Post makes a case for 2nd NHL team in the GTA
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Winnipeg? Las Vegas? Move them to Toronto
NHL's predators sold
Mark Spector
National Post
Friday, May 25, 2007
As the National Hockey League enters yet another dramatic period with yet another failing American franchise, the elephant in the NHL's boardroom just sits there, wearing a bright blue Toronto Maple Leafs jersey.
Will the Nashville Predators end up in Kansas City, where an NHL team once folded after two miserable seasons?
What about that hockey hotbed Houston? Has the time come to start cultivating that Latino market?
Or Las Vegas? You know, the gambling mecca that all the major North American leagues have purposely avoided, in hopes that someone else will become desperate enough to test those murky waters, hoping to stage a straight game in a crooked, crooked city.
Portland? Seattle? Have we explored Honolulu yet? The elephant yawns. Toronto, gentlemen, Toronto!
The NHL has fiddled around long enough with pathetic hockey markets like Atlanta, Carolina, Phoenix and Florida. Winnipeg, for all its nostalgia, has a rink that's too small and an economy that is unproven as an NHL market. It's in line, sure. But not ahead of the largest collection of Canadians -- read: unbridled lovers of the game--on the planet that is Toronto.
Yesterday, a billionaire from Ontario snapped up the NHL's latest southern failure, the Nashville Predators. In Toronto, a drive from Jim Balsillie's Black- Berry empire in Waterloo, there sits the most fecund and underserviced hockey market in the world. (Some would joke that the next NHL team to go into Toronto would be the first, though we'd never say that.)
In Toronto sits one established, Original Six team -- the Maple Leafs -- who, by all accounts, hold the market hostage.
Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment owns the Air Canada Centre, the mothballed Maple Leafs Gardens, and most importantly, territorial rights to play NHL hockey in Toronto. Their ticket prices are the highest in the NHL, as are their revenues, and when the league imposed a salary cap two seasons ago the Leafs payroll dropped in rough terms from US$70-million to US$40-million -- a tidy US$30-million annually added to the coffers of hockey's most valuable club.
At what point does a flailing league get to share in hockey's most fruitful market? Well, the Maple Leafs would argue that another team in the GTA would put a major dent in their revenues. Somehow, the millionplus hockey fans who cannot afford -- or simply cannot get their hands on -- Leafs tickets are seen as lost revenue for that franchise, should an opportunity arise for them to buy an NHL season ticket for another Toronto team.
Actually though, the Leafs won't tell you that. Because they won't address the topic at all.
"We just don't talk about it," begins John Lashway, the MLSE spokesman who was returning calls for president Richard Peddie yesterday. "It is hypothetical. If it were something on a front burner we would formulate more of a public position on it."
If that time ever comes, the Maple Leafs and their many supporters could contrive all sorts of angles on how might is right; how MLSE deserves millions upon millions from an incoming owner, simply because the Maple Leafs (nee St. Patricks) set up shop in Toronto at the dawn of time; because they were there first, the Maple Leafs should be allowed to monopolize the market in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, among Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association --a group the plummeting NHL can't touch anymore -- there exists relationships like the New York Jets and Giants, who share a stadium.
The Chicago Cubs and White Sox, who have shared a city since the turn of last century.
Or, playing out of Los Angeles, basketball's Lakers and Clippers.
Really -- the NHL has two hockey teams in Florida, yet only one in Toronto?
If ever there has been a man who has the capital to operate as a tenant of the Maple Leafs while a new arena is constructed in Toronto, who has the wherewithal to get that new building built, and for whom the NHL should gather its other 28 owners behind and stand up to MLSE, that man is Balsillie.
Of course, under NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, standing up to a single owner has not been the NHL's strong suit.
Perhaps the NHL's second most important market today lies in shambles in Chicago. There, owner Bill Wirtz has run the Blackhawks into the ground, the league powerless to stop him. Instead of fixing a once-proud hockey town, Bettman has gone off to such places as Nashville, Phoenix and Atlanta, another second-chance city whose team won't be there for long.
Does a commissioner who cannot even convince Wirtz to air his home games on TV have a prayer of swaying MLSE off its monopoly? The time has come to find out.
Everything else in hockey has changed to suit a modern game. They even took out the red line.
When will they take out the blue boundary around the most fertile hockey ground in the world?
