Just watch any interviews with Jeremy Jacobs to see the mindset of the NHL brass. They only see glitters and they are snobish as Hell. It's still the sunny dream of going to a fantasy land where nobody knows hockey. These are stupid people who don't get that everything should go to a grassroot level of building up your brand before undertaking expansion. The UFC has grown cause it goes where the demand is, the NHL goes to where a market might exist in a Future World. You have to completely exaust the root of your homebase before seeing things elsewhere.
Instead of going to places that love hockey and that by playing there will give you more hockey players, they are going to artificial territories with no grassroot with people that will exit the place at the first sight of the team sucking. Even Vegas, just watch if they start sucking in a few years.
These owners have their heads in the clouds and it will continue being that way cause there's no acountability cause the NHL is a welfare league where success doesn't matter cause of the cap and other tools like that where you can afford basically to have no people in the stand and having crummy TV deals and a few successsful cows are giving their milk for free to the markets that don't make money. At the very least they should consider moving teams like the Canes/Yotes/Panthers to Quebec.