Article content continued

He said the PNE hopes and expects to earn more money from commercial events than it did when the Giants were the main tenant at the Coliseum.

“That’s not saying we wanted (the Giants) to move,” McDaniel said. “We attempted to do everything we could over many years to make it viable for them, but the reality was it was just a mismatch in terms of the size of the building and what their organization was cycling in the three to four years prior to them moving.”

James Brander, an economist at the UBC Sauder School of Business, said he buys the explanation from the PNE that they will be more profitable without the Giants.

“The Vancouver Giants last year were drawing about 3,000 people per game on average, and obviously (capacity) is a lot bigger than that. It’s not like they generate a lot of revenue with those tickets either. They’re not expensive tickets,” he said.

“If they get one rock concert in there for a night, then that’s worth many games. I would not be at all surprised if they could actually make more money.

“They don’t have to replace all those dates. If they replaced a quarter of those dates, they’d probably be better off.”

The Coliseum opened in 1968 and was built for $6 million. A new scoreboard, lighting, ice plant and other amenities were added as part of a $25-million renovation funded by VANOC for the 2010 Olympics.

Brander said the Coliseum was built during a unique time in the North American sports economy.

“The 1970s was a period when there was quite a lot of expansion of major league sports in North America. A lot of these facilities went up pretty quickly and they weren’t really high quality,” he said. “What’s been going on for the last 10 or 15 years is a lot of them are being replaced by much better facilities — higher-quality facilities that generate a lot more revenue with more luxury boxes.”