Is it a matter of the arena? No interested owners? Isn’t that a better hockey market with well established rivalries with Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan?

Anyhow, my post here was to refute the tired argument sunk has put forth that big markets = successful franchises. Yes I understand the notion of growing the game, what I had pointed out is that they tried and FAILED at this in Phoenix and other select cities. If you’re going to try to argue that Phoenix has a better chance to make money than the “tiny villages” of Quebec City and Markham (Toronto), sorry, the proof is already out there.

hockeywithdrawal put it perfectly, there’s no point of locking in franchises in small existing markets, its all about growing the sport and at least Phoenix was an attempt in doing so – which failed miserably.

However, expanding the hockey into markets like Seattle and Milwaukee would be significantly better for the sport than sticking them into tiny Canadian villages.

Grow the sport all you want, Commish – just don’t make the players pay for the expansion. It will struggle and in some cases a team might need moved. But even if a team fails, the sport was spread (probably just before it’s time). Keeping the sport to small markets or isolating the sport to several locations is just an asinine idea – and comes across as “I’ve got mine – eff the rest”.

Here’s an example. If you put another team in Toronto, did you REALLY grow the sport? Or did you just take some Maple Leafs fans and tell them to root for a different team now? That’s not growing the fan base. Neither is putting a club in a market that is already cheering on another NHL club nearby.

Saskatoon? Heck, I haven’t heard of that being a possible destination since the St Louis Blues almost moved there back around 1985. Failed Canadian franchises? That is soooo 1995, when the Canadian dollar was less than 2/3 of the American dollar. It is on par and economists certainly agree that it is here to stay.

Winnipeg experiment? How about a 17 year experiment in Phoenix that has never made money, has turned out the worst attendance in the NHL, and fewer than 10,000 fans a game watching for free on TV?

The fact is, hockey is a passion all over Canada, if you ever visited there you would be able to see it and feel it. I have to laugh when I’m up there (I travel there frequently) and see how hockey is always the lead story, not an afterthough, even in my home city of Chicago, a strong hockey market.

It was a noble idea to try to spread hockey in the US, but it has failed, at least in the south. The only teams making money are Canadian, Original Six, and Philadelphia. Winnipeg is doing just fine, Quebec or another team in Toronto will do so as well once/if they receive a team.

I can tell you NHL in Winnipeg is no experiment, one of the Co-owners of the Jets David Thompson is the richest man in Canada with a net worth of 17.6 Billion (35th in the world in the world actually).. There is not one owner in the NHL that would even come close to that…

Winnipeg has the second highest AVG ticket price in the NHL.. And the building is sold out for the next 5 years with a waiting list capped at 8000 people, not to mention all the people who share season tickets PAY as well to watch all the games on TV.

The reason why the NHL did not work in Winnipeg last time around was because they did not have anyone who wanted to buy the team due to the struggling Canadian dollar at that time.

Not saying that Seattle can’t deliver, and personally I’d like to see a team in KC for selfish reasons, but all KC can offer is a building, and Seattle has is a potential co-tenant to carry the load in a new arena.

Last year through six games, the Stanley Cup Finals averaged 3 million viewers per game on NBC.. and that’s with teams in Los Angeles and the NYC area playing, the highest ratings I could find for SCF games were the 2011 finals in which one game drew about 8.5m viewers.

So the high water mark for NHL games is fewer than 9m viewers in the United States.

(By the way, 1/4 of the population of Canada watched game 7 of the 2011 SCF.. that’s equivalent to a game drawing about 80 million viewers in the states.)

Last year the least viewed World Series game had four times as many viewers as the average rating for the SCF, and the year before that (keep in mind the 2011 SCF had that 8.5m viewed game, the most viewed NHL game on US television since 1973) the most watched World Series game still had three times as many viewers as the most watched SCF game.

Too bad Greg Jamison won’t get sued for wasting everyone’s time and a lot of cash.