NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator

[FCMacbeth]

51 minutes ago, IceCap said:

I remember back in the day a few old timers here consistently said Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Hartford shouldn't get teams again because those cities failed to hold onto their teams. 

 

But here we are after two failed Atlanta runs and the league wants to go back before Quebec City? 

 

Maybe the people who advocate for this idiocy should just come out and admit their own biases/issues and stop pretending there's anything high minded about their stances. 

Well, had the Thrashers been able to build up as much success as the Stars, the Knights, and the Bolts, then we wouldn't have thought of that in the first place because it proved the NHL was right about giving cities down the Mason-Dixon line a franchise to start a team.

 

Speaking of Atlanta's 3rd attempt, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up with reviving the Nords. And nobody should be if you know how Calgary and Winnipeg (on their 2nd attempt) got their teams.

[spartacat_12]

3 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

My bias is that Canada should have priority in the NHL.  So a team in Atlanta or anywhere else in the southern U.S. should not even be considered until there are teams in Quebec City, Hamilton, Atlantic Canada, Saskatoon, and any other viable Canadian locale that I am not thinking of right now.

 

Your argument lost all validity when you mentioned Saskatoon & Atlantic Canada. Quebec City & Hamilton (or somewhere else in Southern Ontario) are the only markets in Canada that could reasonably support a franchise. I understand the romantic desire to have more teams north of the border, but you have to be realistic when it comes to the economics. The league's return to Winnipeg has gone about as well as anyone could have hoped, and yet they're still ranked 27th in the league when it comes to franchise value.

[sky1324]

NHL expands to 36: Atlanta, Houston, Quebec City, Hamilton. I think that works out nicely for everyone involved.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

16 minutes ago, spartacat_12 said:

Your argument lost all validity when you mentioned Saskatoon & Atlantic Canada. Quebec City & Hamilton (or somewhere else in Southern Ontario) are the only markets in Canada that could reasonably support a franchise. I understand the romantic desire to have more teams north of the border, but you have to be realistic when it comes to the economics. The league's return to Winnipeg has gone about as well as anyone could have hoped, and yet they're still ranked 27th in the league when it comes to franchise value.

 

Saskatoon came to mind becaue the St. Louis Blues at one time considered moving there.  And Atlantic Canada (I don't know which city, maybe Halifax?) was formerly being considered for a CFL team.

 

Still, even if you want to claim that the only viable unoccupied Canadian cities for an NHL team are Quebec City and Hamilton, then the league should deal with those cities before going to places where people call the sport "ice hockey".

 

For the NHL to have no teams in the two Canadian cities that you acknowledge as viable, even as it props up a floundering team in f-ing Arizona, is absolutely absurd. We all know that Phoenix and Atlanta and Houston are bigger cities than Quebec City and Hamilton.  But more important than the sizes of the television markets is the fundamental reality that hockey is culturally Canadian, and that therefore the interests of Canadian fans should take precedence.  The league's choice to abandon this principle is rightfully the cause of some degree of disgust.

[spartacat_12]

59 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

Saskatoon came to mind becaue the St. Louis Blues at one time considered moving there.  And Atlantic Canada (I don't know which city, maybe Halifax?) was formerly being considered for a CFL team.

 

Still, even if you want to claim that the only viable unoccupied Canadian cities for an NHL team are Quebec City and Hamilton, then the league should deal with those cities before going to places where people call the sport "ice hockey".

 

For the NHL to have no teams in the two Canadian cities that you acknowledge as viable, even as it props up a floundering team in f-ing Arizona, is absolutely absurd. We all know that Phoenix and Atlanta and Houston are bigger cities than Quebec City and Hamilton.  But more important than the sizes of the television markets is the fundamental reality that hockey is culturally Canadian, and that therefore the interests of Canadian fans should take precedence.  The league's choice to abandon this principle is rightfully the cause of some degree of disgust.

 

The fact that Halifax can't even get their act together to bring in a CFL team (which only requires selling out 9 home games) should be a good indication that they're nowhere close to an NHL market.

 

At the end of the day the NHL is a for-profit pro hockey league, not some cultural institution that exists to preserve the history of the sport. Hamilton has made attempts at getting teams in the past, and it's usually the Leafs & Sabres who have issues with another team setting up shop right in between them. I'm sure Quebec City wouldn't lose money, but considering it's an even smaller market than Winnipeg, I can't imagine they'd have the corporate support to be a top 20 team in the league financially.

 

Association football is basically a religion in South America, but players can still make more money in MLS than they can in the top Brazilian or Argentinian leagues.

[RyanMcD29]

I wouldn't hate Atlanta getting one more shot, but definitely would put Quebec City ahead of them as getting first dibs at anything. And even then I'd try Houston/Austin for a Sun Belt option first. But yeah, bring back the Nordiques and figure out the Coyotes situation first before doing anything else.

 

That being said the chatter over going to 34 already after just neatly getting to 32 has been a bit odd.

 

Also I guess just your periodic reminder that Hartford still hasn't fixed a situation that caused the Whalers to move out in the first place- the Hartford Civic Center is the same Hartford Civic Center that they left 25 years ago. Not that anyone here's argued for it, but figured to drop that in cause it got brought up. Plus I think we've discussed quite a few times in the *checks notes* 446 pages how Boston and New York have absorbed Connecticut anyway. Great for nostalgia, but outside of continuing to grow UConn's hockey programs (plus Yale and Quinnipiac staying in the national mix) and keeping the AHL presence in the state that train's left the station

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

24 minutes ago, spartacat_12 said:

At the end of the day the NHL is a for-profit pro hockey league, not some cultural institution that exists to preserve the history of the sport.

 

That perception is the entire problem. The denial that hockey is a Canadian cultural institution, and that the NHL is morally obligated to preserve it as such, would at one point have been considered positions beyond the bounds of decency.  But here we are, and certainly not for the better.

[The_Admiral]

47 minutes ago, RyanMcD29 said:

That being said the chatter over going to 34 already after just neatly getting to 32 has been a bit odd.

 

The Coyotes only exist to lie about various sets of numbers, the Blackhawks looked at how bad they were before Patrick Kane and decided to be worse, and the entire league is suffering from a lack of depth and superstar players. The solution: MORE TEAMS.

 

I mean, I know why the league would want to start more teams: in the wake of the Bally/AT&TSN collapse, lacking both baseball's production infrastructure and the NBA's absurd national TV deal, the NHL stands to lose by far the most by no longer having the access to constant stolen money that is RSN rent-seeking. The best way to cover for losing that much revenue would be to slide over from the RSN carriage fee bubble to the franchise valuation bubble and start charging close to a billion for expansion franchises. You may remember the last time the NHL wallpapered over insufficient revenue with expansion money; the league eventually had to take an entire year off.

[Sodboy13]

Western Trad RETVRN accounts, but make it sports.

[monkeypower]

Saskatoon is a no-go. There's just not enough people.

 

There were questions surrounding Jets 2.0 because of Winnipeg's population size with them being a distant last in NHL metro population and Saskatoon has about 500,000 less people than Winnipeg. The Roughriders (in Regina) work because they play nine games a season on the weekends mostly when the weather is still good and are able to draw from all over the province. A Saskatoon NHL team would not have that luxury.

 

You aren't going to get Gord and Barb to drive up from Yorkton for a Wednesday night December game against the Coyotes, especially when they have to get back to work the next day at Nutrien and the Co-op, respectively.

[who do you think]

13 hours ago, RyanMcD29 said:

That being said the chatter over going to 34 already after just neatly getting to 32 has been a bit odd.

 

The NHL expands when they want cash; long-term health of the league is not their concern. There's a reason none of the other, better, more intelligent major leagues have cared to expand at all in the last two decades*, while Bettman spent the mid-2010s beating down doors in Vegas and Seattle looking for expansion partners. And then COVID happened and wiped out that whole take so now they have to expand again, oopsie poopsie.

 

*Pushing three decades if you strike the righting-a-wrong expansions into familiar cities that were the NuBrowns, Texans, and Bobcats.

[spartacat_12]

16 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

That perception is the entire problem. The denial that hockey is a Canadian cultural institution, and that the NHL is morally obligated to preserve it as such, would at one point have been considered positions beyond the bounds of decency.  But here we are, and certainly not for the better.

 

The league is well aware of how important the sport is to Canada. People like to bash Bettman, but he fought to keep teams in Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa when there was a realistic possibility of all three following the path of the Nordiques & Jets 1.0. Having said that, the league isn't obligated to leave money on the table to nurture the inferiority complex a lot of Canadians. There are still hundreds of minor league/junior teams all across the country.

 

It's just odd because you don't see this narrative in other sports. American football plays a huge part in Southern culture, but you don't see people complaining about how Birmingham, Alabama deserves an NFL team more than London.

[Jer15]

17 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

The fact that Halifax can't even get their act together to bring in a CFL team (which only requires selling out 9 home games) should be a good indication that they're nowhere close to an NHL market.

I guess it's not really important but.....building or renovating/expanding Scotiabank Centre that would host more home dates (plus the NLL's Thunderbirds and the Q's Mooseheads) would actually make more sense than building a new football stadium which takes up more room and has less dates. 

 

I'd argue that the city not getting a CFL team is not a reflection of how good of an NHL market it could be.

Moot in the end really as it's not happening regardless for either league. 

[The_Admiral]

1) You don't see this narrative in other sports because hockey is not like other sports; just as MLS is unique among American leagues by not being the pinnacle of its sport, the NHL is unique among American leagues by not being majority American in its players. North American, yes, if you want to be difficult about it, but then we get into how Canadians are kind of Schrodinger's Americans, at least on the Anglo side of things, and who has time for that,

 

2) I sense enough annoyance with the Europe games taking home dates away from local fans that, were the NFL to add a 33rd team there, fans would be disgruntled enough with the whole thing to suggest that even Alabama would be a better place for footbaw than England, 

 

3) college football and major-junior are not a 1:1 by any stretch; Bama plays in like a 100,000-seat stadium and their games are on CBS while the Regina Pats, I dunno, maybe they're on public access sometimes. College football fans see their game as close to, equal to, or better than the NFL. I don't think major-junior fans operate under similar delusions,

 

4) The whole thing about "how hard Bettman fought" seems like bad-faith revisionist history to me. I think saving the Senators had more to do with keeping the Canadian federal government from going up the league's ass than any sort of honest assessment of hockey's value to Canada, 

 

5) The league has been leaving money on the table over 14 years (!) of outright owning or protecting the Phoenix Coyotes rather than allowing any outcome where both they and the Thrashers wound up in Winnipeg and Quebec City or vice-versa. You can point to the taxpayer bailouts, you can point to the parade of broke owners, or best of all, how the NHL rewrote revenue sharing from being based on a set of formulas to "league cuts the Coyotes a check for however much they need to keep doing whatever it is they do." And you can point to them playing in a college arena, but we're running out of fingers,

 

6) Saskatoon and Halifax couldn't make it, definitely Quebec City and maybe Hamilton are the only viable options left for the NHL in Canada, but my god, with the way the league has pulled out all the stops to stay out of those two towns right down to turning down half a billion dollars from Quebecor, no wonder people go a little crazy about the whole thing. 

 

EDIT: if the stories of David Thomson's connections to Toronto high finance are to be believed, letting the Thrashers go off to Winnipeg was also keeping the league's ass, uh, ungoneupon

 

EDIT2: I think "Ungoneupon" is also a small town near the Manitoba-Ontario border

[gosioux76]

23 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

I understand the romantic desire to have more teams north of the border, but you have to be realistic when it comes to the economics. The league's return to Winnipeg has gone about as well as anyone could have hoped, and yet they're still ranked 27th in the league when it comes to franchise value.

 

I find this point to be really interesting. 

 

This issue seems to pit the league's two biggest missions against each other: growing the game and increasing the league's value and financial position.

 

The reason that Atlanta could one day get a third shot at the NHL is because it would seem to satisfy both objectives.  From looking at Forbes' list of franchise valuations, it's clear that market size plays a big role in assessing franchise value. The top of that list is mostly peppered with North America's largest markets while, after Winnipeg, you run into other small-ish NHL markets: Raleigh, Columbus, Buffalo (with the failed Miami and Phoenix experiments holding up the bottom.) 

 

But even based on that measure, I wouldn't rule out Quebec City. It's interesting to me that Edmonton is No. 7 on the valuation list and Calgary is at No. 21. (Also worth noting, Winnipeg ranks No. 22 on Sportico's valuation list, ahead of Nashville, St. Louis, Anaheim and San Jose.) So market size alone doesn't dictate a franchise's value. It's possible for small or mid-sized markets to pack a bigger punch than their metro population would suggest, especially if they happen to be Canadian mid-sized markets. 

 

When it comes to Atlanta, though, I'd argue that the biggest obstacle is market saturation. Vegas and Seattle have been successes, in part, because they had far less competition relative to the size of their markets.  The NHL's entrance filled a gap in the marketplace. While the success in Dallas might suggest that adding hockey to an already sports-saturated market can work, I'd argue that the examples in Phoenix, Miami and twice before in Atlanta would indicate the Stars' situation is the outlier. 

[Sec19Row53]

49 minutes ago, the admiral said:

EDIT2: I think "Ungoneupon" is also a small town near the Manitoba-Ontario border

 

Quoting this because the post deserved a thumbs up, and this line deserved an LOL emoji. So here's both.

[The_Admiral]

 

2 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

While the success in Dallas might suggest that adding hockey to an already sports-saturated market can work, I'd argue that the examples in Phoenix, Miami and twice before in Atlanta would indicate the Stars' situation is the outlier. 

 

The Stars were as much of a checkbook champ as the Red Wings were at the same time but never seem to  draw the same contempt because, I  dunno, people think Daryl Reaugh would be fun to hang out with or something. Take away Tom Hicks Pokemonning his way through the roster of NHL '94 and it's not impossible that they don't make it.

[IceCap]

3 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

Having said that, the league isn't obligated to leave money on the table to nurture the inferiority complex a lot of Canadians.

Neither are we obliged to pretend your rebellion against the common (and justified) narration in Canada is anything but contrarianism. 

 

22 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

The league's return to Winnipeg has gone about as well as anyone could have hoped, and yet they're still ranked 27th in the league when it comes to franchise value.

And yet they're far and away more valuable then they ever were in Atlanta. What does that say, given Atlanta's economic and population advantages over Winnipeg?

 

2 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

The reason that Atlanta could one day get a third shot at the NHL is because it would seem to satisfy both objectives. 

Well that didn't happen the first two times. 

 

The Sunbelt Avengers Contrarian Brigade likes to say Saskatoon would never work, but I donno. They keep wanting to try Atlanta again, and I think Saskatoon's next up on the "Canadian Prairie Cities" list  

[The_Admiral]

40 minutes ago, IceCap said:

And yet they're far and away more valuable then they ever were in Atlanta. What does that say, given Atlanta's economic and population advantages over Winnipeg?

 

Every owner selling a team in North America owes Donald Sterling a debt of gratitude for permanently bloating franchise valuations by being hilariously racist. To think that you could buy a worthless-ass hockey team for right around 100 mil circa the iPhone 4.

[gosioux76]

1 hour ago, IceCap said:

Well that didn't happen the first two times. 

 

The Sunbelt Avengers Contrarian Brigade likes to say Saskatoon would never work, but I donno. They keep wanting to try Atlanta again, and I think Saskatoon's next up on the "Canadian Prairie Cities" list  

 

Personally, I'd love to see additional Canadian expansion, particularly to Quebec City. Long overdue. And like with Winnipeg, I think the game would be well-served by returning to the markets it abandoned in the '90s. (Saskatoon is less than half the size of Winnipeg, in terms of population, so while it works as a metaphorical example, it falls short in about every other metric that matters.)

 

But you know that there's almost certainly someone, somewhere in the league offices who believes that the upside of Atlanta is so strong that even making it a moderate success would reap more benefits for the league than a return to Quebec City. It really isn't even about "sunbelt vs. canada." It's about finding a way to crack the 8th largest metropolitan area and the home to some of the nation's biggest consumer-facing corporate brands and potential sponsors.

 

It's the same reason why Houston (the 5th largest MSA) is considered a near shoo-in for the next round of expansion. 

 

The fact that Winnipeg got the Jets back is a miracle, and one that I would be surprised to ever see repeated.