Yet another argument for the NHL to move at least one team to Canuckistan

The Winter Hawks averaged about 4,000 per home date in the 07-08 season and the numbers have dropped steadily over the past several seasons, according to The Oregonian. The franchise is being audited by the WHL and officials in PDX believe the team's new owners plan to move it when the lease expires in 2013, if not before.

And PDX is not an old-school hockey town. Unless you consider 1976 to be old school.

 

There's another excellent reason not to put a team in Winnipeg, unless this has changed (I haven't been there since the Jets left): The freaking rental cars are OUTDOORS.
You walk across several hundred yards of wind-blasted, snow-covered tundra, lugging your bags, and just as you're about to give up, lie down and hope somebody discovers your body come May or June, you see these big lumps. Turns out they are not polar bears lying in wait, but the rental cars. You can tell from the little cords snaking out from the grilles, plugged into little poles.
If you can disengage the cord with your numbed hands, you can then set about cleaning off the car and driving into "town," which you can identify because it has strings of lightbulbs hung across the streets, making it look like a very large used car lot, circa 1965.
The lights are useful; given that watery "daylight" lasts about three hours in winter.

All that said, I don't cover the league anymore, so knock yourself out, put a team there. Also put 'em in Moose Jaw, Caribou Vagina, and whatever other prairie outposts might contain 12 people and a Zamboni.

Note to canucks: I am kidding. Kind of.

 

No, but I consider 1928 to be fairly old-school.

 

Point.

But there's no chance an NHL team relocates there.

 

I think there's an outside chance a team moves there... but no chance a team succeeds there.

I went to plenty of Winter Hawks games back when attendance was better. The fans were very supportive but knew absolutely zero about hockey. Those people are not buying $50 tickets to see an NHL game.

 

The D-Backs are not "loathed." Not sure where you're getting that. In fact, their attendance is up significantly this season. And Arizona hoops is about 120 miles away. It's a non-factor in Phoenix.

The Coyotes have been hurt by a number of things, so I'm not sure you can just say it's a sunbelt market that won't support a team. They opened a new building while they were in the middle of a salary purge, and then the league went into the lockout. They came out of the lockout with a ton of big-name signings and all of them were old and slow. (The biggest name was Brett Hull, and he retired almost immediately.) The franchise has been run by idiots, and as a result they are now in rebuilding mode. That's a very bad thing when you are rebuilding a team that wasn't making the playoffs anyway. And their building is on the western edge of a giant metropolitan area while the fan base was always assumed to be on the east side, meaning it's a 30-mile trip each way in traffic for a huge percentage of their fanbase.

Bottom line, I don't know if an NHL franchise can thrive here or not. But I do know THIS franchise wouldn't thrive anywhere.

And by the way... they still draw better than they did in Winnipeg.

Here's the thing that gets me about these threads -- people list cities that have franchises but shouldn't, and then they list the cities that should... and the ones that should are always smaller and usually have no significant hockey history. The key to improving the league is not shuffling bad franchises through bad cities. KC will fail. Houston will fail. Portland will fail. Seattle will fail. Winnipeg will fail... again. The Dakota suggestion cracked me up -- the combined population of North Dakota and South Dakota is about 1.3 million, significantly smaller than the Phoenix metro area.

The league screwed itself by adding too many teams. There are very, very few good markets for these teams to move to. I think Quebec City might work -- people actually did go to Nordiques games, unlike the Jets -- and the Toronto area would work. The league really needs to contract but that's not going to happen.

 

Why should Nashville be included on the list? On the ice, the team is one of the more competitive in the League, as they recently proved when they took the Wings to Game Six (a feat matched only by Dallas) and at the box office, the team had increased revenue and out-earned longtime League members Washington, the Islanders, and Chicago -- and all the despite the offseason turmoil about whether the team would remain in town or not!

The Preds continue to prove to be good for hockey and good for a town that has a long history of supporting hockey (see: Flyers, Dixie).

 

The 11-58-3 record could have been a factor.

 

Yeah, but it's been dropping for several years and the lease is unfavorable. (And no NHL team will get a favorable lease from Paul Allen.)

Eventually the team will end up in Salem or Victoria, B.C.

 

In light of the Star piece, Stephen Brunt of the Globe & Mail calls Bettman's tenure an "unequivocal failure"

http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080530.wspt-brunt-col-30/GSStory/GlobeSportsHockey/home

Pretty hard to disagree with any of this

 

Part of it might also be Betteman wanting to get the most money he possibly can for his American TV contracts. While ratings for hockey in Phoenix, Miami etc. may suck ass, viewership in Canada doesn't count at all towards the ratings statistics that determine advertising prices, and hence how much networks are willing to pay for broadcast rights.

Hartford had an NHL team before, couldn't keep it, and will need a brand new arena (with all the required 21st century revenue sources) before it has any chance of getting another one. Some of the other markets given here, like Milwaukee and Seattle, would also need those kinds of arenas.

While places like Nashville, Phoenix, Florida, etc. may seem like terrible hockey markets, the team owners love them because they have brand new, taxpayer-funded arenas there that make oodles of money from club seats, luxury boxes and all the other modern day revenue streams. While the Canadians are no doubt far hardier hockey fans, Winnipeg and Quebec City lost their teams because they couldn't get arenas that would generate enough revenue, while Edmonton and Calgary's rinks are both over 20 years old. Only Montreal and Toronto have arenas comparable to those in Dallas, Anaheim, Tampa etc.

Hartford, Milwaukee and other U.S. markets that seem like they would be great places for NHL franchises will also need to build those arenas. They either couldn't or wouldn't do it in the mid-90s when the Whalers/Hurricanes, Jets/Coyotes, Nordiques/Avalanche and Northstars/Stars were looking to move.

 

Well, JR, you can probably guess the one spot where I'm going to disagree with it.

The highest average attendance EVER for Winnipeg was in 1985-86 -- 13,694 per game.

The Coyotes were second to last in attendance in the NHL this year. They drew 14,820 per game.

Sorry, but anybody making an argument in favor of Winnipeg is ill-informed or dishonest. Winnipeg is not an NHL market. That doesn't mean Phoenix is a viable market, of course... but it's better than Winnipeg.