TORONTO - It appears that $3.5 billion may have just been a starting point for two U.S. firms that made a joint proposal to buy the entire National Hockey League.

According to a report in Friday’s Toronto Star, a Wall Street financial services corporation and a sports advisory firm are prepared to substantially increase their initial offer of $3.5 billion to purchase the 30 NHL teams.

Bain Capital Partners and Game Plan International - both based in Boston - made the initial offer to the league Tuesday in New York.

The radical plan is receiving little interest from team owners.

“It just doesn’t work for us,” Richard Peddie, president of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, told The Toronto Star. “We’re not for sale”

Similar sentiments were echoed by owners of the Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers and the president of the Calgary Flames.

“The Bruins aren’t for sale,” Boston owner Jeremy Jacobs told The New York Times. “I talked to a lot of my contemporaries. They didn’t take it terribly seriously.

“This had been floated a few months ago, and it didn’t get any traction then.”

Flyers owner Ed Snider told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I am not interested in selling.”

He added: “I am sure it probably had merit in many different ways for many different people, but you couldn’t get 30 guys to sell their teams. You could go to the moon in a two-engine plane quicker than you could do that.”

In a 30-minute presentation to NHL owners and commissioner Gary Bettman, the companies outlined a plan for the league to operate under single ownership.

The two companies reportedly had a formula to compensate each team owner based on revenue, assets and market size.  Under the $3.5 billion umbrella, each franchise would be worth an average of $117 million.

Last week, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim were sold for a reported $75 million, a deal that included a $15 million practice facility.

The league is reeling after a lockout caused the sport to become the first in North American history to cancel an entire season. With an estimated $500 million in losses over the previous two seasons and no end to the labor dispute in sight, the proposal could be given significant consideration.

But Rogers Sportsnet of Canada reported league owners turned down the offer after the presentation was made by the companies, which also planned to have a large Canadian-based financier join its ownership team.

Under the offer, the average franchise value would be $117 million.  The plan does include a formula to weigh compensation based upon revenue and assets of each team.

The 30 teams would have identical budgets for players salaries, scouting and coaching, The Globe and Mail reported.

That, the newspaper said, would in essence remove the competitive pressures between clubs, especially over escalating salaries.

“This is a great sport which we feel could be enhanced by this model,” former NFL player Randy Vataha, the president of Game Plan, told the Globe and Mail.

Assessing the future benefits he added: “On the hockey side, you’ve got competitive balance. And on the revenue side, everyone is working together.”

The proposal is less than Forbes Magazine’s estimate of the league’s total value, which it puts at $4.9 billion.

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