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!
I don’t know if you have to have a tradition of winning it all, but you definitely need to not have a tradition of losing, and a tradition of contending would be nice. I’ll contrast San Jose and Calgary, Calgary should be a strong hockey market, but the Flames went on a serious skid and they had to close the upper deck so the team could resume selling out games; San Jose shouldn’t be a strong hockey market and the Sharks have never won it all, but they’re always competitive and strong and frequently go deep in the playoffs and their stadium is always capacity and always loud.
Some teams are kind of immune, but they’ve also been around a while. Cubs fans now take pride in their losing history, but we should remember that by the time this “curse” started the team had been around almost 40 years and had won a couple of Series. And meanwhile they tend to remain in contention just long enough to build hope in the fan base most seasons. They actually tend to have good regular seasons, with an overall over 500 record, it’s the post season where the team collapses.
Well established teams can survive skips. The Cubs continue to prove it, the Packers have proved it. But you’ve got to be established, you have to have the loyal fan base. And some teams hit the skids and show they don’t have as loyal a fan base as they thought. You don’t necessarily have to win championships to build that fan base, but you’ve got to at least be competitive. Just look at what happened with the football Cards in their run to the SB, that first playoff game needed the league to push out the sellout line to not get blacked out, then they were on the road for the divisional round but got to be back home for the conference game that sold out with extra seats in hours. Then they had higher attendance for the next season, and did well, and good attendance again for last season. Of course they reverted to form last season, we’ll see what happens to the fan base now.
It takes more than just attendance to keep a team going. Attendance is the visible measure of their popularity, but the money has to be spent away from the arena too. The changing finances of the league exacerbated the problem for sure. I do think if they’d have managed to get past the first round a few times they might have stayed. I remember in the mid-90s one of the owners said that every home playoff game was worth a million dollars net, so even over and above the additional fan excitement of a team being in contention just getting 2 to 4 more home games made it very profitable to get past the first round.
I’m pro Canadian teams and glad Winnipeg is getting one back. But if they don’t actually start contending I don’t think the team will do any better there than the did in Atlanta. Zero playoff game wins in 13 years just isn’t going to get the fans reaching into their wallets.