Did Steve Wynn criticize Sheldon Adelson – again?

Did Wynn Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn take a veiled verbal swipe at his rival, Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman Sheldon Adelson, during his company’s quarterly earnings conference call Thursday?

You be the judge.

In responding to a question about Wynn’s plans for a hotel-casino on Macau’s Cotai Strip, Wynn seemingly belittled Las Vegas Sands, where the company operates the massive Venetian Macau on the Cotai Strip and is expected to restart development on four additional Cotai hotel-casino projects later this year.

“What I believe is missing from Cotai is a legitimate destination resort that has the one thing in China that is so scarce, and that is space,” Wynn said. “So I want to build a hotel in Cotai and I have designed one that makes use in our 51 acre parcel of extended space of water and gardens, no matter where you are in the building. And that creates an emotional involvement by the guest at a level that cannot be achieved in a city.”

Wynn said the project, which won’t open until 2014 at the earliest, would be “the difference between a lovely hotel and a destination resort.”

But Wynn took his remarks a step further.

In answering a follow-up question, Wynn seemed to dismiss Adelson’s development plans for the Cotai Strip, an area named for its location between the islands of Coloane and Taipa where Chinese engineers spent almost five years reclaiming the land from the South China Sea and the Pearl River Delta.

Las Vegas Sands planned to build 20,000 hotel rooms on Cotai before financial problems halted construction in November 2008.

Adelson had the name “Asia’s Las Vegas” trademarked for the Cotai Strip.

Wynn, who reportedly told Adelson back in 2004 that developing a hotel-casino on Cotai “was a stupid idea,” said Macau and Las Vegas are not the same.

“Trying to pick up Las Vegas and drop it on Macau … will never work,” Wynn said. “One is China, one is the United States, and China is China is China, and in relationships with the people of that country, in relationships with your employees, you must not forget that it is not Las Vegas, it is not America. And so dropping Las Vegas Strip into Macau was always an idea that did not respect the basic fundamental notion of Macau.”