The Boston Bruins had a memorable Stanley Cup victory celebration at Club Shrine in Foxwoods two weekends ago. Their epic celebration included players drinking out of the Cup, drinking from a $100,000 bottle of champagne, and dancing around half naked. The club’s owner posted the team’s bar tab on his twitter account and their bill was over $156,000. Naturally everyone was blown away by the tab, but I said on twitter that I was 99% certain the Bruins hardly paid anything of the tab. The players later confirmed that was the case.
“The champagne was a gift from somebody, so that’s out the window before it even starts, it was a very generous gift and it wasn’t necessary but it was very nice of them and then obviously the people at Shrine, Ed Kane and Randy, they helped us a lot with the bill, too, and Foxwoods really took care of us, setting up the rooms and all that stuff, too,” Shawn Thornton explained on The Sports Hub last week. “It wasn’t like Mr. [Zdeno] Chara and his $7.6 million just pulled out the black card and said ‘Here, it’s on me,’ so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”
Chara was upset with the way the night was portrayed. He clarified the tab at the NHL Awards show last week saying “That number that is posted up is nowhere near what the actual price of the bill was. All I have to say is we are very disappointed that something like this is coming out that is not true.”
The dead giveaway that the bar tab wasn’t real was when the bill showed up on the club owner’s twitter page. People’s private bills don’t get released to the public unless the club wants them to. Clubs want tabs like that to become public because they know it generates good publicity and it promotes the party hard message that keeps their business booming.
Think about it from a business perspective: the alcohol prices are probably marked up around 1,000%. The real total of the bill would maybe approach $10,000 at most. So if the owners paid for most of the bill but got all kinds of publicity from the event, there’s little doubt it was a worthwhile business move.
