Wild stuns Colorado 3-2 on Brunette's OT goal

There's plenty of teams not in the sun belt that are dieing for funds, basically all the Candian teams other than Montreal and Toronto (remember the Sens actually missed a paycheck this season) and Buffalo. The Sunbelt move is one that was garaunteed to be very nasty at one point but if it survives it'll do great. There were similar discussions in the NFL in the 50s and early 60s, it was considered a rustbelt sport that couldn't do well more than 500 miles from the Ohio river basin.

Phoenix will be OK once they get in the new stadium, America Worst is not setup well for hockey (no corner seats, one whole balconey can't actually see 2/3 of the ice) and the owners (the Suns) don't give any conscession stand or parking lot money to the Yotes, there's a lot of missing revenue they're going to start getting next year.

Now that Tampa is turning into a real team they'll be OK. The Panthers skate an AHL team and don't deserve success. Nashville and Atlanta were stupid expansions, no defense there.

Part of the problem with Canadian teams is it's a small country populationwise. Calgary and Edmonton are around the size of Tucson, no one would even consider putting a major league team in Tucson, too damn small and yet Calgary and Edmonton both have teams. Of course the NHL has a long history of putting teams in cities that just don't make sense, why should now be any different.

The Canadian dollar vs the US dollar hurts too.

If it wasn't for being a life long hockey fan I wouldn't even think Saskatoon was a real place.

True points. Though my solution for the NHL is much more brutal. Here's my answer:
Kill 6 to 8 teams, Nashville, Buffalo and one of the Albertans for sure, the others are negotiable. Bang bullet in the head no remorse. Anything cool in the memorabilia rooms goes to the Hall.
Salary cap. A real salary cap, NFL style not NBA MLB style. There's no reason for a 30ish player roster to cost more than 40 million, NFL teams of 50ish players are only now hovering towards 60 million and they pull down a lot more revenue.
Tell Canada to toughen up buttercup, it's their national past time so it's their job to keep the game going in Canada, too many taxes too little population and monopoly money are why the teams don't want to be there, fix any 2 and their part of the problem will go away. Cutting taxes and having more sex sounds like an enjoyable solution, they should start there.

Buffalo is a unique case because professional teams in shut-down industrial cities are bound to fare poorly. Professional teams in government cities (Ottawa, Washington, etc.) also tend to do poorly as well.

In many cases the NHL didn't exactly "put" teams in cities that made no sense -- most of the re-locations over the last 10-15 years involved teams that came to the NHL in 1979 as part of the NHL-WHA merger. Of the four WHA teams that joined the NHL, only the Edmonton Oilers remain in their original location. The other three (Hartford, Winnipeg, and Quebec) have all moved to larger markets in the southern or western U.S.

What's interesting about Canadian cities is that when it comes to hockey they draw far more fans than they would draw in the U.S. on a per-capita basis. When Saskatoon had their bid for an expansion team rejected back in the 1980s, they had already gathered nearly 17,000 season ticket requests even though Saskatoon had no more than 175,000 people or so at the time and the entire province of Saskatchewan had fewer than a million people. The Canadian prairies are the kind of place where people will drive two hours each way in -40 weather just to see a junior hockey game.

The Bettman era marked the end of the NHL as we once knew it, and the league's official demise occurred when they got rid of those old division names (Smythe, Norris, Patrick, and Adams) and conference names (Campbell and Prince of Wales) and replaced them with bland, generic geographic names in a desperate attempt to attract informal fans who had no appreciation for the great history of the game.

The Sens had to pay for their own offramp. Canada is brutal. Businesses get subsidies all the time as insentives to move to towns, the idea (and it doesn't always work) is that the city will make more money on the jobs they get with the business than their losing in the subsidies and tax breaks. I think there's a good chance of that with sports, it can't be bad for the local economy to add a few dozen millionaires to the population, a lot of players start businesses so that adds more jobs, and the players asociations generally make the players do a lot of charitable stuff.

My primary issue with Canada is that they bitch so much. You hear tons of complaints coming from up north that the teams can't afford good players and the teams can't be profitable in the Canadian/ NHL economy, and they're taxing the hell out of the teams, yet Gary Bettman and the NHL are supposed to fix the problem. That's like me complaining about my beer gut but refusing to go to the gym and blaming you.

Buffalo has been in an economic crisis since the 70s, they were dieing before Pittsburgh was dieing, and now Pittsburgh is better. Basically once Hasek left there wasn't a reason to go to the games anymore, it's not like the Sabres have ever been a good team. (don't you think Satan should be a Devil, doesn't it just make sense)

I'm thinking of crappy locations all the way back to the first expansion. They put a team in one of the WAY interior suburbs of SF, they've got a WCHL team now. I had one of the CD the Hockey News puts out, my favorite part was the time line and saying "they put a team where".

It's the national sport in Canada, I'm sure we're supporting baseball teams in cities of a size that would never work for baseball in Canada. But sometimes it's just mind boggling. The fact that the middle of freaking no where Alberta had TWO teams and the national capital had none was always bizaar. And now the one in the national capital is going broke... it's a wierd league.

I miss the old names, but I also understand why they went away, having brought people into the sport the old names were a pain. The three hardest parts of the sport to explain were icing, the division names and the conference names. It was a real barrier to entry for new fans. Now if only they'd get rid of the tagup part of the icing rule.

I have a theory about what's happening with all the NHL teams moving into places where ice doesn't grow naturally. I lived in South Carolina for awhile and there was a lot of excitement in the papers about a minor league hockey team coming to the area.

I think that as northeasterners have migrated south and southwest when their companies moved or they retired there they have brought their love of hockey with them. Money has come with them, so they start generating interest in the communities where they live. The NHL in their continuing quest for acceptance to a wide US audience has speculated that they can move into these iceless areas and make money. So now we have this true bastard child in sport of hot weather ice hockey.

I was really happy for the wild, too. With Colorado and Detroit losing it kind of opens the west up a little bit more. It's more exciting when the same teams are not winning the cup year after year. I would love to see Dallas and the Wild in the west!

The Caps fans are furious at the organization for letting them down again...

Oh, I know what you guys are going through! I think the original model for Scrooge McDuck owns the Hawks. Our GM forced Tony Amonte out and made us the Chicago Maple Leafs. Then we get Theo Fluery whose- to put it lightly- best years are behind him. Chicago sports fans, in general, are used to disappointment.

The NHL can't really have an effective salary cap as things stand now. The NBA and NFL can do those things because they get a lot of their revenue from national television contracts. Most NHL revenue comes from ticket sales and local TV broadcasts, so there is no way to implement a salary cap without first having a revenue-sharing system in place.

And salary caps have their own dangers, too. My interest in the NFL has declined dramatically since the cap was put in place -- I simply got tired of seeing my favorite team change 35% of its players every season, and lose a lot of talented players for no other reason than salary cap issues. That's a lot of nonsense -- the NFL has become nothing more than a cartel of teams, and the result has been a serious decline in the quality of play on the field.

I don't know what the answer is, but if it means going back to a 12-team league then so be it. Maybe a multi-tiered system like European soccer would work, in which 60 teams compete in three different leagues of 20 teams each. And at the end of every season the top two teams in each tier get moved up to the next level and the bottom two teams get demoted. This would allow teams like Edmonton and Pittsburgh to compete in Tier III for a couple of years, move up to Tier II if they excel, and then maybe sign a bunch of good players and make a serious run at a Tier I championship every 10-15 years or so.

Another alternative is to have all the player salaries paid not by individual teams, but out of a common pool of revenue. Let the players negotiate with themselves for their salaries -- if Jagr gets a $2 million salary increase one year, then someone else (or a group of players) will have to take a $2 million pay cut. This would separate the financial aspect of the game from what happens on the ice.

If the Philly-Stars rematch does happen, Hicks & Lites will be kicking themselves for not raising the ticket prices even more!!!

After reading that article in the paper this morning, I was originally ticked off. Then I thought about it some more. This is not very different from when my/our electric bills triple during the summer. I don't bitch and moan, I try to plan for it, knowing it's going to happen.

Seems to me the die hard season ticket holders should factor in the cost of playoff tickets into the overall cost of their season tickets. Tom Hicks is not holding a gun to their heads to buy those tickets, just as TXU Energy does not hold a gun to my head when I keep the AC on 24/7 during the summer.

No other major sport is as dependent on ticket sales as professional hockey. To think that ownership would not try to recoup their cost in adding expensive free agents is enormously naive, as the President of American Airlines (the purchaser of the naming rights for the arena where the Stars play) said about an unrelated matter just two days ago (when apologizing to the employees for keeping secret the executives compensation plan).

The hardest part of a cap is selling it to the PA, that's why only the NFL has a real salary cap (the NBA's is a league wide percentage, and the MLB's is a luxury tax on big spenders). I don't the the revenue source matters too much, but revenue sharing (again NFL style, they really are the only league that understands money) is a good thing.

The NFL chaos has settled. It was ugly at first because nobody rewrote contracts when the cap went into place so the powerhouse teams were all grossly over cap and had to do some major re-org. Also the agents are starting to learn and understand the cap and how to work in it, that's why incentive clauses have become so huge most of them don't count under the cap, Jerry Jones (booo hissss) was the first guy to spot that loophole. The players getting shuffled for "cap reasons" now are the ones that are earning more than they should anyway (Kordell Stewart, I'm thinking of you, overpriced interception factory).

I hear the multi-teared system bandied about, that's just not going to fly in America. For one thing the owners spend WAY to much money on franchise fees, they'll nver agree to get kicked to the minors because the coach screwed up (standard owner excuse, it's always the coach's fault). It's an interesting system and would keep the Bengals and Panthers of the world out of the majors leagues where they don't belong. But it'll never happen.

The cap and heavy duty revenue sharing comes pretty close to doing what you propose. Between the two there's a certain amount of money, to be spent hopefully evenly among the teams, and there's a big pile of money paid to the teams. Last year's shared revenues has a lot to do with figuring this year's cap. Of course none of this would be a problem if we didn't have a handful of owners willing to pay anybody $8 mil for just being able to lace-up, they're the ones driving the price of labor up. But since the owners run the league there's no way they'll take the blame.

Selling a cap to the PA will be easy in 2004, because the alternative will be either a long-term shutdown of the NHL or the immediate elimination of at least a third of the league's teams.

I've been compiling a list of things in my mind that are needed to "fix" the NHL, and putting together a long-term business plan that will allow teams to survive without engaging in annual fire sales of their best players is one of the key items. And a word of warning to the NHL here: Fans are going to disappear in a hurry if their teams undergo massive changes in personnel from one year to the next, regardless of whether those changes are driven by escalating salaries or by salary cap constraints. The NFL has not "settled down" in this regard -- what amazes me is that the league does not consider the large-scale player movement every post-season as an issue of concern. A team that drafts an All-Pro caliber player in 1996 and another one in 1997 should never reach a point where salary cap constraints require them to re-sign one or the other, but not both.

I hear the multi-teared system bandied about, that's just not going to fly in America. For one thing the owners spend WAY to much money on franchise fees . . .

Well, any owner that spends tens of millions of dollars on franchise fees for a team in a small market has nobody to blame but himself when the team starts running into financial trouble a few years later. There's no reason why an owner who made a bad financial decision ten years ago should be allowed to threaten a move to another city just because his market dried up. If that's all the NHL has become, why not just have four teams in Toronto, four in Montreal, a half-dozen in Chicago, ten in Detroit, and 35 more in New York?

The one positive aspect of these uncertain economic times is that sports teams are starting to get put in their places. Even in a large market like the New York City region, all the talk about new baseball stadiums (for the Yankees and Mets) and a new arena for the NHL's Devils and NBA's Nets has come to a crashing halt. These teams used to play the state governments of New York and New Jersey off against each other in an attempt to secure public financing for these venues, but now they've got no leverage at all because every level of government is broke.

Don't count on any union (PA's are just unions with silly names) being smart, just look at the goings on in the airline industry.

The NFL really has chilled, most of the players dumps that are using the cap as an excuse the owners are lieing. They're dumping players for the old pre-cap reasons but fans get irritated about those reasons so the owners make vague references to the cap and fans accept it at face value. Every player in the last 5 years that has been dumped to make "cap room" has been dumped because the people in charge of the team just didn't want them anymore. With deferred salary, signing bonuses, franchise players (some percentage of the franchise player's salary doesn't count to the cap, I forget how much) and incentive clauses the cap is very easy to work with, and it averages out to around 1.2 million per player anyway. The only way a team can't afford 2 all-pros is if they're pulling down around 20 mil against the cap, or they have a bunch of non-spectacular players being paid too much. And either of those can be solved by renegotiating with deferal and incentive bonuses.

But it's not just small market teams that suck. Look at the Rangers. If the NHL went tiered the Rangers would have to be on the chopping block. Florida Panthers are even worse and Miami is no small market. And yet the Minnesota Wild (hey, back to the original topic of the thread, I knew we could do it) knocked off a team with 3 times the salary. Bad management puts teams into a lower tier. Of course depending on how you manage the tier system you could have a Patrick vs Norris situation (remember how the Patrick was the only division that left 2 teams out of the playoffs even though it was the most competitive division, meanwhile the Norris regularly floated 2 sub-500 teams into the playoffs), either that or you have to completely ignore rivalries and they're really lucrative.

I'm not sure sports teams are being put in their place. One of the wierd things that's happened in the last 20 years is owners actually expect teams to be profitable. In the 70s one of the primary reasons to own a team was as a tax write-off, very few were profitable and that was just fine with owners that had other highly successful businesses and a Democratically controlled Congress lusting after their wallet. Sometime during the boom-boom 80s people decided that since every other industry in the world was profitable sports should be too. Maybe that's our big disconnect. The cliche is owners should be fans first and run the teams that way, fans SPEND money on sports we don't make money on it.

Look what's happening to the NY Jets this year -- I hate that team, but there's no doubt that they've lost a few top-quality players with a lot of years left in them. For no reason other than the salary cap.

The real impact of the salary issue in the NHL has nothing to do with a team's performance. Even if the Rangers continue to play poorly, they still drive up salaries for players on other teams and make it hard for these teams to keep these players in the long term. Sure, the Wild may have beaten a team with a payroll three times larger than theirs, but in five years the Avs will still be drawing fans while the Wild may not be. Look how quickly a team like the Florida Panthers started going down the tubes only a couple of years after they had reached the Stanley Cup finals.

What many professional sports leagues don't seem to understand is that the "size" of a market is not directly related to the population base. There are probably several million people living in the Miami area, but as a hockey market I'd say the place is "smaller" than Edmonton's 800,000 people or maybe even Saskatoon's 200,000. The Twin Cities area of Minnesota is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., but it is a "small" NHL market -- not because of a lack of hockey fans, but because the Wild have to compete with college hockey and even high school hockey for the interest of local fans.

Did they dump them because of the cap or dump them to retool for a run deeper into the playoffs? In order to bring in new players you've got to make open roster spots, this often means getting rid of good players because they don't fit the new direction of the team.

You can't use the Panthers as an example, they skate an AHL team in the wrong league. When they made their Cup run they put in a couple of legitimate NHL players, but once they got rid of the Beis and Jovocop they have shown no interest in skating a real team. The fans should abandon them in droves, they're being asked to pay NHL ticket prices to watch a minor league team. The Blackhawks are doing the same crap, once somebody turns out to be a money player they drop them like a hot potato. As long as the Wild is willing to put legitimate NHL players on the roster they should be OK. They're in the snow belt, they've got all the advantages. The Avs will continue to draw because they will continue to spend the money necessary to put an entertaining team on the ice with chance of going for the hardware.

The hockey market in Florida (and over here) is flexible. We both have snowbirds (people from up north that flee the cold and winter in the south), these are an imported hockey market. Problem is snowbird season is shorter than hockey season. Truncating the schedule would be good, but that applies to everybody but the NFL.

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