On to Canada!

If you knew that Calgary’s National Hockey League franchise was originally from Atlanta would be surprised that the sport is suffering from a year long lockout? Would it shock with a sport that overbuilt itself would suffer a monetary contraction and hence, labor troubles?

On the face of things, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL have suffered remarkably analogous fates in the past few years. The NFL appears to do much better but that is a façade as we shall see. In each sport, the economic boom of the 1990s encouraged expansion and new stadia from coast to coast. The NBA opened its first two Canadian franchises, the NFL relocated teams to St. Louis, Baltimore, and Tennessee while putting expansion teams in Charlotte and Jacksonville. Baseball finally put teams in places most known for Spring Training: Arizona and Florida as well as Denver. And the NHL forsook its Canadian/Snow Belt roots for Phoenix, Colorado, Dallas, and North Carolina.

The reasons were very simple. Owners moved their clubs to cities and states that were willing to pour in money for new construction. You might call this extortion, but only if you think that a team owes something to the city that it occupies. This extortion does not always work however: Los Angeles still has no football because it refuses to finance a new edifice for the NFL. Winnipeg and Quebec City balked at the thought of taxing its citizens to build state of the art facilities. And now, each sport is facing lower or stagnating television revenues. So when the NBA gets a cold, the NHL might as well have pneumonia.

Many hockey franchises are losing money, and unsurprisingly most of them are in smaller cities outside of the Northeast or Canada. So before the owners and fans convince themselves the only way to save the NHL is contraction considering this. Move franchises with little or no fan support but are otherwise viable back to Canada.

Now it is true that aside from Winnipeg or Quebec City, there seem to be few good options. But don’t forget the potential to make Detroit a two-team city, where a Canadian counterpart would be based in Windsor Ontario. The Edmonton-Calgary rivalry sizzles just as much as the one between the Flyers and Rangers. “Saving the NHL” is all about creating a marketable product. When you forget the history of that marketplace, economic troubles are never far behind.