NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator

[TBGKon]

On 1/10/2022 at 10:28 AM, tigerslionspistonshabs said:

I realize I may get absolutely man-handled for even suggesting this, but just  a random , probably stupid thought:

 

I know that StateFarm Stadium is in Glendale as well, but is there a possibility they could play there temporarily? The Cards are only there every 2 weeks on average.

 

I'm sure it would be a logistical and organizational nightmare, but just a thought I guess.

I believe Chase Field was considered.  Schedule and logistics are what shoots both State Farm Stadium and Chase Field.  The only way i could see both working is in tandem, where Chase Field is used from the beginning of the season thru mid season (probably Super Bowl since i think Phoenix is a host in the coming years) and then move to State Farm for the second half.  It would be awkward, but it could work.

[IceCap]

People forget that the Thunder Dome only worked for the Lightning because of a confluence of lucky circumstances. The field was the right dimensions to make an ice rink work AND there was no MLB team playing there at the time, so scheduling for the Lightning was never a problem.

 

Both of these kill Chase Field as a concept. State Farm? Eh...I don't know if you wanna play in an empty warehouse for five-seven years while a stadium that's not likely to be be built gets built.

[Sodboy13]

You can talk Quebec City all you want, but the NHL - and I don't mean just Bettman and Daly - simply does not want to go there. I am beginning to think they'd pull an Arena League and fold the Coyotes rather than sell them to a QC outfit for market price.

 

 

[DustDevil61]

1 hour ago, Sodboy13 said:

You can talk Quebec City all you want, but the NHL - and I don't mean just Bettman and Daly - simply does not want to go there. I am beginning to think they'd pull an Arena League and fold the Coyotes rather than sell them to a QC outfit for market price.

 

 

It’s a realization, I feel, that I’m coming to as well. The NHL’s higher ups are hellbent on keeping the Coyotes in Arizona and a team out of Quebec City, logic be damned. Some kind of true contraction/re-expansion almost seems more likely than a simple relocation at this point. The NHL will get that sweet, sweet expansion fee when Team #32 (II) is ready!

[FCMacbeth]

1 hour ago, DustDevil61 said:

It’s a realization, I feel, that I’m coming to as well. The NHL’s higher ups are hellbent on keeping the Coyotes in Arizona and a team out of Quebec City, logic be damned. Some kind of true contraction/re-expansion almost seems more likely than a simple relocation at this point. The NHL will get that sweet, sweet expansion fee when Team #32 (II) is ready!

Speaking of Team 32, how are Seattle doing, financially and popularity-speaking?

[mcj882000]

So, one thing that's gnawed at me over the years of this debate on who deserves a pro hockey team is how some people, both hockey insiders and random outsiders-looking-in like us, seem to focus largely, sometimes even exclusively, on "market size" to find what cities "deserve" a team and which ones don't. And I'm not gonna say I don't get it, on paper it makes sense; "more people living here = higher likelihood that enough people here like the sport enough to come see a game regularly"; but over the years I've come to the opinion that the logistics of hockey as a sport, to say nothing of its regional nature, really complicate that metric more than some would like to admit. 

Take the seemingly-endless case of the Coyotes, the entire reason this thread exists. Here we're talking about whether a team in the 11th largest city and 16th largest metropolitan area on the continent should move to either the 6th largest city & metro area, or the 87th largest city & a metro area so small it doesn't even rank on Wikipedia's top-50 list. And yeah, on paper that choice looks utterly stupid; a no-brainer. Of course you'd move it to the 6th-largest city! What kind of question is that? But to be honest we really don't know how much Houston even cares about hockey. Their last team at the top pro level folded 44 years ago, and even then it only lasted 6 seasons. (The debate about the future of the Coyotes has lasted longer, almost twice as long, as the WHA Aeros did!) They haven't even had a farm-level team in almost a decade now. The city's Wikipedia list of semi-pro/minor league teams lists one hockey team, and it's a roller hockey team not even notable enough to have its own article. Is there really enough interest here anymore? Or have the past 9 years of being without a hockey team at all sapped the city's interest in the sport? Maybe, maybe not; we don't really know for sure either way.  You might even say, it's inconclusive.

Quebec City, meanwhile, lost their last pro team 27 years ago; a franchise that lasted 23 years and even survived the folding of their original league. The Nordiques always drew relatively good crowds despite their small, old arena (46 years old the year they left; the Colisée opened a month before Terry Sawchuk debuted in the NHL for comparison), their small, culturally-isolated market, and sometimes even a miserable on-ice product; and crucially, even despite rising salaries and a weakening Canadian dollar during the pre-salary cap era and especially during their last few years of existence - and I'm going to put big emphasis on this because I feel it gets left out a lot when talking about why they failed - they NEVER LOST MONEY while playing in Quebec City. But their owner was denied public funding for a new arena by the provincial government (because as has been stated here many times, funding a sportsball arena while simultaneously having to close almost a dozen hospitals due to budget cuts would have been terrible optics; an ironic fact given the province's current situation), and was afraid of the mere likelihood of losing money down the road - a twisted form of FOMO, if you will - and so he sold the team to Denver.

But here's the thing: since then, Ville de Québec has been home to several junior and semi-pro teams; most notably the revived QMJHL Remparts, who've been around since 1997, but also the short-lived Citadelles of the AHL and Rafales of the IHL, who lasted a combined 5 seasons in the NHL's main farm leagues in the late-90s and early-00s. The Remparts in particular draw very good crowds for their level of play, consistently leading the QMJHL - and sometimes even the entire CHL - in attendance year after year; and as you may recall, they even got a massive new arena built for them (half on the public dime, alas/even). In fact, the season Centre Vidéotron opened, 2015-16, the Remparts set several QMJHL attendance records and even outdrew 3 NHL teams, the Coyotes among them, in attendance-per-game. Even this season, with COVID ravaging attendance sport-wide and forcing teams to adopt vaccine mandates and capacity limits, they're still leading the Q! Suffice to say, this small, culturally-isolated market provably still cares about hockey; and now they even have the fancy, modern building to back it up.

The long story short is that, ultimately, market size is only part of what makes a strong market, especially in a sport like hockey. Having millions upon millions of people living in your metro area looks good on paper and sounds good to the casual ear, but if that massive city features few-to-no citizens that actually like the sport being sold to them, then that large size doesn't really matter, does it? In fact, I think I know a good way to illustrate this: Does anyone here know what the largest city & metropolitan area in North America is? The one city on this continent that's even bigger than New York City, and would presumably, on paper at least, look to be a better market for ice hockey than even the mighty Big Apple? Anyone? I literally linked to it earlier; the answer, by mere hundreds of thousands of people in both metrics, is 

Spoiler

Mexico City.

 

[BBTV]

Market size can't be the only metric that's used in these decisions, as it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.  The Tampa Bay Rays are a great example.  On paper, MLB baseball should do OK there, but the area is very sprawled with little density, poor (if any) public transit to get people too/from games, and a pretty lousy pro sports culture in general.

 

Phoenix isn't much different.  It's market size is also spread out over a huge area made up of strip malls and parking lots.  That's not conducive to sports that play more than once a week.  I've been in the Phoenix area a bunch of times, albeit only in Phoenix proper once, but my observation of Phoenix proper was that nobody actually lives there and it's a ghost town after 5PM because everyone's going home to Scottsdale or one of the neighboring communities.

 

A smaller market where the games are easily accessible and a higher percentage of the market actually cares should be what the NHL is going for since it's more gate driven than any of the other sports.  For the other sports where revenues are driven so much by the markets that they're selling to the TV and radio partners, it might be another story, but the NHL should stop pretending it's anything but a niche league and go where people want it rather than try to force it for no reason other than to appear major league.

[FCMacbeth]

10 hours ago, BBTV said:

Market size can't be the only metric that's used in these decisions, as it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.  The Tampa Bay Rays are a great example.  On paper, MLB baseball should do OK there, but the area is very sprawled with little density, poor (if any) public transit to get people too/from games, and a pretty lousy pro sports culture in general.

 

Phoenix isn't much different.  It's market size is also spread out over a huge area made up of strip malls and parking lots.  That's not conducive to sports that play more than once a week.  I've been in the Phoenix area a bunch of times, albeit only in Phoenix proper once, but my observation of Phoenix proper was that nobody actually lives there and it's a ghost town after 5PM because everyone's going home to Scottsdale or one of the neighboring communities.

 

A smaller market where the games are easily accessible and a higher percentage of the market actually cares should be what the NHL is going for since it's more gate driven than any of the other sports.  For the other sports where revenues are driven so much by the markets that they're selling to the TV and radio partners, it might be another story, but the NHL should stop pretending it's anything but a niche league and go where people want it rather than try to force it for no reason other than to appear major league.

Isn't Phoenix a niche market in the sense of the fact hockey isn't super popular there? Because on the other hand, practically everyone (even myself) wanted Quebec to have their franchise back which tells me it's not a niche market, but a major one outside the paper.

 

And if anyone wants to talk about Houston being impractical because of limited public access, the only possible way for me to mitigate this problem is to build an arena 10 miles away from the metro area and build a dedicated public network of train stations and buses. That hypothetical team isn't technically playing in Houston, and if the plan I come up still doesn't solve the issue, just call me a dumbass and send my head to Trois-Rivière.

 

[Ridleylash]

23 minutes ago, Friedrich Stuart Macbeth said:

Isn't Phoenix a niche market in the sense of the fact hockey isn't super popular there? Because on the other hand, practically everyone (even myself) wanted Quebec to have their franchise back which tells me it's not a niche market, but a major one outside the paper.

Hockey's actually growing pretty rapidly in Phoenix now that there are more players from the state making it to the NHL, and the Coyotes being there is a big reason for that growth (ex. Auston Matthews, who'd probably be in the MLB right now if not for the Coyotes). USA Hockey lists 7,480 people in Arizona as registered as of 2020-21, which is not that far from states like Missouri's 8,887 and more than states like Iowa's 3,245 or Tennessee's 4,622.

 

It's not really that niche anymore with how many rinks are sprouting up around the city, and the market's had teams in various leagues since the 60's; the main issue has been that the NHL franchise has been run into the dirt for most of it's lifespan, and that was a fate many other Southern teams (Atlanta, Nashville, Carolina and Tampa) have suffered at some point during their histories.

 

The difference in perception between a market like Phoenix and a market like Tampa as far as the NHL goes is that one's had the benefit of getting solid management for over a decade, and the other's spent most of it's life hot potatoed between management groups that could charitably be called incompetent.

[BBTV]

I'm not sure if you guys are using the word niche correctly.  I mean the sport is a niche sport with a passionate following in Canada, the northeast and north-central US, and a few other markets, and then mostly apathy everywhere else in North America.  I'm not saying that a team should consider moving to the mall in Hartford, but the league should go where it's wanted (like Quebec City and... well that's all I got right now) and abandon some other places.  NHL doesn't need the footprint that the major leagues have.  It was arguably at it's peak popularity well before moving teams to these places and expanding to places that weren't asking for it.  I mean... is there a need for the Florida Panthers?

[IceCap]

1 hour ago, Ridleylash said:

The difference in perception between a market like Phoenix and a market like Tampa as far as the NHL goes is that one's had the benefit of getting solid management for over a decade, and the other's spent most of it's life hot potatoed between management groups that could charitably be called incompetent.

Another difference is that the Lightning pay their taxes.

[mcj882000]

1 hour ago, Ridleylash said:

The difference in perception between a market like Phoenix and a market like Tampa as far as the NHL goes is that one's had the benefit of getting solid management for over a decade, and the other's spent most of it's life hot potatoed between management groups that could charitably be called incompetent.

Maybe recently, but have you seen the Lightning's ownership history? They were in some pretty rough waters themselves in the 90s.

[IceCap]

They were owned by the Yakuza at one point!

[mcj882000]

They were owned by a guy that some people thought didn't actually exist at one point! (What is it with Japanese hockey people and legitimate questions about whether or not they actually exist? Why is this a trend(?))

[dont care]

12 hours ago, Ridleylash said:

Hockey's actually growing pretty rapidly in Phoenix now that there are more players from the state making it to the NHL, and the Coyotes being there is a big reason for that growth (ex. Auston Matthews, who'd probably be in the MLB right now if not for the Coyotes). USA Hockey lists 7,480 people in Arizona as registered as of 2020-21, which is not that far from states like Missouri's 8,887 and more than states like Iowa's 3,245 or Tennessee's 4,622.

 

It's not really that niche anymore with how many rinks are sprouting up around the city, and the market's had teams in various leagues since the 60's; the main issue has been that the NHL franchise has been run into the dirt for most of it's lifespan, and that was a fate many other Southern teams (Atlanta, Nashville, Carolina and Tampa) have suffered at some point during their histories.

 

The difference in perception between a market like Phoenix and a market like Tampa as far as the NHL goes is that one's had the benefit of getting solid management for over a decade, and the other's spent most of it's life hot potatoed between management groups that could charitably be called incompetent.

K people play there, but no one watches the games which is the whole point. And as @IceCap said the don’t pay their taxes, so no one in Arizona is going to be throwing public funds their way to play in an arena there. And they definitely aren’t getting any money to build a new arena.

[BBTV]

Isn't it fact that Glendale had to lay off public employees in order to pay their subsidy to the Coyotes?

 

There's absolutely zero rational defense for the existence of that team... or many others.  I'm not a "NHL hockey only belongs in cold places" snob, but it certainly doesn't belong in Phoenix.

[Sodboy13]

I think Phoenix is in the Atlanta basket at this point: A large, non-traditional market that could be sustainable and successful with good ownership and a couple of circumstances, but has basically been soured for the foreseeable future because of bad ownership and some bad circumstances.

 

The NBA made itself a global success while also planting a good number of franchises in places they had no or minimal pro competition. To that end, Québec City would seem like a market for the NHL to pursue. But when you consider the league wants to maximize American eyes and dollars, the language issue, and the continued push there for a cultural, if not political, separatism, I get how it becomes a hard sell. Phoenix is a mess in every sense, and the only hope there is a double longshot - a stable, competent owner, and a city willing to ignore the franchise's lengthy track record and plunk down for a new facility. But the NHL may rather give that every last chance of happening before it even considers Saskatoon au Francais.

[Wings2]

One day the Phoenix Metropolitan Area will have the world record for the most arenas built per square inch. 

[spartacat_12]

On 1/14/2022 at 7:58 PM, BBTV said:

I'm not sure if you guys are using the word niche correctly.  I mean the sport is a niche sport with a passionate following in Canada, the northeast and north-central US, and a few other markets, and then mostly apathy everywhere else in North America.  I'm not saying that a team should consider moving to the mall in Hartford, but the league should go where it's wanted (like Quebec City and... well that's all I got right now) and abandon some other places.  NHL doesn't need the footprint that the major leagues have.  It was arguably at it's peak popularity well before moving teams to these places and expanding to places that weren't asking for it.  I mean... is there a need for the Florida Panthers?

Based on your logic, the league shouldn’t have ever expanded beyond 6 teams in ‘60s. I mean were people in Missouri or California really begging for NHL hockey back then?

[BBTV]

2 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

Based on your logic, the league shouldn’t have ever expanded beyond 6 teams in ‘60s. I mean were people in Missouri or California really begging for NHL hockey back then?

 

Well St. Louis had an NHL team, and most of the other expansion 6 were in traditional hockey markets.  I don't know much about the Oakland/SF situation and whether there was any appetite there or not.  Either way, there's nothing wrong with giving something a shot, but much like Captain Picard in First Contact, sometimes the auto destruct sequence needs to be activated rather than continuing a futile resistance.