BIGGER SEEMS BETTER NOW FOR NHL
Hockey: Shaky Las Vegas support hardly eases concern over the stability of some existing franchises
Two years ago, the notion of NHL expansion would have seemed ridiculous in the extreme. There were unsettled ownership and arena questions in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and on Long Island, and the league had only just come out of a lockout in which it insisted many franchises were struggling to remain both competitive and solvent.
Now, with the various ownership questions addressed, if not completely answered, and with just enough distance from the crying-poor days of the lockout, the NHL appears ready to cash in, netting potentially billions in new franchise fees. This is how the cycle works: when labour concerns arise, the league talks up the financial peril of its clubs. Once a CBA is struck, it can turn to discussing the robust health of the league, tilling the soil for the expansion windfall. The only surprise this time is how short the distance was from Point A to Point B.
But that doesn’t make the notion of expansion any less ridiculous. Start with Las Vegas, the site of commissioner Gary Bettman’s come-hither announcement to prospective owners, and an almost certain bet to be awarded a franchise, given the very public way the league has allowed it to gauge interest in an NHL team.
It has an arena under construction, a wealthy ownership group, and an operation that has attempted to overcome the natural skepticism associated with hockey in the desert by launching a season-ticket drive that, it says, has been very successful. More than 13,000 commitments for tickets after a five-month drive, it trumpets.
In the excitement of yesterday’s announcement, this was often reported as “13,000 season tickets sold,” but it’s nothing of the sort.
The prospective franchise owners have taken deposits on ticket packages, but for most of the price points buyers could opt for a half or even quarter-season. The commitment was as little as $75 for some seats.
Should a franchise ultimately be awarded to the ownership group, buyers wouldn’t face much of a sting if they walked away from that kind of investment rather than follow through with a big-dollar buy-in on hockey. (Another wrinkle: the terms of service on the deposits state that buyers could request a refund if the team is not ready to play by 2016. The league said Wednesday that expansion teams wouldn’t play until 2017; how many Vegas buyers will stick around?)
I asked the ownership group on Wednesday if they would break down their commitments between full and partial-season buyers, but have not yet received a response. As of Thursday, the only section that was fully sold out was the cheapest seat available: a $150 deposit for a full season, based on single-game prices of $20-$40 per ticket.
This does not seem like Vegas, as a whole, is throwing great sums of money at NHL hockey, despite the commissioner’s assertion that the city had “stepped up in obviously a significant and positive way to show support for having a major league team in Las Vegas.”
You want significant and positive? When the Winnipeg Jets opened season-ticket sales after their surprise move from Atlanta in 2011, 13,000 packages — full seasons, none of that partial business — were sold out in 17 minutes.
Of course, whole forests have died so people like me could express skepticism about NHL hockey in southern U.S. markets, and Bettman appears likely to continue ignoring it.
The Florida Panthers have a new owner who is determined to end the years of ticket freebies that he figured, correctly, have devalued the product, but no one knows if that will result in people buying enough tickets to make the franchise stable.
In Arizona, the ownership group, itself in flux, is now in a legal fight with Glendale, the suburb that owns the arena, because the city belatedly decided it had given the hockey team too much of a sweetheart deal to stay there. (Which it did.)
How that will be sorted out is far from clear, but the experience in Arizona seems pretty relevant to the Vegas proposition: ownership changes, a bankruptcy, the franchise becoming a ward of the league, and the latest deal that was only made because Glendale was desperate to avoid losing the arena’s only tenant.
And Arizona didn’t come with all the red flags related to Vegas, where pro sports franchises have been all kinds of disaster.
There are expansion cases to be made for places like Quebec City, Seattle, Portland and Toronto, and caveats with them all, but a league that perpetually has a couple of its teams in financial distress wants to grow again, and the only people who will say with a straight face that there are 32 viable NHL cities will be those in the league offices.
You expand now for the free money, see. And also so enough time passes before the labour deal is up, and you can wring your hands again at the state of the league.