NHL DOESN’T NEED ANOTHER LOSER

On Tuesday, the Las Vegas entry in the NHL will unveil its nickname and logo. It’s expected to be the Las Vegas (Something) Knights, partly because the league vetoed Aces and other such names with a link to gambling, which is silly since nothing makes one immediately think of gambling more than the words “Las Vegas.”

No doubt it will be an occasion for the expansion franchise to talk up all the good news — the executive team full of familiar hockey names, the robust ticket sales, the expansion draft rules rigged to ensure the Not Aces will be decent off the jump.

None of this will explain why the NHL thought it a good idea to expand in the first place.

On Friday the Carolina Hurricanes beat Montreal in front of an announced crowd of 12,101 fans at PNC Arena in Raleigh. A game with the arena more than a quarter empty, against the hottest team in the NHL and one of its storied franchises, was actually a bright spot on the Hurricanes’ season. Three of Carolina’s seven home dates have had announced crowds below 9,000 and, other than the sellout home opener against the New York Rangers, the Hurricanes have played before an average audience of just over 10,000. For Sunday’s home game against the Winnipeg Jets, tickets were available on resale sites for $12.

The Hurricanes aren’t exactly a threat to relocate, as they have a lease at PNC Arena that runs for another seven years. But owner Peter Karmanos, who moved the team to Carolina from Hartford, wants to sell, and it is no surprise that he does not have a line of local buyers interested in taking the team off his hands. He doesn’t even have the beginnings of a line. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that a few more months of 8,000-plus crowds in Raleigh would increase the chances Karmanos will sell to someone interested in buying out the arena lease and decamping.

Carolina’s attendance, lowest in the NHL, is only a shade higher than the average crowds of just under 12,500 that have paid for tickets to see the New York Islanders at Barclays Center. In the club’s second season in Brooklyn, the move from Long Island appears to be a full-on disaster, with the Isles’ suburban fans not terribly interested in the trek to the city (and back), and not enough bearded Brooklyn hipsters willing to pay for hockey tickets.

The Islanders’ owners have reportedly been in discussions with the owners of the New York Mets about building a new arena in Queens, next to Citi Field. Perhaps the Islanders could play a few games a year at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, just to continue the tour of New York City’s boroughs.

And in Arizona, the Glendale experiment seems to mercifully be grinding to an end, with Coyotes ownership having announced plans last week for a new arena, shared with Arizona State University, to be built in Tempe. That would be the third location for the Coyotes, who began life in downtown Phoenix before the amazingly ill-fated move to Glendale, which led to a bankruptcy and made the team a ward of the league for several seasons.

The move to Tempe, which still has many hurdles related to arena financing because, surprise, it would involve hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars, makes a lot more sense than the move to Glendale did, but that the Coyotes are even trying to do it speaks to how terrible the team has done in the suburbs. Glendale, remember, sued the former owner when he considered selling to parties interested in moving the team, and the city just three years ago signed a 15-year lease that allowed public money to be used to backstop operating losses for the hockey team.

City council eventually realized what a terrible deal it signed and voided the lease, essentially on a technicality. So, in a few short years Glendale went from fighting to keep the team to fighting to get rid of it — literally preferring the idea of an empty arena to paying the Coyotes millions annually just to stay there.

Arizona is third-last in NHL attendance, just behind the Florida Panthers, who despite getting to the playoffs in the third season under new ownership are still getting crowds that average less than 14,000 in Sunrise. Vincent Viola’s plan was to end the massive ticket giveaways and build a team fans would pay to see. He has so far had more success with the first part than the second.

None of this is particularly new or unexpected. For years now, the NHL has always had a handful of franchises losing piles of money, with lousy attendance, or with questions about ownership or an arena — and sometimes all of those things at once.

There are still many reasons to be skeptical of Las Vegas as an NHL site, but the biggest question remains this: With so much uncertainty around the bottom end of its 30 markets, why add a 31st?