I think his analysis is more along the lines of calculating hockey fervour in an area via google searches, multiplying a resulting percentage by the population of the area, and coming up with a realistic potential fan base.
That said, your way of recommending things also seem sound. Living just shy of Ontario’s “Near North” region, it doesn’t suprise me much that Thunder Bay As the song says, “What’s a Canadian farm boy to do?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUb0C0iI_GE
The only flaw with an analysis of "hockey fervor" is that it overlooks what had been part of the NHL's strategy since the early 1990s in developing a national TV audience. Once you have television involved, business decisions based on TV ratings drive sports enterprises to use a whole different set of parameters to measure their business prospects. In the case of the mid-1990s move of the Winnipeg Jets, the NHL decided that a Phoenix metro area with 25,000 hockey fans among 2.7 million people was more valuable than a Winnipeg market with 400,000 hockey fans among 600,000 people. With TV audiences and potential TV audiences (i.e., "casual fans") in the mix, the decision to relocate the Jets to Arizona was based on the denominators in those fractions (2.7 million vs. 600,000), not the numerators (25,000 vs. 400,000).