quebec city = makeiteight
hamilton / gta2 = makeitnine
keep up
I say Make it Ten, Quebec instantly (with Vegas) and when the controlling share of the Leafs is next up for sale, making “agreeing to a territorial fee for new Southern Ontario teams†a condition of the sale, enabling Hamilton & GTA to come in. Rogers & Bell can each own a Toronto franchise, and we get Hamilton in, too.
Well, if they do, they certainly don't act like it. First of all, the NHL's national TV deal revolves almost exclusively around the broadcast of a few of the league's "prime time" teams and has little to do with any of the newer teams ... regardless of market size.
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Anyone who claims that the NHL expands with some vision of growing the game or pursuing a national TV contract is really giving the league far too much credit. When it comes to expansion, there is only one thing that matters to the NHL .... who's willing to pay the price of admission?
But those two are not contrary positions. They both are different avenues in the same direction: What, in principle, gives the CURRENT OWNERS more cash.
Expansion fees give them cash.
More TV sets/viewers in the footprint increases the national TV share, and it really doesn’t MATTER who’s on TV: The TV rights are sold well before any games are scheduled. The networks have to bid while the whole time there’s a possibility it’s an Ottawa-Edmonton SCF for the entire term of the contract. The more big market cities there are, the higher potential one is in the SCF, or winning, or on TV. Before the 1990s expansions, there were 10 teams in the top 20 US markets, and 11 teams in markets outside the US Top 20. They’ve added EIGHT top 20 US markets since (with ATL moving after the fact).
If you own one of the existing teams, really your only interest in expansion markets is “How does this affect ME, and my team?†Which is part of the reason few are advocates for Hamilton, because no one stands to gain very much from Hamilton (again, this is why I want more revenue sharing. So when the NHL owners realize: Hamilton is a revenue rock star, they can do the math and say “That means more money for all of us!â€).
If your Columbus or Detroit, you don’t give a damn if Las Vegas and Salt Lake City loses $20 million a year. Both would say “hell yes†because they get their share of expansion fees and two Western Conference teams let them sell 66 ETZ games to their TV rights holder, which is more money than four years ago, when they only had 50 ETZ games to sell to TV.
Secondly, and perhaps not coincidentally, some of the NHL's weakest franchises have been in large crowded sports markets. The last 25 years have shown pretty clearly that the NHL can not just show up in a big US city and just magically expect growth. I don't think anybody in any NHL office or national network is overly enamored by the NHL in large urban centers anymore. That may have been true at one point but I really doubt that's the case today.
Ad hoc, ergo proctor hoc? Certainly not. Just because something happens AFTER an event, doesn’t mean it’s CAUSED by the event.
Phoenix, Atlanta, and Miami didn’t suck because they are franchises in Top 10 markets. They sucked because ALL EXPANSION TEAMS SUCK, and with so many new teams sucking at once (and all the existing teams that were sucking like my beloved Islanders), it’s a lot harder to build through the draft. You definitely have a situation where teams little other competition of sports dollars (Nashville, Columbus, Tampa for example) will get a lot more patience/loyalty from the fan base with a long rebuilding process, solely because they don’t have a “Panthers or Heat tickets? Panthers suck again, Heat just got LeBron!†factor in those non-NBA markets.
No one in the NHL is going to be scared that a future big expansion market team because Atlanta sucked at hockey. When you look at Phoenix and Atlanta, the common denominator is not “Big market in the southern part of the US†because Anaheim and Dallas are also in big markets in the southern US, and Dallas was CRUSHING IT (until Hicks bought Liverpool) and Anaheim is just fine.
The common denominator is ownership that didn’t give a crap about making it work. Jerry Moyes and Atlanta Spirit Group didn’t buy the teams because they wanted to run successful hockey businesses. ASG bought the Thrashers to get the Hawks and Moyes was left holding the controlling interest in the Coyotes.
And I think THAT’S the valuable lesson they learned from the 90s expansions:
It’s not “Oh, we can’t go to Vegas because we don’t want another Phoenixâ€
It’s “We can’t go somewhere without a guy willing to buy in with $500 million, because we don’t want another Jerry Moyes.â€
The high buy in makes sure they have someone who is FULLY COMMITTED to the NHL in that market.
What the NHL wants (needs) is successful teams ... but for the most part, market size and location are hardly relevant as contributing factors to the prosperity of new NHL franchises in the US. Winning is the only ingredient that matters for the younger American teams and that is determined by how well the team is run as a whole (and a bit of luck) ... not by how many eyeballs are in the area. So while I agree that Alexander and Hansen may have the league's ear, it is only in this context of ownership/management, not because of the cities they represent.
This is the paragraphs that illustrates exactly how close our line of thinking is. The NHL’s ideal is obviously BOTH (Ownership/management AND that big market). Because when you add an expansion team, you are basically accepting that the team will, over the course of history, be bad, average and good roughly one-third of the time each. You don’t want — no offense — to add someone who’s like Buffalo, Carolina or St. Louis. Who in their best possible stretches are still not going to be big revenue teams for a period of time. You need a market that’s going to be able to survive the bad times in an old arena and crush it in the good times. And when you look at teams who’ve done just that (Dallas, Denver, NY Islanders, Anaheim, San Jose), the bigger you are, the more likely you are to survive lean times. Just look at the Panthers. As bad as the financial situation has been in Miami, they’re still there. Had that happened in Carolina, Buffalo, or Tulsa… would the franchise still be there? Would someone have ponied up and bought a franchise time and time again that has just sucked for almost 20 consecutive years?
