Its the fact they may not be able to sell seats for the foreseeable future. We are far away from figuring out when it will be okay to get 19,000 people in one arena. So, until this is clearly sorted, figuring out how to keep these franchises alive is an important issues. Most teams will have issues with dramatically reduced gate, and the wealthier clubs aren't going to be too inclined to increase revenue-sharing.I disagree with your overall assessment.
1. If "how they can keep certain franchises alive" is an actual issue (it's not), a huge cash payment from an expansion team would be how, so not sure how you're using that to argue against expansion.
2. New teams do grow the revenue streams. They bring in TV viewers to the national contracts and therefore more TV revenue joins the league; and the big one is the merchandise sales. Expansion teams are usually massive additions to merch sales for the first few years because no one owns anything with the logo they unveiled yesterday on it. Vegas has been Top 4 in merch the last three years.
While the expansion fees and initial merch boom aren't sustainable, every subsequent sale is. Just like every league-wide sponsorship includes another team, every TV deal includes another team.
3. So many teams live by the gate is silly. Yes, 1.89 billion of 5.09 billion (37.1%) is gate revenue. But the cheap seats account for the smallest share of revenues. If suites and premium seating are sold, the team is fine and Joe Sixpack seats are drops in the bucket. Everyone argued Vegas would be giving away hundreds of upper bowl tickets as comps, Florida and Arizona stopped giving comps because the value of STH was so significantly higher and comps devalue that purchase for fans; so they had to eliminate comps to maintain their STH.
Look at the Islanders revenue growth moving from NVMC to Barclays. Fewer seats, fewer cheap seats, more suites = huge jump in revenues.
The people buying premium tickets aren't the people bearing the burden of the pandemic. They are corporations, not Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack can't afford to go to an NHL game anymore, which is a shame, but the corporate world has long left those people behind anyway. Look at your TV, all the people who were advertising before the pandemic are still advertising during the pandemic. And that's where the NHL gets the other 62.9% of its revenue from.
Every new team added further divides the current national TV deals. Do you think Rangers, Leafs, Flyers, etc like the idea of further dividing the pie.
You also ignored the second part, which is how many people want to buy a sports franchise right now with so much uncertainty at premium expansion prices.