Posted on 11/06/2019 7:49:23 AM PST by C19fan
The team’s appeal fades, it faces financial distress, and it becomes a candidate for relocation.
That’s just my humble opinion.
500 large would set me for life. These people are morons.
"Mob" has nothing to do with it... The deserts have always been the solution of last resort... Gambling that they aren't these days, still, is tantamount to making a "fire" bet...
I’d take that bet.
Las Vegas was a unique situation. It was a polity with no identity. To outsiders, Las Vegas wasn’t real. Then came the shooting and a wounded town found comfort in a hockey team that embraced them. Them became us. The Knights became the hottest ticket in the NHL and most of it is due to local enthusiasm.
I have to admit having studied socio-political interactions many moons ago, it was fun to watch.
While I think Las Vegas is secure, I’m not confident about Seattle. The NHL there will be just another sports team.
The biggest challenge an expansion team or relocated team faces isn’t the first few years. Those are the years when the new team attracts a lot of interest simply because it’s a novelty — no matter how good or bad the team is.
The real challenge comes a few years later after the novelty wears off and the team is just an ordinary franchise in a professional sports league. The team will still maintain a strong fan base if it is improving and building itself into a championship contender, but the potential for a loss of interest is highest once the fans have experienced a dominant season (especially a championship) and the team must rebuild for several years. This is the most vulnerable period for a new team.
Under normal circumstances a new team will build itself into a championship contender AFTER the novelty of the new team wears off. So the franchise could potentially get a decade-long run where fans start following the team as a novelty, then stay with the team as its performance peaks. In the case of the Golden Knights, they became a good team so quickly that this period of strong fan interest may end up lasting only a few seasons before mediocrity sets in and the casual fans disappear.
A perfect example of this was the Colorado Avalanche. They didn’t enter the NHL as an expansion team. Instead, they relocated from Quebec City at a time when they were already one of the most dominant teams in the NHL. They won a Stanley Cup in their first season in Denver, won another one five years later, and remained a dominant team for the better part of a decade. They were a hot ticket through those years, for sure.
Once that dominant period ended their decline was rapid and alarming. Fans in Denver who never knew what it was like to see a losing team vanished as soon as the team’s performance declined when the great players from their championship teams aged and moved on. They missed the playoffs for the first time around 2008, and within several years they were in such financial distress that they were regularly mentioned — along with dismal franchises in weak hockey markets like Florida and Arizona — as a strong candidate for a sale and relocation. It has taken them years to recover financially.
I still believe the Knights are a unique situation. The fans strongly identified with the team from the beginning of the franchise. The winning helped but it wasn’t the whole story.
Such was not the case with Denver. They were going to see a winner. That team had a bunch of superstars headlined by all-world goalie Patrick Roy.
I think Seattle will be more like Columbus. Those cities don’t need something to rally around but they do need a winner. Abuse any fanbase with a bad team for long enough and people won’t show up. I don’t think any franchise would survive now with the horrible attendance Pittsburgh had in the early years.
I've lived on both sides of the border, and I've observed something interesting about NHL fans. There are only 8-10 NHL teams with a very strong fan base ... and by "very strong" I mean you could fill an arena with 15,000+ fans in the last weeks of a season even if the team is not a playoff contender. These teams include the Original Six (Montreal, Toronto, New York Rangers, Boston, Detroit and Chicago), plus Edmonton and Philadelphia -- and maybe Buffalo and Calgary now as well.
This is really apparent when you get north of the border and visit a place like Vancouver, and find that almost everyone you meet is either a Toronto or Montreal fan. The rest of the NHL's teams have fair-weather fans who will support their local team passionately, but only if the team is winning.
One of the problems the NHL has had in the last 25 years is that they've expanded the league to get national coverage for TV contracts, but in doing so they've put teams in places that have absolutely no historical or cultural ties to hockey. These are the markets where the teams tend to struggle when they have to rebuild after they've had winning seasons.
The article linked below from just two years ago lists EIGHT potential candidates for relocation among NHL teams. The list includes the following:
Colorado Avalanche
Nashville Predators
Columbus Blue Jackets
New Jersey Devils
New York Islanders
Florida Panthers
Arizona Coyotes
Carolina Hurricanes
The two anomalies in this list are the Islanders and the Devils. They are unique in that they are the second and third NHL teams in one metro area. The Islanders would probably come off this list right now, since they are a hot team and they will be moving to a new arena on Long Island in the next couple of years after playing in an arena in Brooklyn, NY that was totally unsuitable for hockey.
The rest of those teams all have something in common: they were expansion teams or relocated from other cities since the mid-1990s. In other words, the cities where they play were probably never strong hockey markets in the first place.
One correction, not,”maybe Buffalo now” always Buffalo the whole time. We have a very strong and loyal fan base.
Historic Storm Produced History for Devils in '87
The New Jersey Devils were an embarrassment to the NHL for the first several years after the Colorado Rockies moved there in the early 1980s. Wayne Gretzky even had one of his very rare intemperate moments as a professional hockey player at that time, when he referred to them as a "Mickey Mouse organization" after the Oilers scored 13 goals against them in one game.
But they slowly improved through the later years of the decade, and finally made the playoffs for the first time in 1988. The article above was published around the anniversary date of one of the most bizarre games in team history in early 1987, when a blizzard dropped two feet of snow on the New York City area and some of the players took hours to get to the arena at the Meadowlands Sports Complex. The visiting Calgary Flames were staying at a hotel not far away, so they made it there on time. But the Devils didn't have enough players to field a team at game time, so they delayed the start until after 9:00PM.
There were 11,000+ tickets sold for the game, but only 334 fans showed up. They soon became legends in Devils history. The team gave them all kinds of free merchandise at the game, and even 30+ years later they have periodic reunions and are still remembered as the "334 Club."
You may even see one or two of them at Devils games today. They're the ones who wear what looks to be a regular Devils jersey from the front, but on the back it has the number "334" instead of a player's number. LOL!
Calgary has always been a very corporate town where the fans could never match the intensity of blue-collar Edmonton.
In addition to its loyal fan base, Buffalo also lays claim to having the guy who I honestly believe is the best play-by-play announcer in all of North American sports -- Rick Jeanneret (not to be confused with Rodney Dangerfield, LOL):
The idea that the teams you mention have fan bases that will put up with losing is being torpedoed this season. Already hockey headlines are noticing that we had a day where NONE of the Canadian teams sold out except for the Leafs. The Leafs lost their sellout streak the season before Matthews was drafted. The Rangers are having troubles selling out and the Leafs ticket market is soft even though they are still selling at face value. Detroit, Philly and Montreal are all mentioned in sports business columns for having ticket selling problems.
The teams listed for relocation is a laughable especially because the author thinks most of them should be relocated to Canada. Nashville is solid both in ownership and fanbase. Columbus isn’t going anywhere soon. The Devils , Carolina and Arizona have new ownership and/or arena deals. I think Arizona is the weakest team and would make a good relocation target for Houston but that won’t happen until the new owner explores his options.
“I’ve observed in the NHL over the last 30+ years.”
I did want to say I’m glad the NHL is attracting new fans!
I don’t think I was ever at a game with less than a 1000 fans. That must of been an experience! I will say there were only a few thousand people at Penguins games when I started going.
Montreal and Toronto have similar problems, and Montreal has the extra difficulty in selling out games because they designed the Bell Centre with more than 21,000 seats -- the largest hockey-oriented arena in the world (I believe). Toronto went through a period a few years ago where the fans staged a mini-revolt similar to what happened in Chicago when that team was awful in the early 2000s.
You won't find a bigger hockey fan anywhere than me, but even I haven't paid my way into a New Jersey game in years. These new arena deals destroy the market for ordinary fans. I was perfectly content to watch games at the Meadowlands where they had very few suites but could pack 19,000+ fans into the place pretty regularly when their ticket prices were reasonable. It's no coincidence that the team hasn't won a Stanley Cup since they left that arena!
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