EXPANSION STILL STINGS IN QUEBEC
No bid process to worry about as NHL awards 32nd franchise to Seattle group
The list of coming events for the Videotron Centre in Quebec City next month is straightforward. There are some junior hockey games and a Bryan Adams concert.
An entire month anchored by a 59-year-old rock star performing such hits as Summer of Soixante-Neuf isn’t what Quebec politicians had in mind when they put on Nordiques jerseys and picked up spades some years back to break ground on the arena, the shovels being an excellent metaphor for the $330 million of public money that was being dumped into the place.
What they had in mind was NHL hockey, the dream of a return of the world’s premier league featuring men on skates. And with Tuesday’s formal news that the league was expanding, again, but this time to Seattle, a second Quebec team and eighth in Canada remains very much a fantasy.
That this result has been in the works for months doesn’t make it any less awkward for fans in Quebec City, and those politicians — from all levels of government — who spent piles of their money following the NHL’s preferred path: Build an arena, and we’ll talk.
The arena boosters started promoting the benefits of such a building in the early part of this decade, even as NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, in his patented dismissive way, kept saying publicly that, gosh, the league just had no plans to expand.
There was excitement in the summer of 2015 when the NHL announced it would allow interested parties to submit expansion proposals, but a year later Bettman said that it was granting a team to just one of the applicants: Las Vegas.
Quebec City was receiving a tousle of the hair and a pat on the cheek: the bid was fine, with the spiffy arena and a deep-pocketed prospective owner in Quebecor, but the Canadian dollar was weak and the city itself was over there in the East, which would have exacerbated the league’s conference imbalance. That both these things were true before the NHL solicited expansion bids at $10 million a pop didn’t seem to concern the commissioner in the least.
Good try, Quebec City. Tousle, pat.
That the Seattle group that is now the steward of the NHL’s 32nd franchise didn’t have to win any bid process of the sort that the Quebec capital endured must only make it that much more galling to those who were turned down.
Some wealthy men with an eye on renovating an old arena batted their eyelashes at the NHL, and the indications right from the beginning were that the league was receptive.
Seattle, conveniently situated over on the West Coast, allows the NHL to have 16 teams in each conference, and also the economy doesn’t run on those colourful Canadian dollars. The success of the Vegas experiment was barely two months old when the NHL gave the Seattle group the go-ahead last year on the expansion that was formally approved on Tuesday.
Whatever the merits of Seattle as an NHL market, and they appear to be many, the broader reason for the move is money. The other NHL owners now get to split a US$650-million expansion fee, on top of the $500 million they divvied up from Vegas.
They also get that windfall with some distance between now and the scheduled end of the current collective-bargaining agreement with the players in 2023, a point at which the league will inevitably start tutting about troubled team finances and the need to squeeze certain concessions from the union. It’s hard to pull that off when you’re rolling around in a fresh $1.15 billion in expansion fees.
But all that free money ignores the larger question of whether the NHL truly needs to be in 32 markets, which was the same question asked when Vegas became the 31st. Ever since the league began its aggressive southern expansion in the 1990s, there’s perpetually been a handful of problem franchises. Some of these have changed over the years, and even teams that seem solid today like Tampa have staggered through ownership changes amid indifferent markets.
When the Nashville team was going through bankruptcy, a trade for Ottawa’s Mike Fisher was reported in the local paper as “Predators trade for Carrie Underwood’s husband.”
Today’s problem teams — Arizona, Florida, the Brooklyn Islanders — have been problems for years now. Even the Carolina Hurricanes, with new ownership and everyone swooning over their goofy-but-fun post-game celebrations, are still 29th in attendance at fewer than 13,000 per game.
Does the NHL really need to add another team when it always has at least a couple of franchises seeking some combination of a new arena, new investors, and a lot more fans?
Naturally, this is where Quebec City comes back into the picture. It could be a landing spot for one of those teams, just like Winnipeg was for Atlanta. It could also be Kansas City, which built an arena in 2007 and is still without a major-league tenant.