Look I am perfectly willing to concede that the average Albertan is more willing to play money for NHL tickets, but I think that Atlanta is way ahead of Edmonton in terms of the corporate economy.
Just think about this, your local economy supports roughly 700,000 people who live in the EDM metro area. The Atlanta metro has approx 5,000,000 people who live and work here. Our metro area is 700% larger than Edmonton, are you really going to try and argue that EDM economy is bigger? Even with higher oil revenues at the moment, I find it very hard to believe that the economy is larger than ATL metro.
I'm not trying to be mean, but there is a reason why I think that in the long run Atlanta will be a solid hockey market. Atlanta is so big in terms of population and the economy that it only requires a fraction of the market to fall in love with hockey for hockey to flourish here. I think Dallas is a perfect example of this. Does everyone in Dallas love hockey? Heck no. Are the Stars a success, absolutely. That's because Dallas has a) filed a competitive team and b) is a massive metro area.
Huge metro areas like Dallas, Atlanta, Anaheim, Phoenix have certain advantages over smaller markets like Carolina, Nashville, and Buffalo. We don't need every person to love hockey for there to be sufficient support for a NHL franchise. People love and adore hockey in Edmonton and Calgary and Buffalo--and that is great, because you need a higher percentage of your residents to turn out and buy tickets.
Let's say the goal of a NHL franchise is sellout their building with season tickets. Let's say you have roughly 17,000 season tickets you need to sell. In Edmonton that means that you would need one out of every 41 people in the metro area to become season ticket holders to reach 17,000 STH. In Atlanta because of the huge population you only need one out of every 294 people to buy season tickets to reach that number. Roughly speaking EDM needs about 2.5% of their population to buy season tickets while ATL would only need .3% of the population to do so.
I am going to jump in the middle of this, so forgive me if I am running off on a tangent.
First of all, I would suggest a little stronger fact checking before getting into the math. The city of Edmonton has a population of 700,000. The Edmonton Metro is just over 1 million. You already shorted it by 300,000 people, which obviously throws all of your population based estimates off.
That, however, does not change your overall point: that Atlanta has a much, much larger market to draw from. However, while there is a larger market, the real question is how likely that market is to support the team.
There are undoubtably more corporations in Atlanta than Edmonton, and probably, the Thrashers are better off than the Oilers in terms of real dollars generated from corporate support. I wonder if you have any information on that for these two teams, or any others? You said Atlanta is in the top third, was there a story or chart posted in another thread? I would be interested to read it.
However, in terms of the metro area, one also has to consider that the Atlanta market is divided, where Edmonton's is not. The Oilers are *the* team in Edmonton. The only competition of note for sporting dollars are an NLL team. Next year there will also be a WHL team that the Oilers themselves own.
The Thrashers have to compete with the NBA's Hawks, as well as an AFL and an ECHL team in the market. There is also, of course, college football and basketball to compete with. So while there are more people, and more dollars available, the Thrashers are in heavy competition for those dollars with other sports that have greater interest in the Atlanta market, where the Oilers have a near monopoly.
