Not that we needed more reminders that Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs is completely made of bugs, but today is another. Delaware North, Jacobs’s company that owns the TD Garden and the Bruins, announced Wednesday that they’re laying off all the part-time arena staff.
What this means is they’re firing all the ushers, vendors and gameday staff.
This is a familiar tale of the current time, but it’s important to always go over the details when one of these ghouls tells you they can’t afford to pay their staff when there are no games.
Delaware North generates annually $3.2 billion in revenues. That’s annual. Jacobs’s personal net worth is $3.1 billion. Which means that 1 percent of his worth would double the fund he had set up for gameday employees, one in which he was the last NHL owner to set up for his arena workers and had to be guilted into it by the Massachusetts Attorney General. And that was only set up in case the Bruins and Celtics didn’t play the rest of their seasons, which is very much up in the air right now. And even if they do, how these workers get from here to July or August, when those games could be played, is still a fraught question.
It’s clear that Jacobs doesn’t give a flying fuck. The caveat that “staff might be eligible for unemployment benefits” is the kind of final jab that only the truly evil and fucked could come up with.
Again, by rough estimate, simply 1 percent of Jacbos’s net worth, $3.1 billion, would be enough for the hundreds of employees at The Garden to split up and live off of for a month or two, if we assume there are about 500 of them. And you can bet that when games do start again, Jacobs and Delaware North will find a way to not bring everyone back, because they’d chair-shot your mother for a nickel.
But committing the actions of a shit demon is nothing new for Jacobs. He’s been one of the bigger driving forces in both Lockout At Bettman’s II and III, which also just happened to hamstring his arena employees at the time. During II, Jacobs came up with this pile of horseshit in the sun:
“Ticket prices are too darn high. Our prices are high. We’ve been chasing away the fans with it over the last couple of years. For every dollar that we’ve increased ticket prices, we’ve spent more than two on a player.
“I hope that the commissioner in the next CBA is able to reach an agreement that allows us to stabilize the ticket prices and perhaps even lower them because I think we are chasing away a lot of our ticket base.”
The Bruins have the third-highest ticket prices in the NHL.
Jacbos’s miserly ways have chased any number of Bruins stars out of town, including greatest B of all time Ray Bourque. Cam Neely’s career was pretty much wasted even though he gutted through most of it with one knee that was made of glue and children’s dreams. During the depositions for the lawsuit against the NHL for concussions, Jacobs claimed he didn’t know what CTE was and what it had to do with hockey, even though former Bruins players like Patrice Bergeron and Marc Savard had suffered through concussions that caused them to miss whole seasons. Which might give some indication to how little Jacobs pays attention to the sport at all, unless he’s lying to the point of absurdity.
Jacobs and Delaware North don’t have to do this. They want to. But don’t worry, they’ll happily send the rest of us out to get sick and half of us to die to improve their stock prices a couple of percentage points. That’s what everyone’s life is worth to them.
Nationalize sports.