brec7
Registered User
From the NHL point of view, I think the whole "there was only 6 teams in the NHL so it was really strong" argument is overused. There was way more internal corruption in the NHL the O6 era, way more politics keeping teams strong/teams weak, way less scouting all which lead to many great players undiscovered. That was fixed when they brought in the universal draft-things went a bit wild in the 70's when the WHA came along but that was rectified with a merger. You'll find the odd uncovered gem but these days the best players are almost all identified. Basically, the NHL's expansion to 12 to coincided with the league becoming less bush league so that's why quality didn't take a big hit.
Currently, the KHL has 21 teams in Russia and Vityaz's relocation doesn't change that. If you're going to make a pan-European league that represents all the true hockey nations in Europe (including expanding into non traditional markets like Italy which has already been discussed), then really Russia should make up at less than half of that league. When done expanding this puts you at league that probably has at least 50 teams in it- I don't know how that's easily managed as one structure.
Again, my point of view is admittedly that out of an outsider, but it seems to me that people in Europe have concerns of this expanded KHL still being Russian dominated and are expressing as such in these forums. Three choices seem to be to either have a very Russian dominated KHL (which is the status quo, but an understandable one at the moment because it's still a growing structure), a streamlined truly representative 32ish team KHL with way less Russian teams replaced by teams elsewhere, or a MASSIVE KHL with all current teams + a bunch of new ones.
