NHL Board of Governors to approve opening of expansion process; Atlanta and Houston believed to be leading candidates

[LeafGrief]

Sure, keep alienating the core fan bases with expansion and chasing the new dollars. Fans of the small market teams will applaud the addition of more small markets and the owners will bathe in expansion fees, but more teams doesn’t just dilute skill level, it dilutes the entertainment product. Most of the games on the schedule are already boring, fewer rivalries is boring, and boring sucks.

What does more teams actually do for the big markets? The Leafs, Habs, and Rangers have been keeping half the league in business for decades with equalization payments, so the league pays them back by making championships harder to win, top players harder to come by, and making decisions based on the fans who hate them.

By all means, milk the good will of the big clubs. Our owners have bought into the Ponzi Scheme of expansion whole hog, but at the end of the day the league wakes up and realizes the Leafs and Habs have lost two thirds of their fan bases, all that magical franchise value they’re getting from expansion fees will disappear like the mirage it is.

Canada loves hockey, you can see how much the country followed the Oilers run, but there’s 82 regular season games and the interest is dying among my friends and family. This wave of expansion isn’t the main thing to blame, but it is the clearest indicator that the league just does not give a single hoot about the clubs that paid the bills for the last 50 years, and the reality check will be fierce when it comes.

Anyone paying a billion dollars for a place at the NHL table is a sucker.

 

[Lazlo Hollyfeld]

That's ... typically how things go. But it's fine.

I will freely admit that I'm not the smartest person in the room. However, I do tend to listen to those who are.

So, let's approach this from another direction, shall we? What makes you or some other posters think the talent pool is already too diluted to expand again? Are Bill Daly, Gary Bettman, and others wrong when they say the talent pool is fine and one could add a number of new teams and not see a problem? How so?

You guys wanna convince me that this isn't about gatekeeping and is about actual demonstrable talent dilution? Now's your chance.

Difficulty: Don't cite bad moves by bad GMs. That's already been tried, and it didn't work.

Are you using Gary Bettman and Bill Daly as a reputable source on anything?

"fans think the game has never been better" during the clutch and grab era
"There's no link between concussions and CTE"
"helmet ads are temporary"
"you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to put ads on jerseys"
"We're not looking to expand to Seattle"
"fans love the digital ads"

Honestly I don't know how much talent dilution will be an issue but the fact that Bettman and Daly are saying it's not a problem is the biggest evidence it probably is.

My main issue is the season is already too long. With more teams there'll be ones that barely play one another. Rivalries will be watered down. Less chance for some markets to see star players.

 

[dj4aces]

Are you using Gary Bettman and Bill Daly as a reputable source on anything?

No, although I can see how you and others might have connected those dots. That was my mistake. Just because tweedle-dee and tweedle-dumbass are saying something doesn't necessarily make it true -- or false, for that matter -- but I digress.

The fact remains though, that people who actually pay attention to these things know what dilution of the talent pool would look like and what it'll take to actually dilute said pool.

So far, no one has provided anything to empirically prove said talent pool has yet to recover from Vegas and Seattle, much less that it will become worse with Atlanta and Houston. Just anecdotes, which only tells the story if the listener doesn't know better.

 

[tucker3434]

Sure, keep alienating the core fan bases with expansion and chasing the new dollars. Fans of the small market teams will applaud the addition of more small markets and the owners will bathe in expansion fees, but more teams doesn’t just dilute skill level, it dilutes the entertainment product. Most of the games on the schedule are already boring, fewer rivalries is boring, and boring sucks.

What does more teams actually do for the big markets? The Leafs, Habs, and Rangers have been keeping half the league in business for decades with equalization payments, so the league pays them back by making championships harder to win, top players harder to come by, and making decisions based on the fans who hate them.

By all means, milk the good will of the big clubs. Our owners have bought into the Ponzi Scheme of expansion whole hog, but at the end of the day the league wakes up and realizes the Leafs and Habs have lost two thirds of their fan bases, all that magical franchise value they’re getting from expansion fees will disappear like the mirage it is.

Canada loves hockey, you can see how much the country followed the Oilers run, but there’s 82 regular season games and the interest is dying among my friends and family. This wave of expansion isn’t the main thing to blame, but it is the clearest indicator that the league just does not give a single hoot about the clubs that paid the bills for the last 50 years, and the reality check will be fierce when it comes.

Anyone paying a billion dollars for a place at the NHL table is a sucker.

Expansion is the reason the Leafs are worth however many billion they were just valued in sale. How do people not understand this?

 

[VaporTrail]

Stop adding teams to the NHL...Create a second tier and implement relegation...This would also help teams from deliberately tanking.

 

[EMcx2]

Relegation is not happening in the NHL... If you think it's a possibility you really don't understand how the business of professional hockey works in the North America.

 

[dj4aces]

Stop adding teams to the NHL...Create a second tier and implement relegation...This would also help teams from deliberately tanking.

How do you convince owners to support this? How do you convince the fans of relegated teams to spend NHL dollars to see what basically amounts to an AHL-caliber team?

Genuinely curious.

 

[nerevarine]

So the nhl will have more teams than every other big professional league in north america right?

 

[Tawnos]

So the nhl will have more teams than every other big professional league in north america right?

Fitting for a league with the most viable markets of any big pro league in North America.

 

[ICanMotteBelieveIt]

Such an obvious money grab. There's enough teams already.

 

[JS19]

There’s no debate to be had, expansion dilutes.
Have a good day, no use continuing this.

People are missing the point about the whole dilution concern. Using examples of losing X star player and replacing him with league-average replacement player or worse only takes into account the impacts felt in the short term and disregards what teams do to replace the star player via the draft or free agency. And this isn't really representative of whether talent was actually diluted. In addition, I think people forget hockey is a global sport, how many times have we seen players move over from international leagues and into the NHL via the draft or free agency?

In fact, this logic can be extended to when the league moved from Original Six to 12 in the 60s and then 16, 18, to eventually 32 right now. You would have said the talent would be diluted in any of the previous years, especially when you're dealing with a mix of no minor hockey league(s), the smaller number of roster spots and skill level of players, and the direction of the league (admittedly, your best argument would have been expansion in the 70s-90s diluting talent, but when you look at those teams now, there's more talent now than there ever was, so is that really a good argument?)

At some point, people need to realize they're rehashing a stupid talking point that has no basis in reality or history.

 

[Viqsi]

People were ready to give up on Ottawa and rightfully so. Their economics and fan support was/is horrible and their owner was a POS. Had they moved, I wouldn't have been surprised and it 100% would have been justifiable. They got what Atlanta/Arizona needed; a white knight owner willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.

Chicago and Toronto? They had shitty owners but they were never losing 10's of millions of dollars per year. Big difference.

That was exactly my point. "Bad ownership means a bad situation" was a bullshit argument and that was what I was pointing out.

 

[Viqsi]

Sure, keep alienating the core fan bases

Well, if those teams don't continue to get fan support, that clearly means they don't deserve to stick around because they're obviously Not A Hockey Market. That's how I'm told it works, anyways.

 

[Pinkfloyd]

The talent pool gets diluted…

Fans lose games against historic rivals…playing the teams I grew up hating less often so I can get a 10:00 start against Seattle and Vegas is absolutely horrific.

Currently, there has to be at least one team that hasn’t won a cup in 31 years, add 4 teams and that goes up to 35 years. As there becomes less and less of a reason to think there will eventually be a championship won in your lifetime, eventually there isn’t a real reason to ever get invested.

I honestly can’t think of a single benefit to existing fans that expansion provides.

You just want things easier for your team to win more. Fair enough but it makes the assertions against expansion hollow and about gate keeping.

 

[SkarEffect]

The hate for Atlanta is real and it shows. Didn't Quebec lose 2 teams too? Yet people want them back.

 

[LeafGrief]

Expansion is the reason the Leafs are worth however many billion they were just valued in sale. How do people not understand this?

I understand that just fine. But I am not a fan of MLSE's book value and Rogers' share price. I literally do not give a shit, it's not a high score that matters except in the most mundane of HFboards arguments. I'm a fan of a hockey team, so if expansion is driving franchise values to the moon, I do not care.

But what's worse is actually that the franchise values going so crazy high is because the league is quickly becoming a Ponzi Scheme. That's wacky enough that I do care. I ask what real value expansion is brining to the big market clubs because the franchise value is a scam, and it's a darn shame that all the owners seem to have bought in.

Well, if those teams don't continue to get fan support, that clearly means they don't deserve to stick around because they're obviously Not A Hockey Market. That's how I'm told it works, anyways.

The Leafs will never fold, that's too far even for a hypothetical, but if they stopped revenue sharing due to their financials collapsing, we'd lose five or six teams (number made up to illustrate point). Then the Ponzi Scheme and all that magical franchise value would really disappear in a hurry.

 

[tucker3434]

I understand that just fine. But I am not a fan of MLSE's book value and Rogers' share price. I literally do not give a shit, it's not a high score that matters except in the most mundane of HFboards arguments. I'm a fan of a hockey team, so if expansion is driving franchise values to the moon, I do not care.

But what's worse is actually that the franchise values going so crazy high is because the league is quickly becoming a Ponzi Scheme. That's wacky enough that I do care. I ask what real value expansion is brining to the big market clubs because the franchise value is a scam, and it's a darn shame that all the owners seem to have bought in.


The Leafs will never fold, that's too far even for a hypothetical, but if they stopped revenue sharing due to their financials collapsing, we'd lose five or six teams (number made up to illustrate point). Then the Ponzi Scheme and all that magical franchise value would really disappear in a hurry.

Franchise values may be overstated but that isn’t expansion’s fault, at least not exclusively. We just watched someone buy the Yotes for $1.2b.

Expansion does expand the reach of the league as a whole which does improve the leagues overall value. If you want to debate how much that is worth, fine. But it can’t be denied that it is an addition.

 

[LeafGrief]

Franchise values may be overstated but that isn’t expansion’s fault, at least not exclusively. We just watched someone buy the Yotes for $1.2b.

Expansion does expand the reach of the league as a whole which does improve the leagues overall value. If you want to debate how much that is worth, fine. But it can’t be denied that it is an addition.

Exclusively, no. But the driving force is absolutely the billion dollar checks new owners are cutting to join the club. That’s Ponzi Scheme 101. The Yotes weren’t worth 1.2b until that was the cost to sit at the table.

A new TV contract would expand the reach of the league. Better marketing would expand the reach of the league. Expansion is an addition, but it’s not a free lunch. That it’s some panacea for growing the league is a myth, and a healthy league should have a limit to the number of teams in it. The NHL is a business, but if it buys into the scam and forgets itself as a hockey league, the hockey fans will suffer.

 

[K Fleur]

Put a quality product on the ice and Atlanta(like basically every other city) will sell out home games.

Also the Atlanta of 2024 is not the same as the Atlanta of 2010. For better or worse, the market has changed considerably

 

[tucker3434]

Exclusively, no. But the driving force is absolutely the billion dollar checks new owners are cutting to join the club. That’s Ponzi Scheme 101. The Yotes weren’t worth 1.2b until that was the cost to sit at the table.

A new TV contract would expand the reach of the league. Better marketing would expand the reach of the league. Expansion is an addition, but it’s not a free lunch. That it’s some panacea for growing the league is a myth, and a healthy league should have a limit to the number of teams in it. The NHL is a business, but if it buys into the scam and forgets itself as a hockey league, the hockey fans will suffer.

A franchise is sold, either as a whole or a minority interest which gives us a valuation, every couple years or so. And every single time, the number is higher than everybody expects.

They’re obviously going to set expansion fees at a number that doesn’t devalue current franchises. But I don’t see it as a driver. Current franchises are doing that on their own.

 

[Golden_Jet]

The hate for Atlanta is real and it shows. Didn't Quebec lose 2 teams too? Yet people want them back.

I just recall once.

 

[dj4aces]

The hate for Atlanta is real and it shows. Didn't Quebec lose 2 teams too? Yet people want them back.

Some folks will use the balance of their lifetime, saying they remember only one, and in this way, QC would have only lost one team while Atlanta has lost two (I was born days after the Flames moved, so I don't remember them, therefore...). Others will use creative phrasing, saying things like "Atlanta is the only city to lose two expansion franchises". Because neither of Quebec's teams were formally considered *expansion teams*, it paints Atlanta negatively while keeping QC looking so fresh and so clean.

But no... QC has lost two. The Bulldogs and the Nordiques. Both cities have changed quite a bit since the loss of their first (and second) franchises, but both the Flames and the Bulldogs are ancient history at this point.

At the end of the day, if the Flames are fair game, so too are the Bulldogs. No amount of disingenuous arguments will change this.

 

[Golden_Jet]

But no... QC has lost two. The Bulldogs and the Nordiques. Both cities have changed quite a bit since the loss of their first (and second) franchises, but both the Flames and the Bulldogs are ancient history at this point.

You failed to mention that the Bulldogs moved over a 100 years ago.

No amount of disingenuous arguments will change this

I would say that is disengenious, failing to add they moved over 100 years ago.

 

[dj4aces]

You failed to mention that the Bulldogs moved over a 100 years ago.

I mentioned their departure is "ancient history". Along with that of the Flames.

I know, that doesn't mesh well with the view that one predates the other by a significant period of time and that's the only lens one might wish to look through. But the Bulldogs were still a NHL team, and one that QC lost.

I'll say it again, since you seem to be in the back of the room: If the Flames are fair game, so too are the Bulldogs. You can't count one and not the other.

 

[Golden_Jet]

I mentioned their departure is "ancient history". Along with that of the Flames.

60 year difference, one is ancient, one is not.