Tell me again why the NHL needs to stay in Nashville

How do the southern hockey teams draw?

I went to a Lightning game several years ago. We walked up the day of the game and bought tickets three rows behind the glass. Granted, this is when they sucked, but still...

 

And in the case of the Islanders a few years ago, not even that.

 

Plenty of good seats to be had in Miami and Atlanta. The first two games of the Rangers-Thrashers 2007 playoff series was in Atlanta, and it sounded like MSG.

 

Baby steps. First the league welcomed $50K John Spano as an owner. Once that blew up in their faces, they decided that a potential owner should be able to, you know, pay for a fucking team.

 

IIRC, the Devils made noise about moving to Nashville before getting the new arena in Newark.

 

Won't have that happen now. They were top-10 in attendance last year, and that was when they sucked and before the recent ownership, front-office and coaching changes.

 

Technically true, but hardly adjacent events. This was back in the mid 90s.

As for JR, I think someone has pointed out a solution that lets us both have what we really want.

http://sports.aol.ca/article/forget-nashville-jim-buy-the-leafs/363288/

 

That was several years ago before they were anything resembling a decent team.

I remember someone telling me that when the Panthers made the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996 that one of the games wasn't a sellout.

I know Dallas has drawn pretty well in the past. Don't know if that's still the case.

 

Dallas struggled a bit (still in the area of 17,000 a game) after moving to the American Airlines Center, developing the bad habit of losing in the first round and alienating a lot of the ticket holders. But I don't think they ever lost money in a season.

The Stars have significantly upped their season-ticket base after last year's playoff run and have made really good strides my making up with their fan base after losing Armstrong and Lites, two very unpopular figures. They averaged 18,038 fans per game in 07-08, 97.5 percent capacity, in a year where their season-ticket base was the lowest it's been in a while.

But there's a huge amount of hypocrisy in talking about sellouts and average attendance. The Oilers and Flames both had putrid attendance figures in the mid-1990s, but no one ever attributed that to the "failure of hockey in the market." They attributed it to the Oilers and Flames sucking. I think that same reasoning should be applied to Florida, Phoenix and Atlanta, in particular. None of those teams has consistently good or even consistently competitive since 2000.

Finally, Balsillie has no one to blame but himself for not already owning the Predators. He's the one who got 10 steps ahead of himself by selling season tickets in Hamilton BEFORE HE'D BOUGHT THE TEAM. Every potential owner has to make nice with the league before they buy, and that was telling the league he'd be an incredible headache and not worth his money.

If he can't figure that out, he doesn't deserve to be included.

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/attendance?year=2007


Phoenix, Boston, New Jersey, Washington, New York Islanders, Chicago and St. Louis, all drew less than Nashville in 2007.

And they outdrew Columbus, Phoenix and the Islanders in 08 and were within about 400 of Boston.

I used just the home numbers for this comparison.

Nashville was actually 18th in the league in 2001 and had increased attendance the last two years before dropping off last year.

 

You and your damn facts, always getting in the way.

What kills Nashville is the lack of corporate support. It's more of a branch office town than a headquarters town, and the companies that are based there have been stingy with support. When Leipold applied to admit the Predators, they were going to be the first and only pro team in town. Then once the ball got rolling for hockey, Bud Adams came out of nowhere and said he wanted to move the Oilers in. I don't think the Preds front office ever recovered their footing entirely after that.

 

I'm cynical enough to believe that if he hadn't done that, Buttman would have said something like, "sorry, Mr. Balsillie, there's no evidence that Hamilton and area would support a team in our league. If you had done something to prove otherwise, like take deposits for season tickets or something of that nature, then we might have considered it....."