Although I completely agree with what you're saying, I don't see why another league can't be started up in North America. The only hurdle that the new league would face is history. That's the only thing thats on the NHL side.
Its almost the same as saying if Walmart is already in your city, then why would any other businesses try to come in?
Are any tickets in the league affordable? Outside of Florida/Tampa Bay/Phoenix, I wouldn't say that sitting up in the 300 section of a building, paying over $100 is reasonable.
Here's a
link that hopefully provides valuable information on why a new league has no sustainability. It can certainly start-up all it wants, but the NHL will crush it so hard, that it's a venture in utter futility.
The World Hockey Association (French: Association mondiale de hockey) was a professional ice hockey league that operated in North America from 1972 to 1979. It was the first major competition for the National Hockey League (NHL) since the collapse of the Western Hockey League in 1926. Although the WHA was not the first league since that time to attempt to challenge the NHL's supremacy, it was by far the most successful
Furthermore, why would an owner want to start a new league rather than buy into the NHL's market by franchising a new team and then benefitting from the revenue sharing and marketing structure already in place.
Here are a few key differences between what the WHA was able to do and what a new league would be able to do:
The WHA hoped to capitalize on the lack of hockey teams in a number of major cities[sup]1[/sup], and it also hoped to attract the best players by paying more than NHL owners would[sup]2[/sup]. The WHA successfully challenged the reserve clause, which bound players to their NHL teams even without a valid contract, allowing players in both leagues greater freedom of movement. Sixty-seven players jumped from the NHL to the WHA in the first year, led by star forward Bobby Hull, whose ten-year, $2.75 million contract was a record at the time. Unlike the NHL, the WHA also signed many European players.[sup]3[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup] There are fewer Canadian cities not currently in the NHL and even fewer that would be considered a big enough market to bother posting a team in. A new team might be able to wrest a spot in Toronto/Markham, but Halifax, Saskatoon and maybe Victoria would be the few other top contenders (assuming that the NHL puts a team in Quebec City). This differs from when the WHA came into being, when teams could be placed in Edmonton, Winnipeg and Quebec City.
Even at that, the WHA was only successful (for a brief time) because it went and added teams in the US as well. That's an integral consideration for marketing and broadcasting. Getting the games televised outside of using hand-helds and YouTube would be very hard to do with a Canada Only policy...
[sup]2[/sup]It would be very, very hard to find enough billionaires who wanted to start up a Canada only league and out-pay the NHL for star talent. In fact, I would almost guarantee that it would be impossible. The KHL does offer some players better salaries than NHL players, for example the rumoured offer for Ovechkin to stay in Russia or for players like Radulov, however the majority of players there make less money than average NHLers.
The major benefit for the KHL is that income is entirely tax exempt, meaning the take-home is much higher compared to the heavily taxed NA contracts.
However, taxes on income are much higher in Canada than in the USA, meaning that offering more money to players here would actually require offering upward of 50% of a player's market value just to get in the ball-game. That means a CPHL would have to pay a Sidney Crosby $13.05M/yr, and even that assumes Crosby would be interested in the same "discounted" contract he took with the Penguins.
And that further takes into assumption that Crosby is okay losing the mega-million dollar endorsements because I'm sure the majority of the Yankee businesses like Reebok and Nike will be cancelling their contracts with anyone defecting to a CPHL that has no ability to properly market itself, meaning Crosby would not be seen by millions of Americans and wouldn't "sell" the Reebok brand like he currently does.
Perhaps new sponsors might come into the picture, but not at what he currently gets.
[sup]3[/sup] The NHL no longer avoids European players, despite Don Cherry's lamentations, which is a major reason why the KHL isn't bigger than it is, and why it tries so desperately to retain Russian stars. However, the NHL currently taps into all the European markets, and it's scouting network is world-wide and growing.
But wait, that's irrelevant because the CPHL only wants Canadians, making it even less likely to get NHL talent to defect, and at-best would draw in some AHLers and ECHLers, and the few Canadians playing in European leagues.
Without the desire to attack markets that haven't quite got the NHL signing them up, and with a nationalistic attitude and approach, a CPHL would not make it off the ground, let alone flourish.
) used to be in Montreal, where the league has it's roots.
