I'm not too familiar with the situation in Winnipeg, but I know that Quebec and Hartford lost their teams because their owners planned on moving them all along. Quebec lost their team because of a lack of a new arena, and while Colorado deserves a team, it doesn't mean that Quebec City doesn't deserve one, as well. Many fans have a lot of misconceptions when it comes to these teams moving. I happen to have lived through the Whalers era, and while I'm a bit biased since they are the team I grew up with, I've done some research and can possibly explain why it is that they in particular left.
The situation in Hartford is simple: Peter Karmanos bought the team with every intention of moving them. He originally wanted to move the team to Detroit as a second team there, but he settled on placing an OHL team there instead (ironically named the Plymouth Whalers). He had the opportunity to purchase the Tampa Bay Lightning expansion franchise but opted for Hartford since it was cheaper. He tried to move them to an abandoned airplane hanger in Columbus but the city told him to take a hike, so he saw that an arena was being built in Raleigh and took a gamble. The city offered him an arena deal at the last minute, but he turned it down, proving that he was intent on moving the team. We had over 10,000 season ticket holders the last season, which is impressive for a team that was only above .500 3 times in 18 NHL years and had missed the playoffs for six consecutive years. The fan support would have been immense if we could compete, but smaller markets didn't stand a chance in the pre-salary cap era. I understand that Carolina finally got fan support after winning the Stanley Cup, but don't you think that the same thing would have happened in Hartford? We only won one playoff series ever and they made it to the finals twice before hockey really caught on down there. I'm not saying that the Hurricanes should be moved, but I don't see why people knock the markets like Hartford and Winnipeg when we never got the chance to be that good and really turn things around. The Green Bay Packers almost went bankrupt once, but that doesn't mean that Wisconsin is a bad football market. Sometimes it takes a winning product to turn things around, and we never had the chance to compete and turn it around. I doubt that we'll ever get that chance again because of Bettman's emphasis on spreading markets out to get a better TV deal, but that hasn't exactly worked out either. There are studies being done in Hartford right now to see whether we should build an 18,000+ seat arena to replace the Hartford Civic Center within the next few years, and if that happens I think we should be given another shot. I mean, if all Kansas City had to do was build a new arena, why not us? We also have a potential owner who made a highly competitive bid on the Pittsburgh Penguins last year in Larry Gottesdiener who owns $500 million of Hartford real estate. If Quebec City, Winnipeg, and Hartford can build new arenas up to NHL standards and find decent ownership groups I don't see why we shouldn't get the same kind of support that Kansas City got from many of the fans on these boards. I understand that this isn't an overnight process and that we have to earn our way back in, but I don't understand why some people would immediately count us out, especially since the economics of the NHL have changed significantly from a decade ago.
