Could NHL surpass NBA?

[joelef]

Expense has little to do it. NBA / basketball is Heavily tied with pop culture and hip hop along with the fact that the nba markets there stars. Also the nba has college basketball/ march madness to get people excited about future stars while hockey has the chl which Dosent try to market in the USA. Over half of ncaa hockey are small northern d2 and d3 schools that the mainstream has never heard of.

 

[JFedol]

Hell no, basketball is heavily tied culturally with the most popular facets of pop culture. AAU is something else though price wise, but basketball has always been a easy sport to pick up and play.

 

[Phil Kessels Hot Dog]

...Hockey is also by far the most expensive sport to play...a LOT of kids just don't have the opportunity to play the game cuz it's soo expensive...

Anecdotally, I spend more for my kid to play Rep baseball than I did for Rep hockey.

 

[joelef]

The game is dying out in many places do to demographic changes. That why I want to “ grow the game”

 

[DrDangles]

Well yes, but no

 

[Erik Alfredsson]

I've been saying it for years, but the NHL has to increase the amount of teams that qualify for the playoffs if they want to grow the game more. You can't have half of the markets in the league looking at their franchises as failures. You have to grow and increase interest on a local level first before you can hope to grow nationwide. The efforts with stuff like the 4 Nations is nice, but that works because casual fans have a team to root for. You need a team to cheer for in sports, and no new fan is going to want to start cheering for their local team if their team isn't competitive.

When the 16 team format was introduced there were 21 teams in the league. There's 32 now. It needs to expand to 20 or even 24 teams. New markets like Utah and Seattle would especially benefit from this.

 

[SirJW]

Yes, for 30 years they've had the chance to surpass the NBA.

 

[castle]

Actually that’s a very Westernized perspective. Cricket is the 2nd most popular sport in the world with 2.5 billion fans. Field hockey/hockey is 3rd. Basketball is 7th.

This is terms of fans.

Not sure what you mean by westernised. Do you just mean north America?
It's still pretty niche, being a sport for the former empire or commonwealth or whatever you want to call it. Most of Europe and Asia and Africa and South America couldn't care less, in addition to North America.
But in India, Pakistan, the UK, Australia, South Africa, and some West Indies it's a big sport.
2.5 billion fans? Whoever came up with that fanciful number must just be counting the entire population of India as fans. They might not be far off, though.

 

[Auston Marlander]

...this is the Team Sports chat, not the Recreational Activity chat...

You said sport, you said nothing about teams.