Tuesdays With Hildy: They're Gonna Put a Team WHERE?

game can not grow by keeping the game in canada. as dangerous as desert teams are, as dangerous as atlanta teams are, big market prescense will create some minor shift towards televesion driven revenues which are required.

end of story.

perhaps the precursor to all this though is the “a”

a few years back i took a vacation to north east jesus NC. during hockey season. obviously i’d find a minor league team in the state of decent level. or virginia or.. yum west virginia? the atlantic ocean?

wow. a vast dead zone.

kc has had minor league hockey, colorado and dallas had, indianapolis has a long and colored history with everything from wayne gretzky to brian noonan, to today’s ushl team http://www.indianaice.com/roster.php

getting an expansion plan organized with the ahl would be too long term and smart for the buttman era.

dallas had no minor league team last year, it is how we got a free forth liner with upside, they couldnt send him anywhere

so where is this land of vast areas of need and new fans did the stars take a year off to create a new ahl team? cedar park texas.

bravo!!!

So the league will fight like hell to keep the teams there. Unfortunately, many of the nontraditional markets have had people who make bad decisions. And those bad decisions have led to poor teams. And winning heals everything.

Case in point, Tampa was kept out of the “Shut down those damn teams!” conversation because they won a Cup. Now they’re ownership is in disarray and they’re back in the spotlight as a team in trouble.

I don’t want to see expansion. But I don’t want to see any teams contracting either.

They need to find a way to put more team north of the Border.

the next expansion would be in fucking Guadalajara.

I still voted “No” in the poll. They could have a team in Buttfuck, Nebraska (a town that may, or may not, actually exist), and I could give a shit, as long as it draws well.

Plus, we don’t want assholes like Jim Balsillie running our hockey teams, now do we? Tell him to go buy the Hamilton Tiger-Cats or something. Fuck that asshole.

I think that non-traditional hockey markets are not the worst idea. But you need to keep some teams in markets that you can make a lot of money in as well.

There’s a beautiful new areana across the state and I think hockey would do well there. There’s a number of places where hockey just hasn’t caught on and probably will not. Like Atlanta. It didn’t work the first time and it still hasn’t quite worked yet this times.

Phoenix once upon a time had a very nice minor league team with the fans into it completely—though not so much about the actual game. The numbers were too small to compete in the NHL though.

Carolina appears to be working and one has to think that their early success in that market had to help. But it’s also not too far away from the rest of the natural hockey bed.

There’s a number of teams I’d think about relocating at this point.

The snobby board shut him out last time when he would have been greatly helpful. It’s bull shit that if someone has the bread to buy a team and is not a criminal(so there’s little chance the money will float away), bring them in.

Because when you starve them for pro hockey they have OHL WHL and other junior teams they pay good money to watch and support, thus supporting NHL teams minor minors.

How about a team in Alaska? The one issue besides travel, which isn’t that horrible on a charter is population. Anchorage has a decent population besides the fact that you can pretty much guarentee a very, very solid crowd as there’s not a whole hell lot to do in Alaska.

It’d be better to have six teams in Europe then some of these places in the south.

I’m guessing an NHL team based in the UK is out of the question then?

Oh well – guess I’ll just have to force myself to keep supporting the Blues…lol

I agree that its not the market so much as the team. Sure the market has to be there, otherwise its suicide, but if you have a winning team, people want to see them. You could have a in New Orleans and if they were a successful team, I’m sure they would have the money. Also like they said above, what happens if you oversaturate Canada? Sure Basillie may want to put the team in Hamilton, but then you’re going to undercut Toronto and Buffalo.

1) Stable ownership
2) Competent management
3) Time and patience

It can also fail anywhere (except maybe Toronto/Montreal) where there is a sustained lack of all three. Sadly, the league has rarely had all three at once. And while they’re “patient” with new markets now, they sure weren’t patient when entering them.

I’d love for Hamilton to have a team — not sure about smaller CDN markets, though. But I’d prefer it not be Balsillie’s, who strikes me as just another Grade A tool infatuated with his own genius — a Dan Snyder type, if you will. We have enough of those.

Another argument FOR the existence of “southern” hockey is the long-term benefit. You won’t see it for a long time, but the kids in these newer NHL cities are getting exposed to the greatness that is NHL hockey, where they wouldn’t have been before. A potential Sidney Crosby could be growing up in Georgia right now, and were it not for the Thrashers, he would have chosen football or basketball instead of hockey. You’d never hear of him now, but the benefit of ATL hockey would be realized when the kid gets drafted 10-15 years later…

I remember a story from a recent NHL draft, where the prospect mentioned being a big Gretzky fan as a kid: the LA King Gretzky, though. Wayne was traded to LA on 08/09/88 … a little over 21 years ago. We now have a whole generation of kids (players) whose earliest memory of the Great One is as an LA guy. We’re now seeing these kids from SoCal playing in the NHL. The same is true for Georgia and Texas and the like.

This is something that is often overlooked, me thinks.