At one point hockey anywhere was unnatural, because it was a new sport. That’s why I’ve always scoffed at the “traditional market” argument. If the Moose continue the lack of winning tradition the Thrashers have had they won’t be getting much support from Winnipeg either, nobody really wants to start cheering for losers, they’ll stay with a losing team they’ve already built loyalty to, but they won’t build loyalty to losers. That was part of the problem the Jets had, and the Thrashers are much worse than the Jets ever were, 1 playoff series, no playoff wins (I mean games), it’s hard to imagine any audience beating down the doors to watch that team.
Discostu: I think your focus on the importance of "winning" is relevant, but it should not be overestimated. In an era when major sports leagues are interested in developing and maintaining as much parity as possible, it's going to be extremely difficult for a team to build a tradition of winning when the rules are increasingly stacked against it. In a league where 16 out of 30 teams make the playoffs, the odds of a team winning more than one or two Stanley Cups in a fan's lifetime are going to be pretty slim . . . and the sheer numbers here indicate that a team is almost as likely to miss the playoffs as make the playoffs in any given season.
That's why in my book, "winning tradition" is less important than "tradition," period. The Cubs can fill Wrigley Field even though they haven't won a World Series in a hundred years, and have been marked by ineptitude for many of those years.
I've long said that there are only eight NHL franchises with hard core fan bases -- and by this I mean a franchise that can get 15,000+ fans to a late-season game even if the team is out of playoff contention. These eight teams would include the "Original Six," plus Philadelphia and Edmonton. Winnipeg may very well be another such team, since the Jets did very well at the gate even when they weren't a great team. The Jets didn't move to Phoenix for lack of attendance. They were simply a very small market (the smallest in the NHL at the time, after the Nordiques left Quebec City) and could not keep up with the growth of the NHL as a big-time North American sport. They also had the misfortune of spending most of their NHL existence in the same Smythe Division as some of the most dominant teams (in terms of on-ice performance and media exposure) in the NHL . . . including the dynasty years of the Edmonton Oilers, the Calgary Flames of the late 1980s, the Los Angeles Kings during the Gretzky era, and the Vancouver Canucks during the Pavel Bure era.
And as Lexinom said, currency exchange rates play a huge role in the NHL's business model, too. In the midst of that flurry of new or relocated teams in large U.S. markets in the last two decades (Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, the two Florida teams, Anaheim, Carolina, etc.), it's hard to believe that Saskatoon (with a population of about 200,000+ people) was a serious contender for an expansion franchise or a relocated franchise (the St. Louis Blues were in play at the time) as recently as the late 1980s!