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.
What's wrong with them being marquee players? They're good, they're tough, Pronger is photogenic, they've put up good numbers their whole career, they give good interview. They should be marquee players. The only reason they're not truly marquee players is that hockey isn't really a marquee sport, it's never gotten the kind of press coverage for more than 1 or 2 players to be known outside of hockey fandome.
Collegiate hockey numbers aren't that good. It's not a matter of convincing the fan, it's a matter of having the fan to convince.
That's my point, all the fastest growing metro areas are in the sunbelt now. That's the place where it's going to be easiest to grow a fanbase, between transplanted existing fans and just general population growth there's more potential to improve the fan base for the whole sport in places like NC and Dallas and Atlanta than in New York state, Chicago or Minnesota. If the league restricts itself to just the snowbelt it will die with the snowbelt, it needs to expand and turn non-traditional hockey markets into hockey markets. Football had to go through the same thing when it moved out of the "football swath" of industrial and South Eastern America. A lot of teams struggled, a lot of teams failed, but eventually they managed to make the game stick. To be a truly national league they need to make it a truly national game, that means following the population and getting out of the frozen north, if the NHL is ever going to move out of a distant 4th (and really with the rise of NASCAR one can argue it's not a distant 5th) it needs to make the southern expansion work. If it bails on the southern expansion hockey stops being a major league sport.