nomorekids said:
Do you have any grasp on what the lockout is about? or have you just rationalized it to suit your own fanciful philosophies? The idea isn't for southern(or western) teams to have an easy way to MOVE. it's to make it so that their teams can be healthy. it's for western canadian teams to be HEALTHY. you live close enough to hartford to know it's a pit(and i lived there, believe me, i'm qualified to say so.) Winnipeg, even most realistic canadians who feel bad the jets had to move...will admit it's not a viable NHL market...more like a terrific AHL market. Quebec..seems feasible..with the right ownership.
baseball hasn't recovered in toronto since the '94 mlb strike, so i have serious doubts hockey ever would in places like raleigh and nashville.
i'm interested if you could expand on why you feel quebec city could be viable, while winnipeg could not. both quebec city and winnipeg have similar populations and income levels. quebec's arena however is 55 years old, while winnipeg's is brand new.
allin4466 said:
winnipegs new arena isnt big enough to support a new NHL team i dont think. In the winnipeg free press i think it was last year, they had an article, and for a winnipeg team to BREAK EVEN they would have to sell out every game and go two rounds deep into the playoffs.
under new conditions, its possible, but i think the NHL is looking for contraction not expansion right now. Although pull some teams out markets they dont belong in and bring them back up to the BGWN and it may do well.
1st things first, get rid of bettman and goodenow
if winnipeg couldn't sell out their 15,015 seat arena, then the city would have no place even dreaming about the nhl. the city did average approximately 13,000 fans per game in the past for the jets, which isn't bad considering the jets were seldom a winning hockey team and the winnipeg arena with a seating capacity of 15,353 had approximately 2,000 seats with terrible sight lines. the mts centre has no such bad seats. the jets attendance at times was actually better than boston and minnesota which is often overlooked.
in regards to the size of the arena, both ownership from the flames and oilers have expressed their support for the nhl returning to winnipeg, and to paraphrase one of them, it's better to have 1,000 seats too few than 2,000 seats too many as it creates greater demand, and increases revenue from pay per view broadcasts.
here's a link to a sample gate revenue chart for the jets from jetsowner.com .
http://beerforbreakfast.org/cgi-bin/i/Jets/Revenue_Crunch.jpg . these figures include aggressive targets for pay per view, but it's important to note that gate revenues gererally account for only 40-60% of a team's total revenues and this doesn't include merchandising, advertising, etc.
also, well heeled corporate types such as the aspers (owners of canwest global tv network, the sun newspapers/national post) have indicated they are interested in being part of an ownership group for a winnipeg team under a new cba.