Because when NFL originally launched their expedition in to Europe there was so many fans there. Come on lad, NHL isn't the only league/sport, or hell, an industry, to try to grow in to new market.
Hockey should not expand at the expense of their traditional market, fine, I can accept that argument. But they should never expand outside of those markets? Thats ludicrous to me.
That's a bit of a disingenuous analogy to me. The NFL's expeditions to Europe, in order, have been to a--- put a minor league there and then b--- have one-off games there. There's perfectly logistical reasons why they haven't put honest-to-goodness NFL teams there (as you pointed out in your followup post) but that makes it a sloppy analogy. No one in St. Louis blames the NFL's obsession with London for why they no longer have a team or are unlikely to get one soon. I do agree with
@ForumNamePending that if any NFL teams in Europe were the result of relocating American teams, you could absolutely expect some nationalistic gnashing of teeth about it, esp. the moment there was an attendance downturn to instigate said teeth-gnashing.
If the NHL had decided, say, in 1985 to start arranging neutral-site regular season games in large southern markets, this would be more or a "like-to-like" analogy. And in fact, I'd be willing to bet that if the NHL had adopted that strategy, nary a fan would have complained about it...or at least certainly not to the degree that the staunchest "traditionalists" do on this board. But that doesn't mean that this would have been the better strategy.
The Premier League is indeed an e.g. that you don't need teams in the big American markets......or indeed America at all....to get a good TV contract. But that's not how the NHL sees it and I think that's probably due to that also not being the way American sports networks see it for hockey. Is it possible that having the Coyotes in Arizona didn't really create any more TV viewers for hockey than the NHL's national TV coverage would have created? I suppose, yes it is possible but the NHL needs to cater to what the ESPNs of the world think, not what we think. They're the entities that will sign the contracts.
A still-sloppy (because it's not a team sport and therefore not apples-to-apples) analogy that shows the north-south flow of "traditionalism" in complete reverse
is NASCAR. And NASCAR demonstrates that contrary to
@aqib 's initial statement, the growth-at-the-
alleged-expense-of-where-the-strongest-fanbases-are instinct is hardly an instinct reserved for the NHL.