NHL to expand by four by '17?

Bring back Hartford. For one reason:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJtiepwpKFw

(Of course that may be easier said, then done).

 

Breakfasts come and go, but Hartford, the Whale, they only beat Vancouver once, maybe twice, in a lifetime.

 

Still one of the best logos.

 

Think he was working for Spain at the time.

 

Scheduling and division-wise, it would be utterly insane/idiotic to go past the algebraically-perfect number of 32 franchises.

Not to mention that right this second there are probably 4-8 franchises which are teetering on the brink of financial collapse and will probably require/demand a move within the next several years. If you hand out all these prime territories to expansion teams, where do the existing vagabond franchises end up?

Are they gonna just keep on fuckin' the chicken in hockey wastelands like Carolina, Columbus, Miami and Phoenix forever?

 

The LA Kings used to benefit from that in the 70s when they were thousands of miles from the nearest competitors. They always faced the backup goalie, and half the guys on the other team would be so sunburned they could barely skate.

I'm pretty confident they'd only ban betting on the Las Vegas team's games, like they do with college sports. They won't take the whole league off the board.

 

The Maple Leafs having veto power is very murky. The Hockey News' Ken Campbell tried to explain it a few years ago.
http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/43130-Campbell-Can-the-Maple-Leafs-prevent-a-team-from-moving-to-Southern-Ontario.html
However, if New York City had basically three teams for most of the last 30 years or so, and LA has two teams, there is no reason not to have a second team in Toronto, at least somewhere in the GTA. And no, Hamilton is not the answer, as the building is ancient and I doubt little excitement about spending $500 million on a new building there, especially after watching the city make a complete mess out of rebuilding Ivor Wynne Stadium. Plus I don't think it would take much to revive the Markham Arena plans with the real possibility of bringing a second NHL team to the area.

That being said, expanding the league by four is stoopid, especially with a complete mess sitting there in Miami with the Panthers, who's latest owners have basically already said the team has no long term future in the city (http://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/nhl/florida-panthers/). The product does not need to watered down any further, just rescued from markets that are terrible.

 

This may be a dumb question because I really have no clue about the logistic and ramifications of contraction, but could the plan be to expand to these cities and collect the expansion fees, then contract the likes of Florida, Arizona and maybe others? Otherwise I can't imagine how they think four more teams is a good idea.

 

No. Makes no business sense. The players' union would go batshit over the loss of jobs, and you can't charge a big expansion fee if the new owners know they could just buy an existing team and move it for a fraction of the price. Plus, the amount of money you'd have to pay the owners of the contracted teams would nullify most of the possible benefits. A group just bought the Coyotes a few months ago -- they're not looking to dump the team.

Four more teams is a ridiculous idea, but perfectly in keeping with the league's history expansion history. They always add far more teams than they should.

 

Sighhhhhhh...

No "major league" sports league is ever going to contract. Never, ever, ever, ever again.

The Number One Presumption upon which ALL expectations of future value of a franchise in a sports league is based, is that the franchise is going to continue to exist.


Once that presumption goes out the window, the future viability of all franchises in the league is dramatically degraded, and franchise values plunge like a meteor.

That's why over the last couple decades, almost every major pro league has from time to time "bought back" various financially-troubled franchises, operated it until a buyer can be scared up. In the olden olden days (say, before the mid-1980s) if franchises went bankrupt, they would go bankrupt -- if worse came to worse the league would allow them to go out of business (see NHL Cleveland Barons).

But not now with hundreds of millions of dollars in teevee money and most franchises playing in multi-hundred-million dollar taxpayer-paid arenas. The franchises have become "too big to fail," because the owners know if they did allow (for instance) the Phoenix Coyotes to go out of business, the (potential) franchise value of the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Rangers would take a 30-40% shit the next morning.

 

Are there 90 more NHL-level players out there to help make these teams competitive?

Past expansions were helped by the influx of European players, but there are no more untapped pools.