Well it's about time!
I'm not too interested in moving teams around at this point. Okay, maybe one or two, but that's it. I thought the Jets never should have left Winnipeg, and I thought the Nordiques never should have left Quebec. Of those two, I think Denver did deserve a team, but Phoenix didn't. The North Stars left Minnesota due to years of idiotic ownership that destroyed the relationship between the fans and the team, getting a new team back there was imperative. It is difficult to explain just how hockey-mad a state Minnesota is, they pretty much blow away any other place in America for hockey passion.
So now we have a team in Anaheim, just 28 miles from another team in Los Angeles. I say one team is enough for southern Cali. Yes, there are other areas of the country that have similar or higher team concentration (i.e. NY/NJ/Long Island, Buffalo/Toronto). But Buffalo and Toronto can easily support their teams, so that's fine. Frankly, New Jersey can't, they've had one of the best teams in the league for a decade now, and they still can't get fans to turn out. They are the Atlanta Braves of hockey. I say move 'em or dump 'em. New York can have the Rangers and the Isles, and the few dozen folks in Jersey who care about hockey can decide to be either Flyers fans (like the few Jersey-born hockey fans I know are) or Ranger fans. In the south, we have teams in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and two in Florida. Does Florida need two teams? Really? And I'll be generous, I'll let Georgia, Carolina, and Tennessee have two teams between the three of 'em. They can have a celebrity deathmatch to determine which of the three goes.
So let's add this up. We whack one of the two southern Cali teams, the Devils, the Coyotes, the Panthers, and one of the three GA/NC/TN teams. That's five. I say throw a team up in Seattle or Portland, cover the Pacific Northwest, maybe set up a nice cross-border rivalry with the Vancouver Canucks (the same way Buffalo-Toronto and Buffalo-Ottawa have developed into nice rivalries). Washington state currently supports four Major Junior teams in the WHL, plus a fifth down in Portland, so they can support hockey. The area has a better history of support for a variety of different sports than Phoenix, so I say move the team there. Plus the Seattle Metropolitans were the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, so that's gotta count for something, right? So that way we kill off four teams, move a fifth to an under-served region, and all is well. And no, Hartford, you can't have a team again. Not gonna happen, just forget it.
Oh, and while we're at it, the NHL should try to work the "eminent domain" laws to take the Blackhawks away from Bill Wirtz and the Isles away from Charles Wang and put the teams in the hands of people who aren't idiots. Then we'll enforce a league-wide 20% rollback in ticket prices. Once upon a time, hockey was a people's sport, a working class sport. That was the old stereotype in Boston, corporate types went to Celtics game, and Johnny Lunchpail went to Bruins games. The NHL can fret all it wants about goal production, they can add any amount of idiotic noisy shiny blinky flashy pre-game and intermission and TV time-out stuff they want, but the math is so stupefyingly simple: Attendance is down because ticket prices are obscene. Flat-out obscene. They've priced it from being a "go to every home game" sort of thing to a "go every once in a while as a special treat" sort of thing. It's a joke. $176 will get you a seat on the glass at the Garden, another $6 for a beer, another $4 for a pretzel. Johnny Lunchpail would need a second mortgage to get season tickets. The owners loudly claimed that the salary cap would give them "cost certainty" and allow them to lower prices. They got the salary cap, then "lowered" prices by an underwhelming average of about 2%. Then this season, most of 'em raised prices right back up. According to the demographic stats, the NHL has the most affluent and well-educated fans of any of the "big four" major league sports in America. That's not an indicator that the NHL attracts smart, rich people, it's simply an indicator that rich people are the only ones who can afford the game at this point. It's just sad.
-Ricardo
