I think the big problem in the USA is weather and climate. It’s hard to convert fans in no winter ice climates.
South Korea does get winter weather so there was a market to try to develop where young kids seeing the sport starts playing.
I don’t know in China , how many experience winter.
given the large population of 1B, and if you can get 2% of the people become big sports fans , that gets you 20M fans. If the each pay $100 on things, that’s $2B in annual revenue. Thst coukd mean the nhl could get half on that which is $30M per team per year.
there in financial opportunity.
a sport like soccer/ football that is a basic sport the world plays has gotten growth because it’s a low cost sport to learn how to play. It’s growth in the USA took years to do. Early on fanswoukd struggle to see pre internet days. Now you can see it all over.
China has a fairly sizeable region with a cold winter climate. Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang and Harbin immediately come to mind as big cities with winter at least as cold as Chicago - Shenyang and Harbin more like the Canadian Prairies really. That's already something like 40 million people. There are dozens of other major cities and rural towns in the northern part of China, totaling almost 300 million in population that experiences winter with snow. This is excluding the Xinjang region to the west which is also pretty cold, but may be less receptive to ice hockey for cultural reasons (totally speculating on my part).
In general, you can safely assume there is basically the entire US population of 330M in China that would experience a cold, snowy winter. That is a far more attractive proposition than playing in Korea, where even if all 51M of its population is exposed to winter (I think Jeju Island is fairly mild), it's a small fraction of China's population. And we're only using the winter metric as an indicator for interest in the sport - generally reliable across the world, but that doesn't mean anyone in a warmer part of the country wouldn't be interested.
I believe the opportunity is massive and the NHL would be wise to capitalize on it. I do think getting a slice of the viewership pie there - with a newer generation of people coming of age with disposable incomes and malleable interests - is totally worth 21 days. The NBA obviously, hugely values China having captured its market (without getting into the politics of it). Obviously as someone interested in international hockey, I would also think it's worthwhile, but it actually makes good financial sense from a business proposition. Certainly far more than South Korea did, or playing in almost any European country would. This is basically a new market with few fans exposed to the game.
