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Report: NHL Expanding league, Adding 4 Teams by 2017


Luke_Groundrunner

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You'd have all the hallmarks of the Clippers. A fanbase comprised of contrarians and fans of the other team looking to get tickets to see a game.

:rolleyes:
Roll your eyes, but he's not wrong. That's been the Clippers' ticket buying base since they moved to LA. Look in the mirror. You're the exact type of contrarian he's talking about. Why else are you a Clippers fan? Because Pooh Richardson was so good?

Where do you even live?

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I mean the "we love hockey but anyone but the Maple Leafs!" contrarian crowd does exist here, though not as large as their vocal escapades would lead you to believe. Still, it's a market. A market that's currently being cornered by the Senators and the Red Wings.

A second team in Toronto could tap into that crowd, as well as Leafs fans who are interested in catching live NHL hockey, but they'll never really be anything more then that. Which could very well be enough for them. Look at the Clippers. The Clippers, however, benefit from their lease with the Staples Centre. There's no way MLSE lets a second GTA NHL team into the Air Canada Centre. So they'd have to fund their own arena and live or die on their own. Again, the region's hockey-crazed enough that the contrarian crowd and Leafs fans who want to go see NHL action live crowd might be enough to sustain them. That's all it will ever be though.

I weep for the Senators' southern Ontario fanbase should it come to pass.

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Kansas City and Portland are much better NHL expansion markets than Las Vegas and a second Toronto team, IMO. The NHL would have to surpass all OITGDNHL levels of stupidity displayed ever before to expand in Las Vegas. Phoenix, Miami, Raleigh, Nashville, and Dallas all have larger metro area populations than Las Vegas and those franchises all struggle to draw a sufficient crowd. Las Vegas in the NHL would be absolutely catastrophic.

I can't speak for the others you list, but in Raleigh the Hurricanes draw well enough, particularly considering that they don't market themselves anywhere near as well as they did when the team first came here.

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I mean the "we love hockey but anyone but the Maple Leafs!" contrarian crowd does exist here, though not as large as their vocal escapades would lead you to believe. Still, it's a market. A market that's currently being cornered by the Senators and the Red Wings.

A second team in Toronto could tap into that crowd, as well as Leafs fans who are interested in catching live NHL hockey, but they'll never really be anything more then that. Which could very well be enough for them. Look at the Clippers. The Clippers, however, benefit from their lease with the Staples Centre. There's no way MLSE lets a second GTA NHL team into the Air Canada Centre. So they'd have to fund their own arena and live or die on their own. Again, the region's hockey-crazed enough that the contrarian crowd and Leafs fans who want to go see NHL action live crowd might be enough to sustain them. That's all it will ever be though.

I weep for the Senators' southern Ontario fanbase should it come to pass.

You know I've never really fought for Hamilton here. Back when it seemed like Balsillie might wrangle the Coyotes, I was stomping my feet and insisting that the league had to worry about serving Winnipeg before super-serving the GTA. Fate was on my side, kinda, and I still don't really want to see a team in Hamilton, but there might be an argument for it now. I looked up "census divisions of Ontario" on Wikipedia because you guys have this weird-ass jury-rigged system of "regional municipalities" where some cities are actual cities and others are just place names within larger official jurisdictions and there's no way for me to know what's what, and here's what I got, helpfully annotated for the convenience of fellow non-Ontarians:

odsuEqq.jpg

Hamilton: 519,949

Waterloo: 507,096 (Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, the land of Blackberry)

Halton: 501,669 (suburbs between Hamilton and Mississauga)

Niagara: 431,346 (Niagara Falls, St. Catherines, the cities the Buffalo Sabres actually do stand to lose)

Wellington: 208,360 (Guelph and some farmland)

Brant: 136,035 (Brantford: here there be Gretzkys!)

Oxford: 105,719 (Woodstock and basically a buffer zone between London and GTA)

Norfolk: 63,175 (Port Dover, included for the sake of rounding it out)

Haldimand: 44,876 (that big nothing west of Niagara, really included for the sake of rounding it out)

That gives you a grand total of 2,518,225 people within a 65-mile radius of Copps Coliseum. This isn't including anything in the States, nor London, nor anything east of Oakville, which drops Mississauga, the York Region suburbs, and Toronto itself. A "Hamilton/Southern Ontario metro" of 2,518,225 would rank ahead the primary statistical areas for the following NHL metros:

Columbus: 2,348,495

Vancouver: 2,313,328

Raleigh: 1,998,808

Nashville: 1,845,235

Ottawa; 1,236,324

Calgary: 1,214,839

Buffalo: 1,213,668 (though I will concede that the Sabres daisy-chain adjacent population areas in ways other teams do not and so this number could stand to be larger; ironically, one of these population areas is Niagara, folded into Southern Ontario above)

Edmonton: 1,159,869

Winnipeg: 730,018

While many people within that ~2.5MM are indeed already spoken for, consider that most people in Raleigh and Nashville don't even like hockey in the first place. So basically, they would be on par with a bunch of other Canadian markets.

So would it work? I dunno, it'd probably be a huge reach, and I feel icky about the ramifications for the Sabres (I'm not sweating the Senators at all; whos making that trip?). However, consider that the NHL is freely farting around in worse places than the world's cradle of hockey consumption, and TSN has just found itself starved for content. In my perfect world, the Maple Leafs would be back in the West to do battle with the Original Six Red Wings and Blackhawks, which would allow the Hamilton Tigers to engage with the Sabres and Senators and give the GTA a full slate of Campbell and Prince of Wales hockey.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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But if you set up shop in Markham, you're going after Toronto/Mississauga/York, which could be harder to wrest from the Leafs than the fringier areas out west. Also, as much as I want to look out for the good old Sabres, I have some trouble with the idea of enforcing Buffalo's territorial rights when traversing that territory requires you to own a passport. With border crossings being what they are in a security-theatre world, to what extent can you reasonably expect fans from Burlington or K-W to schlep out for a Sabres game on a winter weeknight? I'll happily give them Niagara and the right to air their games just over the border, but past that, their claim gets pretty dodgy.

EDIT: I realize my case for Hamilton as outlined is actually a case against: even with all those people, there's no there there. It's just a loose constellation of places that are Ontario But Not Toronto, and even Hamilton itself has no real downtown or urban core. Where's the civic focal point that attends so much hockey fandom in other cities? It's the same dilemma the New Jersey Devils have had that has made them throw parades in parking lots. Furthermore, by accounting for Kitchener, St. Catharines, and Guelph, you're stomping all over the OHL, something I'd be loath to do. This Hamilton/Southern Ontario thing is a real highwire act.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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I mean the "we love hockey but anyone but the Maple Leafs!" contrarian crowd does exist here, though not as large as their vocal escapades would lead you to believe. Still, it's a market. A market that's currently being cornered by the Senators and the Red Wings.

A second team in Toronto could tap into that crowd, as well as Leafs fans who are interested in catching live NHL hockey, but they'll never really be anything more then that. Which could very well be enough for them. Look at the Clippers. The Clippers, however, benefit from their lease with the Staples Centre. There's no way MLSE lets a second GTA NHL team into the Air Canada Centre. So they'd have to fund their own arena and live or die on their own. Again, the region's hockey-crazed enough that the contrarian crowd and Leafs fans who want to go see NHL action live crowd might be enough to sustain them. That's all it will ever be though.

I weep for the Senators' southern Ontario fanbase should it come to pass.

You know I've never really fought for Hamilton here. Back when it seemed like Balsillie might wrangle the Coyotes, I was stomping my feet and insisting that the league had to worry about serving Winnipeg before super-serving the GTA. Fate was on my side, kinda, and I still don't really want to see a team in Hamilton, but there might be an argument for it now...and here's what I got, helpfully annotated for the convenience of fellow non-Ontarians:

odsuEqq.jpg

Hamilton: 519,949

Waterloo: 507,096 (Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, the land of Blackberry)

Halton: 501,669 (suburbs between Hamilton and Mississauga)

Niagara: 431,346 (Niagara Falls, St. Catherines, the cities the Buffalo Sabres actually do stand to lose)

Wellington: 208,360 (Guelph and some farmland)

Brant: 136,035 (Brantford: here there be Gretzkys!)

Oxford: 105,719 (Woodstock and basically a buffer zone between London and GTA)

Norfolk: 63,175 (Port Dover, included for the sake of rounding it out)

Haldimand: 44,876 (that big nothing west of Niagara, really included for the sake of rounding it out)

That gives you a grand total of 2,518,225 people within a 65-mile radius of Copps Coliseum. This isn't including anything in the States, nor London, nor anything east of Oakville, which drops Mississauga, the York Region suburbs, and Toronto itself. A "Hamilton/Southern Ontario metro" of 2,518,225 would rank ahead the primary statistical areas for the following NHL metros:

Columbus: 2,348,495

Vancouver: 2,313,328

Raleigh: 1,998,808

Nashville: 1,845,235

Ottawa; 1,236,324

Calgary: 1,214,839

Buffalo: 1,213,668 (though I will concede that the Sabres daisy-chain adjacent population areas in ways other teams do not and so this number could stand to be larger; ironically, one of these population areas is Niagara, folded into Southern Ontario above)

Edmonton: 1,159,869

Winnipeg: 730,018

While many people within that ~2.5MM are indeed already spoken for, consider that most people in Raleigh and Nashville don't even like hockey in the first place. So basically, they would be on par with a bunch of other Canadian markets.

So would it work? I dunno, it'd probably be a huge reach, and I feel icky about the ramifications for the Sabres (I'm not sweating the Senators at all; whos making that trip?).

Nah, the Senators' local fanbase will be fine. Well as fine as it has ever been. The city's still, at the very least, 50% Leafs Nation. Ottawa itself is a separate beast from southern Ontario, and what does or doesn't happen here wouldn't really affect Ottawa. I was mostly speaking in terms of the contarian crowd in southern Ontario itself.

The Sens are the go-to team for any fan who is dead set against rooting for the Leafs but still wants a local-ish English Canadian team. That's the market a second GTA or Hamilton team would need to draw from, and if that happened the Sens' southern Ontario fanbase would probably disappear. Ottawa itself wouldn't be affected though.

Again, it's southern Ontario and this the NHL. That contraian crowd and the Leafs fans just hoping to catch a game could very well be enough to make it work. It's just never going to be much more then that. And if that's a viable business model I don't take issue with it. Another local rival for the Leafs would be fun, and it's probably a better prospect then a few active markets at the moment.

looked up "census divisions of Ontario" on Wikipedia because you guys have this weird-ass jury-rigged system of "regional municipalities" where some cities are actual cities and others are just place names within larger official jurisdictions and there's no way for me to know what's what,

Us and northern Virginia. The best way to figure this place out is to give up the goal of ever truly figuring it out.

However, consider that the NHL is freely farting around in worse places than the world's cradle of hockey consumption, and TSN has just found itself starved for content. In my perfect world, the Maple Leafs would be back in the West to do battle with the Original Six Red Wings and Blackhawks, which would allow the Hamilton Tigers to engage with the Sabres and Senators and give the GTA a full slate of Campbell and Prince of Wales hockey.

This would make me so happy. I dig the rivalry with the Habs, but the fact that the Leafs play them so often has kind of diminished its coolness. I rather they play in a revamped Norris with Chicago, Detroit, Winnipeg, Minnesota, and St. Louis. Throw Dallas and Columbus in for good measure. I'm gonna stop here though because this doesn't need to turn into five pages of Reel Line Mint.

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I mean the "we love hockey but anyone but the Maple Leafs!" contrarian crowd does exist here, though not as large as their vocal escapades would lead you to believe. Still, it's a market. A market that's currently being cornered by the Senators and the Red Wings.

A second team in Toronto could tap into that crowd, as well as Leafs fans who are interested in catching live NHL hockey, but they'll never really be anything more then that. Which could very well be enough for them. Look at the Clippers. The Clippers, however, benefit from their lease with the Staples Centre. There's no way MLSE lets a second GTA NHL team into the Air Canada Centre. So they'd have to fund their own arena and live or die on their own. Again, the region's hockey-crazed enough that the contrarian crowd and Leafs fans who want to go see NHL action live crowd might be enough to sustain them. That's all it will ever be though.

I weep for the Senators' southern Ontario fanbase should it come to pass.

You know I've never really fought for Hamilton here. Back when it seemed like Balsillie might wrangle the Coyotes, I was stomping my feet and insisting that the league had to worry about serving Winnipeg before super-serving the GTA. Fate was on my side, kinda, and I still don't really want to see a team in Hamilton, but there might be an argument for it now. I looked up "census divisions of Ontario" on Wikipedia because you guys have this weird-ass jury-rigged system of "regional municipalities" where some cities are actual cities and others are just place names within larger official jurisdictions and there's no way for me to know what's what, and here's what I got, helpfully annotated for the convenience of fellow non-Ontarians:

odsuEqq.jpg

Hamilton: 519,949

Waterloo: 507,096 (Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, the land of Blackberry)

Halton: 501,669 (suburbs between Hamilton and Mississauga)

Niagara: 431,346 (Niagara Falls, St. Catherines, the cities the Buffalo Sabres actually do stand to lose)

Wellington: 208,360 (Guelph and some farmland)

Brant: 136,035 (Brantford: here there be Gretzkys!)

Oxford: 105,719 (Woodstock and basically a buffer zone between London and GTA)

Norfolk: 63,175 (Port Dover, included for the sake of rounding it out)

Haldimand: 44,876 (that big nothing west of Niagara, really included for the sake of rounding it out)

That gives you a grand total of 2,518,225 people within a 65-mile radius of Copps Coliseum. This isn't including anything in the States, nor London, nor anything east of Oakville, which drops Mississauga, the York Region suburbs, and Toronto itself. A "Hamilton/Southern Ontario metro" of 2,518,225 would rank ahead the primary statistical areas for the following NHL metros:

Columbus: 2,348,495

Vancouver: 2,313,328

Raleigh: 1,998,808

Nashville: 1,845,235

Ottawa; 1,236,324

Calgary: 1,214,839

Buffalo: 1,213,668 (though I will concede that the Sabres daisy-chain adjacent population areas in ways other teams do not and so this number could stand to be larger; ironically, one of these population areas is Niagara, folded into Southern Ontario above)

Edmonton: 1,159,869

Winnipeg: 730,018

While many people within that ~2.5MM are indeed already spoken for, consider that most people in Raleigh and Nashville don't even like hockey in the first place. So basically, they would be on par with a bunch of other Canadian markets.

So would it work? I dunno, it'd probably be a huge reach, and I feel icky about the ramifications for the Sabres (I'm not sweating the Senators at all; whos making that trip?). However, consider that the NHL is freely farting around in worse places than the world's cradle of hockey consumption, and TSN has just found itself starved for content. In my perfect world, the Maple Leafs would be back in the West to do battle with the Original Six Red Wings and Blackhawks, which would allow the Hamilton Tigers to engage with the Sabres and Senators and give the GTA a full slate of Campbell and Prince of Wales hockey.

I never thought I'd see Port Dover mentioned on a post in this forum. That place is my summer hideaway.

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Remember how just about everyone was exited when news came out that the Sacramento Kings might move to Seattle, only to be eventually blocked by an outside party? That's sort of what I see happening if any serious steps are taken to have another team near Toronto or Quebec City. I don't see the Maple Leads or Montreal Canadiens letting that happen. And hockey won't really work in Vegas with gambling and other distractions that would cause scandal with team management or it's players. And while it would be a nice story to have Hartford get the Whalers again, they've just too small of a city to support a team in the big world that is the NHL. Sorry to rain on the parade, but we've got to look at these types of things realistically.

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The "outside party" in the Sacramento/Seattle thing was the NBA and somebody else buying the Kings. It has almost nothing to do with this. (Except if Bettman continues to not give up the ghost on the Coyotes or does the same in Florida.)

And Montreal has no say over what happens in Quebec City. The Maple Leafs could block a move to Toronto, because they're in Toronto.

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Remember how just about everyone was exited when news came out that the Sacramento Kings might move to Seattle, only to be eventually blocked by an outside party? That's sort of what I see happening if any serious steps are taken to have another team near Toronto or Quebec City. I don't see the Maple Leads or Montreal Canadiens letting that happen. And hockey won't really work in Vegas with gambling and other distractions that would cause scandal with team management or it's players. And while it would be a nice story to have Hartford get the Whalers again, they've just too small of a city to support a team in the big world that is the NHL. Sorry to rain on the parade, but we've got to look at these types of things realistically.

I was with you up until Hartford. If anything, that's exactly the type of market the NHL should be looking at... one with no other pro teams. You could argue that most of Connecticut is Rangers or Bruins fans, but it's still a better market for hockey than at least a handful of places that currently have teams.

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Realistically if Vegas gets a team Reno should have one too. It would set them up quite nicely. You can't just plop a team in the middle of the desert and expect it to survive on its own. We've all seen what geographical rivalries can do for teams, and it'd be a great way to get hockey up and running in Nevada.

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Here, read this thing I wrote, if you want to. Or you can just keep babbling about this "34 teams in 2017" thing as if it were anything resembling a fact.

http://hockeybrunch.blogspot.com/2014/08/numbers-games.html

Pretty spot-on with Milwaukee. Although if the Bucks left for Seattle, I'm not sure that being the #5 team there should be more appealing for the NHL than being the only major winter sport in Milwaukee. The Bradley Center isn't the Copps Center... it'd actually be serviceable to the NHL for a few years until a new arena was built.

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Halifax has a Westin. I know baseball players have stayed at the Westin in Pittsburgh. I saw LaTroy Hawkins and scowled at him. The Prince George seems to get good reviews, too.

The Bradley Center and Copps Coliseum are pretty close, actually, with the edge to Copps in that it was built to be renovated.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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Their estimates are only part of the story. I mean, you'd have to account for "new car smell" and people who hadn't previously watched hockey at least giving it a shot when a pro team comes to their city. Some of them would get hooked. That being said, like we've all been saying, Seattle is a disaster without a new arena, it's not building one without the Sonics coming back, and a hockey team fighting with the Sonics for market share (along with the Seahawks, Mariners, Sounders, and UW) is probably in worse shape than the Coyotes currently.

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Nate Silver has been pushing for more Canadian teams for some time now. Why does he hate America? Why doesn't he want to Grow The Game?

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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I only value Nate Silver's opinion anymore if it involves some form of burrito-related strife.

On 1/25/2013 at 1:53 PM, 'Atom said:

For all the bird de lis haters I think the bird de lis isnt supposed to be a pelican and a fleur de lis I think its just a fleur de lis with a pelicans head. Thats what it looks like to me. Also the flair around the tip of the beak is just flair that fleur de lis have sometimes source I am from NOLA.

PotD: 10/19/07, 08/25/08, 07/22/10, 08/13/10, 04/15/11, 05/19/11, 01/02/12, and 01/05/12.

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