Updates On Vince McMahon/WWE vs. Stan Kroenke/Denver Nuggets

Where is Raw being held tonight? The Staples Center in Los Angeles. How did we get to this point? Well, it’s been an interesting story to follow this week. Now, let’s refresh this situation. Raw was scheduled to take place at the Pepsi Center in Denver tonight with the booking being done for this date on August 15, 2008. The Denver Nuggets made the Western Conference Finals to take on the Los Angeles Lakers. The date for Game 4 was made to take place tonight at the Pepsi Center at the same time that Raw was scheduled to take place. Tickets for Raw have been on sale for a while now. The contract for the event taking place at The Pepsi Center was sent to WWE last month and signed. Stan Kroenke owns the Pepsi Center and also the Denver Nuggets. The NBA stayed out of it and left it up to Kroenke and WWE to settle. The bottom line is that Kroenke was in the wrong. WWE had booked the date way in advance and WWE basically got thrown out of the building. The result had Vince McMahon all over the place in the media including ESPN ripping on Kroenke. Vince talked about how they were still going to send their trucks to The Pepsi Center for Raw while also taking shots at Kroenke saying that it was a shame that the Nuggets owner didn’t have enough faith in his team to leave late May possible playoff dates open. Vince has also been appearing on media apperances holding up Lakers gear. To sum it up, Vince is taking every advantage of this situation that he can get.

Now, the updates on the situation. Believe me, this story keeps rolling. There is word that WWE was offered the Denver Coliseum as another alternative. The building holds a significant amount of lesser people. Several buildings across the country offered their venue to host Raw including Madison Square Garden, The Staples Center in Los Angeles, and more. On Wednesday, word started leaking out that WWE was going to move Raw to Staples Center. Word also started leaking about Smackdown being moved as well. WWE announced the move which would have Raw moving to Staples Center in Los Angeles for Raw which is the home arena for the LA Lakers, the Denver Nuggets playoff opponents if you didn’t know that. WWE announced that they would return to Denver on August 7 and run at the Denver Coliseum which was offered as a replacement venue for Raw. The Smackdown taping in Colorado Springs on Tuesday was also moved to Staples Center. The house show scheduled for Loveland on May 24 was also canceled and rescheduled for August 8. Now, The Pepsi Center then got involved in this issuing a statement to the media bashing on Vince McMahon. Kroenke Sports said that Vince had agreed on Tuesday afternoon to move the Raw taping to Sunday at The Pepsi Center. They claim that he changed his mind overnight and were disappointed with the decision. KSE Executive Vice President, Paul Andrews had this comment in the statement: "Despite the propaganda campaign launched by WWE and Chairman Vince McMahon, the KSE team maintained a professional manner throughout this process. We had hoped for, and worked hard toward an amicable resolution - which we verbally had on Tuesday. We understand there will be many disappointed WWE fans in the Denver area. It's unfortunate and disappointing that WWE executives ultimately chose this path. The sensationalism employed by WWE in this instance is not surprising. The amount of publicity and coverage enjoyed by their group over the last few days has clearly become their new business goal instead of finalizing what we thought was a favorable solution and would have ultimately allowed their fans to attend the event." Hold on though, we’re not done by a long shot. LOL. Vince McMahon talked to ESPN’s Sportscenter. He was told about the comments that Kroenke Sports had made to ESPN saying that they were working with WWE on the situation. Vince then said to Sportscenter that Kroenke Sports woulnd’t even talk about a deal unless they could release a joint press release which would have Vince “basically be kissing Kroenke’s behind”. The Pepsi Center announced that they would offer refunds to people that bought tickets getting the refunds at the “original point of purchase”. It should also be noted that these fans will likely not get their extra Ticketmaster charges back. Basically, fans paid for their tickets, did nothing wrong, and are going to lose probably close to $10 a ticket in extra Ticketmaster fees. WWE held a press conference at The Hard Rock Café in New York City announcing the change of venue. Smackdown was moved to Staples Center as well with WWE saying the reasoning being that they couldn’t move their equipment from Los Angeles to Colorado Springs in a day. Vince made these comments to 9News in Denver: “It's really unfortunate because if he were just a regular business man and picked up the phone and said, 'Vince, you know, we're throwing you out but I want to make it right, what can we do?' I never heard from Kroenke, I don't know if anyone else has either, by the way, he's somewhat of a Howard Hughes guy I understand. I think our company has been damaged severely from a financial standpoint and from a psychological standpoint as well. You don't treat people the way Kroenke's management treated us. I'm not a litigious kind of guy, but quite frankly when we have a contract and we have over 10,000 tickets sold and you just say: we're out, and we're not going to do anything for you, you know we're not going to make any restitution. We may pay for your additional expenses, that's it. There could very well be a lawsuit down the road." WWE is going to go full out with this show in Los Angeles to rip on Kroenke and the Nuggets. Vince has said that he will appear on the show and be wrestling Kroenke. Yeah, that screams something bad for that segment. It will be some kind of silly spoof which will likely be just that, silly. The main event announced for Raw continues the five on five basketball theme with John Cena, Batista, MVP, Jerry Lawler, and a “fifth player to be named” taking on Randy Orton, Ted Dibiase, Cody Rhodes, Big Show, and The Miz. The graphic for the show has the face team wearing Lakers jerseys while the heels are in Nuggets jerseys. It gets more interesting though as TMZ got a hold of a press release that the Pepsi Center was wanting to release as their “joint statement”. The press release was written by Kroenke Sports including the statement in it from Vince McMahon. Yeah, they wrote Vince’s statement and sent it to WWE for approval. Here is what the supposed statement from Vince was: "By all accounts, Mr. Kroenke is one of the most respected professional sports team owners in the world, and the professional way he and his staff good-naturedly handled this conflict gives further testament to the type of business leader he is. We look forward to Sunday's WWE event and future events at the Pepsi Center." Vince claims to have never said the statement and it sure is opposite of everything that Vince had to say about Kroenke. Vince said that he was furious over it and that was when he decided to move the event to Staples Center.

So, there is the updates on the story. Interesting, isn’t it? It has been fun to have such a big story and have it be a light hearted type of story. I feel bad for the WWE fans in Denver cause they really got the bad deal out of this whole thing. They were just in the middle of this and Denver should have stuck with their date for Raw when they had commited to it. I expect for us to probably get oversaturated with the Nuggets story on Raw. WWE has gotten a ton of media attention over this whole thing and they have pushed it for all they have.