ottawa isn’t Toronto. We don’t suffer fools gladly. Speaking of …

Melnyk should have used the weekend festivities simply to extol the virtues of hockey and its great fans. Instead he suggested owning a team was really no different than owning a McDonalds franchise that can simply be packed up and relocated to some other street corner when hamburger sales were down.

He even complained that Ottawa fans paid only $160 for a playoff ticket last season when they were paying $1,000 in New York.

If Melnyk really does want to get the franchise back on the rails he needs to drop threats to relocate the team. It has become a cliché of sports franchise owners who are looking to extract something from government or fans and use the relocation threat to whip the public into a frenzy. Ottawa hockey fans have seen this movie before and this time they aren’t buying it