EUROPEAN EXPANSION IS A DISTANT SHORE
NHL will run out of North American targets, but a trans-atlantic game is not imminent
It is no secret that the National Hockey League likes to expand. It likes to expand so much that, no sooner did it become apparent that it had an early success on its hands with the new team in Las Vegas, the NHL was already laying out the welcoming carpet for prospective owners in Seattle. There is also no secret to the motivation here: the league’s owners get to charge a fat expansion fee to the newcomers. Free money! Everyone loves free money, especially when it comes a few years before your collective bargain agreement expires and you have to start telling everyone in hushed tones that the league’s finances are in rough shape and the players are making off like bandits. But eventually this game will run out of prospective targets in North America. (It probably already has, if we’re honest. The popularity of the Golden Knights doesn’t erase the fact that the NHL has had a handful of franchises in various levels of crisis for years now.) And so, rumblings occasionally burble forth about expansion in Europe. There have been an unusual amount of such burbles in recent days. Bill Daly, the NHL’s deputy commissioner, said in Toronto on Monday that while nothing was likely to happen on that front in the short term, or even in the medium term, he considered NHL teams based over there on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean to be “probably inevitable.” Perhaps more surprisingly, Daly said the biggest impediment to European expansion is a lack of NHL-style arenas, which is to say buildings that can house 20,000 paying Swedes or Finns while entertaining their most wealthy corporate citizens in luxury suites. Leaving aside the question of whether anyone in Stockholm or Helsinki is foolish enough to speculatively build an NHLready arena — ask Quebec City how that is working out — it is intriguing to hear someone as senior as Daly offer such enthusiasm for European growth. He was restrained next to NHLPA boss Donald Fehr, who said “the sooner the better.” Fehr said it would be a “real positive statement” to create the first truly transcontinental league, and of course it would be particularly positive for his membership because it would mean a lot more NHL-level salaries. And while possible European expansion was not a subject of discussion at the NHL general managers meetings in Toronto on Tuesday, nor was the possibility entirely ruled out. Montreal GM Marc Bergevin, asked if he could imagine squeezing a Europe trip into the already tight NHL schedule. “If you fly from Montreal to L.A.,” he said, then gave a little nod of his head to point in the other direction: “I mean, you just go the other way. It’s about the same distance.” Bergevin said he could see the NHL doing it. “We have the first team in pro sports in Vegas, I wouldn’t be shocked if we were the first to go to Europe,” he said. If it happens, I would still put myself down as shocked. Other than the usual questions about expansion, such as the dilution of talent and the need to add teams to a league that has four franchises averaging fewer than 14,000 fans per game so far this season, there are the tremendous logistical hurdles that a move to Europe would bring. Fehr offered some back-of-napkin doodles for a system in which five or six European teams would travel to North America twice per season, while each current team would go to Europe once. That doesn’t sound unbearable, until you start trying to figure out how to shoehorn that trip across the ocean into the calendar of each team. One example: the Chicago Blackhawks, conveniently located in the centre of this continent, have two consecutive days off 19 different times between the start and end of the regular season, from mid-October until early April. One of those breaks comes after a long trip to the west coast, and one is over Christmas. (They also have a bye week, which was grudgingly added for all teams a few years back when the players balked at All-Star changes.) The Blackhawks, meanwhile, also have nine separate instances this season in which they play on back-to-back nights. And they have a 15-day stretch in February in which they play on every second night for eight consecutive games. There just isn’t any space in there for a dash across the Atlantic, assuming that a team on a European swing would be given at least a couple of days off on either end to adjust to time zones and hopefully not be waking up at two in the morning on game days. Someone who is very keen on an NHL team in Prague might wave this off as a problem that can be overcome, but that someone would not be aware of the importance of sleep to a professional athlete. On the hockey player’s hierarchy of needs, “game-day nap” comes right between safety and love, and right after Corsi and Fortnight. It’s a great idea in theory, this European expansion, but there are practical concerns. Then again, this is the league that keeps putting hockey teams in the desert.