NBC Sports/Calcaterra: The Rangers sale is a “trainwreck”

Really nice piece of work by Craig here, expanding on this cite from Sports Business Daily:

The creditors have to sign off on the tentative agreement between Hicks and Greenberg/Ryan, and from the sound of it, they don’t have a huge incentive to do so.  According to the article:

The key issues, the sources said, are that while the sale has an announced price of $570M, there is only $390M of cash changing hands, with the difference assumed liabilities. And of that the banks would only get $250M, sources said. Before they get paid, according to the deal, Hicks would be paid for the real estate around the ballpark, MLB must be paid for loans it forwarded the team, and Rangers investment bankers, Merrill Lynch and Raine get paid too.

That’s right: Tom Hicks has helped broker a deal in which he personally gets paid before the people from whom his spendthrift ownership group had to borrow in order to make ends meet last year. And of course, Hicks himself is part of the new ownership group too. The result: an angry group of creditors is worried that they’re going to only get pennies on the dollar—“We will be better off in bankruptcy court,” a source says—and may very well tell Greenberg, Ryan and Hicks to go back to the drawing board. If that happens, you have to figure that Jim Crane and Dennis Gilbert, who were reported to have better bids than Greenberg—would come back into play.