Going through a desk the other day, I came across a clipping of an old column of mine. It was from another era, when the NHL had 18 teams, the WHA still was in business (barely) and Elvis only a short while earlier had left the building (permanently).
The issue was what makes a hockey town, and it had come up because even the head of the players' union, "Honest Alan" Eagleson, had mused that the league would be better off eliminating several markets and many jobs. (Maybe that should have been a hint about his integrity.) Several franchises, including the Colorado Rockies, were struggling at the gate, and the thinking among hockey folks at that point -- and these were men who wore tuxedos to league functions and often threw up on them by the end of the night -- was that there could be only one reason for games not selling out.
Those cities had to be bad hockey towns -- or not hockey towns at all.
The interesting thing was that the standard was selective, because cities such as Detroit, where the empty seats in the Olympia for Red Wings' games were numerous, got an "Original Six" free pass, although the teams considered the "Original Six" weren't the league's "Original Six" at all.