Is Nashville even selling out 30+ games a season right now with the Preds??
No, they aren't, but you have to remember that prior to 08-09 (the first full season under current ownership), the club had virtually no corporate base and hardly ever promoted on TV or radio outside of game broadcasts. Freeman and now Cigarran have turned that around: the franchise is everywhere now. Everything is sponsored, and the building sold out 17 dates this year (IIRC), which is the best they've done in quite a while.
And we're talking about a club that had to do without basic staples of American sports teams through the first decade of its existence. An expansion franchise in another city that markets strongly and builds corporate inroads from the outset wouldn't have the severe growing pains many newer clubs are suffering.
Fans need to be able to relate to the franchise in some facet. The reason the Vikings are so damn popular is because its been the foundation of sports in the state of Minnesota and it bares a symbol of the state's origin. The reason the Wolverines are so popular in Michigan is they bare the symbol of what the University is all about. Its hard to move a franchise (i.e. the Jets to Phoenix) and have that identity because they really aren't from there. Its even harder as an expansion team because you are starting from scratch. Either way, yes marketing plays a huge role...but what do you propose they do? You can only do so many appearances with players or open skates on the ice to get the name out there.
But at one point, those clubs weren't established. They had to build a culture and establish roots in the community, and that takes time. It's tough to develop those kinds of profiles in a day and age where everything is expected to be instant or near-instant, but the impatience of a handful of people should not be reason enough to abandon the thought of expansion to certain markets. If it were, teams would be moving left and right or even folding all together, and the sport would be completely irrelevant in the eyes and minds of the typical American sports fans.
When teams market, they have to reach a broad audience. Every team makes public appearances, and those are great, but they typically only target one demographic at a time. To reach a mass audience, you have to use mass media. Promoting on local TV, radio, and billboards across the market are critical to generating fan interest. If you don't do those things on a large enough scale, you won't sell out too many games. That's true for any sport, not just hockey, and examples of it are everywhere.
Atlanta is becoming a large transplant city at this point, but think of it this way...if it can't work there what makes people believe it would actually work in OKC or even San Fran?? Because there are more white people living there?? (honest question and not a racial question)
No. Again, the criteria for a successful expansion franchise are:
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Competent ownership. ASG is far from that.
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Strong marketing. Atlanta hasn't had that for much of its history, and from my understanding, radio coverage in that market is not particularly good, which hurts a great deal.
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Good corporate base. Can't really comment on that, but if ASG's "success" in other areas is an indicator, I doubt there's much in the way of a corporate base.
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Reasonably competitive product. Atlanta has one playoff appearance to its credit and was run into the ground by Don Waddell's awful drafting.
From casual conversations in Corvallis and Lake Oswego with locals in those areas they thought hockey was barbaric and something that "midwesterners" played because they weren't good at football.
Those aren't liberals. Those are idiots, and they exist everywhere.
And what money would be spent on a competitive hockey team? Its a capped league meaning they can only spend the same amount as Detroit, Pittsburgh, or even New York. This isn't baseball where its free reign on whoever you want.
Eleven teams spent to within $100k of the cap last year, and all but two (Calgary and New Jersey) made the playoffs. Even in a capped league, there is no requirement that every team spend to that cap, and as such, teams that spend more are generally able to field more talented teams than those that don't, and are generally more competitive than those that don't (New Jersey was the only team that finished worse than 9th in either conference). Paul Allen would almost certainly be one of those owners that routinely spends to the cap.
I always like to attribute a cities ability to support a NHL team by if they can support a NFL team.
You shouldn't, for the very reason you go on to mention. The NFL is the exception rather than the rule in modern sports: they could put a team in Juneau and sell 60,000 tickets a game.
There really isn't any definitive measuring stick for determining whether a hockey team will be successful in a given market. A lot of it really depends on the quality of the owner(s) and their ability to entrench the team in the community.
The reason I can see Milwaukee with a team over Portland is there is actual interest in the league and sport in that area.
Was there widespread interest in the sport in Nashville? Tampa Bay? San Jose? The whole point of expansion is not to capitalize on existing interest: it is to create
new interest in the sport. While the results of the last wave of expansion have been mixed, it has propagated hockey into markets that wouldn't have dreamed of developing hockey players 40 years ago, and the league should continue its expansion into uncharted territory; if those markets don't work out after, say, fifteen years or so, then you relocate those teams to areas where the interest existed previously.
