No high profile players? So Chris Pronger and Rod Brind'Amour are nobodies? Of course the real punchline is that post season success is one of the keys to a player becoming high profile.
If you get the days you long for say goodbye to the NHL. The league needed to expand beyond the traditional market. Sure the old days of the league were nice if you lived in the snowbelt, but the population of the country is moving out of the snowbelt and the league needed to follow. And the Carolina and Texas teams make good money, better than Buffalo and some of the other teams in "traditional" NHL markets. Attendance was up league wide this year, revenue significantly better than projected, just gotta fix the TV situation.
If you get the days you long for say goodbye to the NHL. The league needed to expand beyond the traditional market. Sure the old days of the league were nice if you lived in the snowbelt, but the population of the country is moving out of the snowbelt and the league needed to follow.
This is one reason why collegiate hockey games often attract bigger TV audiences than the Stanley Cup finals. When you have national championship games involving teams like Boston College, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Lake Superior State, etc. you never have to convince fans that it makes sense for these teams to be playing on a sheet of ice for a winter sport.
And the Carolina and Texas teams make good money, better than Buffalo and some of the other teams in "traditional" NHL markets.
That's a good point. Keep in mind, though, that you are comparing teams from two of the fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S. with a team from a city that has been most aptly described for years as a poverty-stricken dump.