I get that team ownership is mostly for social clout and likely won't net you much profit overall until an eventual sale, but truth be told I honestly do think that the overall franchise pricing scheme across all sports is a massive bubble waiting to burst, and dollars to donuts it'll hit the NHL first.
It's one of those things - I too think that sports team valuations are a bubble, and will eventually come back to earth.
The thing is though - bubbles can last for a very long time. Take a look at Bitcoin, which is not connected to anything. The price has jumped around for quite awhile, but is still fairly high for something with no intrinsic value.
Or look at the most famous example (in my lifetime) - the dotcom bubble. People were saying for years that dotcom stocks were a bubble, yet the prices kept going higher. Until they didn't.
Or look at real estate - people have been saying for 20 years that real estate values were a bubble. While there have been some examples of the "bubble bursting" (think Arizona during 2008) real estate valuations have remainder extremely high. So perhaps it's just the new normal.
Or finally - back in 1999 there was a book - DOW 36000, published in 1999. It predicted that the DOW Jones industrial average would hit 36000 points within a few years. Famously this was untrue - you again had the dotcom bubble collapsing, plus the 9/11 attacks.
The thing is - the DOW Jones average is at 42,000 today.
So long stor short - investing $1.2 billion (or more!) in an NHL franchise isn't necessarily a crazy idea. It's just a really, really expensive bet.