Jim Balsillie believes Canada should have another NHL franchise.

Agree that percentage of seats sold is a better gauge. In that case Minnesota moves up to number 5. You can only sell what you have available. Yes, you can guess where I'm from.

Also agree that a suitable building is necessary.

 

As long as they're averaging close to 19,000 attendance nearly every home game and sometimes hitting over 20,000 (or at least selling the tickets), the Tampa Bay Lightning aren't going anywhere unless some Canadian half-wit does something pathologically stupid.

 

First rule of busienss: go to markets where there's a real and quanitifable demand for your product as opposed to forcing your product into markets which are either totallly ignorant of or indifferent to your product.

The NHL expansion into Tampa, Florida, Arizona, Atlanta and Nashville made no business sense, other than it being a nice cash grab for existing owners who got their slice of the expansion fees.

The awarding of the original franchise to Ottawa was a joke. They had no money and a business plan that was smoke and mirrors. If you read up on the subject, the group in Hamilton had everything in place but they were turned down because they wanted to pay their expansion fees over a period of time; the Ottawa group was willing to pay it up front--even though they didn't have the actual cash

Yeah, that was a great business plan.

Now Balsillie may not be the easiest person to deal with but here you have a guy who's got the cash who also will build his own arena. When he put his bid in for Nashville, he also purchased a big chunk of land right on Highway 401, about an hour's drive from a market of oh, approximately 6 million people where he was going to build his rink. But only Bettman could ignore the largest hockey market in thw world and say, "Nah, we'd rather stay in Nashville--where ticket prices are slightly higher than Major Junior's--or go to Kansas City".

Yeah, that's a great business model.

A team in K-W would be able to get more TV revenue, higher ticket prices and far more merchandising revenue than any market in the US that doesn't have a franchise.

I'm not all misty-eyed over this. I look at it from a buiness point of view and it makes no sense.

The point is there is no rational business reason to keep one, maybe two teams out of Canada.

And I do agree with EF. Winnipeg's too small.

The whole "Oh Bettman rolled back salaries" is a topic for another discussion. All I'll say, "Yeah, he shut down the league for a year and in a country where the sport is barely on the radar, he made it pretty much invisible. Oh, but the league got Versus,"

OK, I'll retract my comment about Tampa Bay. But go back to the pre-Cup days and see what their attendance figures were like.

And, yup, Boston & Chicago's attendance has sucked recently but that's more to do with the quality of teams and the Wirtz factor.


If the Leafs have taught us anything, Canadians are suckers for hockey and will show up for games no matter how pathetic their team is.

Edit: Arizona was not an expansion team but you know what I mean.

 

Exactly what good did the lockout do?

The cap is going up to $60 million this summer. Players are signing long term, big money deals. And some owners are grumbling about the CBA.

 

For the record, I LOVE this thread.

 

So if a Sun Belt team doesn't draw it's a poor business model, but if a Original Six franchise that makes the playoffs ranks in the bottom five for attendance, it's tied to the lack of quality of play? Makes perfect sense.

I've talked to friends and family. You might not believe this, because you don't seem to believe any non-Canadian market can thrive in the NHL, but the people there want an NHL team. Not an NBA team, because the Kansas Jayhawks are already close enough, but an NHL team.

 

Oz,

I didn't say an NHL team couldn't thrive in a US market. And Boston and Chicago are sitll niche markets even though the're Original Six teams. What was that old saying?

"There are 20,000 Black Hawks fans in Chicago and they all go to the games".

This conversation started off with a discussion about the NHL's business model, which has proven itself, to put it charitably, less than successful with virtually no long term planning or even rudimentary market research. The league has been trying to elevate the exposure of the game in the US since the 1960's. It is and will continue to be a niche sport, no matter how much Bettman thinks otherwise.

I have no doubt that hockey could probably succeed in K-C but any first year biz student knows that before you start expanding into secondary markets, you make sure you've exploited your primary market.

The fact is that there are at least one market in Canada that would generate more revenue for the league than a team in one of the US markets. That's a businesss reality.

I'm not implying--but some people seen to be inferring--that this is some sort of thinly disguised anti-American thing on my part. It's not.

It makes NO business sense-no matter how you look at it---that teams in the US continue to flounder while there is a huge demand in THE LARGEST HOCKEY MARKET IN THE WORLD for another team where you could command premium prices on tickets, TV revenue and merchasndising as opposed to the US where the league is giving away TV rights to NBC but blowing them at the same time.

 

JR, thanks for the explanation. I agree that southern Ontario ought to get a franchise, for sure. Canada deserves another team and that area would probably be the best fit for it, given that the other markets are either too small or don't have the arena in place or in future plans. As much as I would love to see Quebec with an NHL team again, the locals there (when my wife and I visited two years ago) said it's probably too small a city to support the NHL again. So southern Ontario gets the nod.

And while I will readily admit to being somewhat biased here given friends and family there, but Kansas City's a good second choice for a franchise. The Sprint Center is already up and running, they've offered free rent to the Penguins in the past so maybe that's on the table for another team, and the people there would love to have the NHL. As a bonus, KC would finally be in the same conference as St. Louis in a sport, so you've got a huge natural rivalry from the start.

If the NHL expands by two -- or if teams simply move -- those ought to be the choices.

 

Why is Seattle not a candidate for a NHL team? Isn't KeyArena only 13 years old?

 

The rebuilt version, yes. Key Arena itself has been around since 1962.

http://www.keyarenatickets.net/index.shtml

 

Thanks for the info, Ozzie.