Also crammed right between Boston and NY/NJ, so a new Hartford team would be the 5th most popular team in the region by default. Not exactly a great place for the NHL to be leaping into; I think AHL's probably the cap for Hartford for a while.
That logic doesn't fly with me. Everyone on the East Coast is close together. You could say the same thing about Philly being between DC/NY. The Baltimore Orioles between PHI/DC; the Mets being 8 miles from the richest team in sports, etc.
A Whaler return wouldn't make them the 5th most popular team in the region by default. For starters, there's a generation of NHL fans in Connecticut who WERE Whalers fans and only like one of those other four teams because their team left.
Remember, the Whalers were the lame duck for NHL fans in Hartford even back then. You saw loads more Bruins and Rangers fans even at the time the Whalers existed than you did actual Whalers fans;
I don't think that's necessarily true, either. I wasn't watching a ton of Whaler games since I was in the Islanders/Devils local TV market on SportsChannel, and the odds of seeing the Whalers on national TV weren't great. But that's because they made bad trades and couldn't financially compete in the no-cap, no revenue sharing NHL of the late 80s, early 90s.
Winnipeg, Quebec and Minnesota couldn't compete financially in that era, either; but that doesn't mean those MARKETS aren't good. They couldn't compete because they had antiquated arenas without "modern" revenue streams.
Which brings me to the key point: The time period of the Whalers existence was while sports was changing from "sell them a ticket, get fans into the arena quickly, get them out quickly, sell them a beer and a hot dog" into a massive entertainment industry.
So people look at Hartford Whalers attendance like "14,230 average in 1987? And that's one of their better years? That market can't hold up. That's 29th in the NHL, and Coyotes/Panthers/Islanders/Senators level of "there's a massive problem there that needs to be addressed. Not what you want to add to your league"
But the era was different:
Average NHL attendance during the history of the Hurricanes: 17,089 (1997-2020)
Average NHL attendance during the history of the Whalers: 13,922 (1975-1997) (For two 22-year blocks)
The Whalers' 14,230 attendance in 1987 was ABOVE LEAGUE AVERAGE.