With teams like the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes and the Tampa Bay Lightning – who in spite of a 2004 Stanley Cup win are reportedly borrowing from themselves to pay their players – it seems a good time to check on the health of so-called sunbelt hockey.
Despite growing up in Boston Bruins territory, being a Bobby Orr fan as a small child, and attending a high school that had both junior varsity and varsity hockey teams, I only started following the NHL in earnest about 10 years ago, when I started playing the sport myself.
It was actually the 1998 women’s Olympic ice hockey team that got me re-interested in the sport. Working for a company that had a box at the San Jose Sharks’ home arena enabled me to follow it post-Olympics. I am a beneficiary, one could say, of sunbelt hockey (and a Canadian CEO).
I’m also a promoter of amateur hockey—especially adult beginner and intermediate hockey—who can report, anecdotally, that e-mails and comments from newly-minted players in the southeast went up on my hockey blog directly following the championship seasons of the Carolina Hurricanes and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
And yet I can’t help thinking that the NHL needs fewer teams, not more. Thirty teams is a LOT. It’s the same number of teams as in all of Major-League Baseball, in case you were wondering—and baseball is America’s game. Hockey is Canada’s. But putting aside the baffling fact that U.S. NHL franchises outnumber Canadian ones 4:1, I have a hard time understanding how 30 teams can possibly be profitable. Certainly, all 30 can’t be good.
Which brings us back to the sunbelt, and its incompatibility with ice. Do we really need teams in Nashville, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, AND Ft. Lauderdale? (Personally, I’m not sure we need any NHL teams in Florida, much less two of them.) Does the Los Angeles area alone need two teams? Certainly Arizona could do without, don’t you think?
I understand and support Jim Balsillie’s bid to bring an NHL team (specifically the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes) to Hamilton, Ontario—an area that appears to have more than enough hockey fans to support a franchise. What I absolutely don’t want to see is the kind of dealmaking that finally brought hockey back to Minnesota… but only by adding a team to the league (and leaving the former Northstars in Dallas). In fact, what I’d prefer is a 3-for-1 deal where Balsillie gets to build his Hamilton team from the remains of the Coyotes, Panthers, and Predators… and maybe a Lightning and a Thrasher or two.
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As a former Floridian I say that, yes, Florida needs two teams. I also say this, The Lightning really needs better PR.
There are many people in the south that are passionate about hockey, it isn’t their fault that it doesn’t actually get cold. And Florida is a huge state. If you live in Pensacola and want to see the Panthers play that is a 10 hour drive at least. You’d have a shorter trip going to a Dallas Stars home game.
BUT, 30 teams is a lot. There are three teams in the state of New York, no? How many in California?
Not being able to make payroll is just bad management. Maybe we should pay players slightly less millions. Or charge $10 a beer.
Understand, I’m not giving YOU a hard time (well, except for the Florida thing).
There are 30 teams in Major league Baseball, 30 in the NBA and 32 in football.
Maybe the NHL needs to get their finances in order.
New York and California have the same issues as Florida: They’re big states, and nobody’s going to travel from Buffalo to NYC or San Jose to LA to see a hockey game (well, I did the latter once, but I’m an exception). That said, I have a couple follow-up thoughts:
1. Just because you’re passionate about hockey doesn’t mean you’re entitled to an NHL team in your city. I’d argue that some of the expansion teams can’t have enough fans that are *that* passionate, or their attendance figures would be higher. Passionate fans is what the NHL Center Ice package is for.
2. If the NHL wants to spread hockey to the sunbelt, why not start a southern minor league? Cheaper tickets, more venues, lots of fun for the hockey fans (especially if the minor league teams are affiliated with NHL teams).
3. If it were me, I’d get rid of the Islanders. Their attendance levels have been low for years, and there are already two other teams in the metro-NYC area (the NJ Devils and the NY Rangers). The trick with measuring worthiness by attendance, though, is that it can shift dramatically over a couple seasons. Take the Chicago Blackhawks, for example: They went from 29th in attendance in 2007 to 1st in 2009.
4. I hold by my assertion that 30 teams is too many for the NHL, and that the NHL could get its finances in order by reducing the number of teams. Hockey, to my great chagrin, is just not as popular in the U.S. as football, baseball, or basketball, and the NHL needs to stop pretending that it is. See #2 for one idea on spreading love for the sport; another is to encourage youth and adult participation in recreational leagues. The NHL has tried to increase demand by increasing supply, and that obviously hasn’t worked well enough to be sustainable. I say scale back now and prove that demand for hockey is there before adding back any teams.