I don't think we'll ever see 36 teams in the NHL. It makes no sense when you start splitting up the pie more and teams end up taking less TV revenue.
Pretty sure we've done the math on this and shown how that's a silly logic.
Just to ballpark the league-wide revenues, the national TV contracts a few years ago amounted to about $20 million per team with 30 teams (on average, Canadian split complicates actual numbers but this is just a sample of theory). Say the rest of money that gets distributed league wide adds another $5 million a team for like, league sponsorship and merch and stuff.
So $750 million total, $25 million per team for 30 teams, per year. NHL adds Vegas and Seattle and now that pool of money is divided 32 ways instead.
Each team gets $23.44 million. So that's a loss of $1.56 million less. Over 30 years, that adds up to $47 million in losses by sharing the pie more ways! (That's your argument).
Except that
1. Expansion fees. VGK/SEA paid $38.33 million per team just to get in. So that $47 million loss is only $8.67 million over the next 30 years.
2. VGK and SEA add revenue to the pool. The next NBC contract is going to be around $350 million, an extra $4.86 million per team. PER YEAR. So now every team is coming out ahead STARTING IN YEAR TWO.
I'm sure the NHL will still be a 32 team league in the year 2846.
Exactly.
This is why NBA won't expand. But NBA has fans in cities without NBA teams. NHL? Maybe not so much in the US.
Sure, but the NBA and MLB wouldn't be able to have profitable teams in Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Winnipeg. The NHL can.
Plus no other league would be able to put a third team in the New York metro area, and the NHL already has NYR, NYI, NJD.
If the NBA/MLB expand into Montreal and Vancouver, the NHL still has 5 extra teams in their pocket (and the NHL beat the NBA/MLB to Vegas).