The NHL as a Cautionary Tale

If you ran a league that was a small time league that wanted to expand its presence, say in the US market, what would you do?  Would you go on an expansion/moving rampage to get more teams in "key markets"?  Would you care if the teams added were on long-term financially dubious terms (as they are trying to sell their product to an indifferent market)?  Or would you just take the franchise fee revenue and assume that everything would work itself out.  Would you try to make the game more appealing (and less boring) to an audience that sees the game as Chandler Bing said in friends (paraphrased) -  a bunch of ticked off, toothless Canadians with sticks? 

That is the problem that the NHL faced.  They wanted to be one of the big (and rich) sports leagues.  Unfortunately, for them, they picked a relatively boring "sport" with very limited marketability.  Yes, in the US marketability matters a lot.  The goal was to raise their profile in the US market.  They did this by over-expanding and moving teams.  The league didn't exactly do a good job of picking the winners.  Adding teams in bigger market cities like Dallas, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Atlanta, San Jose, Phoenix, etc. may have seemed like a good idea at the time.  However, inevitably some of the teams will struggle to "convert" those massive populations to actually watch their brand of entertainment.  When the fans don't come the teams will struggle.  Some teams actually did well.  More than a few teams are struggling with long term viability.   Since contraction is usually taken off of the table, some of these teams will have to move - most likely to Canada (where the rabid fan base is). 

In a way, they were overlooking their core base - Canadians (the plain girlfriend) for the US (sexy, intriguing debutante).  So they did have sort of an identity crisis.  At the same time, you had the rise of the European leagues (where it doesn't matter as much if the player actually speaks English). 

They can try to open up the game as much as they want, but it will never play well in the US (outside some of the "M" markets -  like MN, MA, MI).  For one, the game structure does not lend itself to television (with two 20 minute breaks per game).  There is too much time to switch off the camera.  Also, the game televises terribly (the camera angles kind of suck).  So, it basically is soccer - a niche sport in the US.  Yes, there are rabid fans in each market.  However, the rabid fans are the only ones you can really count on coming back for more.  However at least some soccer (football in most countries) matches wouldn't get beaten in the ratings by dogs playing poker on ESPN 2.      

This is one instance where they were probably better off keeping what interest the had without poisoning the game in potential future markets - the league was probably going to expand eventually, but they did too much, too fast.  Ironically, at the same time, the NBA was seeing its popularity dip. 

i'm in the 13th largest media market in the US and am kind of glad we don't have an NHL team.  Now if we could only get rid of the junior teams too...