BRUINS’ BOSS BELIEVES HOUSTON IS NEXT BIG THING FOR NHL
It could be a long season for haters of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The country’s largest sport market is abuzz and bullish not only on the strength of a 4-1-0 start to the new NHL campaign, but because of how the Leafs have done it, with record-setting offensive production by Auston Matthews (nine goals), Mitch Marner, free-agent stud John Tavares and even freewheeling Morgan Rielly, whose 12 points in a season’s first five games are the most by an NHL defenceman in 100 years of action.
Meanwhile, it’s a particularly bullish time to be a sports fan in United States markets such as Los Angeles, Boston and Houston, where the defending World Series champion Astros are into the final four of the Major League Baseball post-season against the Red Sox, winners of 108 games during the regular season.
Houston also seems to be the apple of Jeremy Jacobs’ eye. The owner of the Boston Bruins continues to tout the fourth-largest city market and eighth-largest metro market in the U.S. as the Next Big Thing for the NHL, in the afterglow of a US$500million expansion into Las Vegas and what will be confirmed in December as a $650-million foray into Seattle for 2020.
The red-hot Red Sox and the Original Six Bruins are only part of the deep sports fabric in Boston, which also fields the NFL dynasty that is the New England Patriots and the heritage NBA brand that is the Celtics.
Add in the New England Revolution of Major League Soccer and one of the country’s best varsity landscapes, and Boston is arguably the most engaged sport city in the U.S. Attendance rates across the four big leagues hovers north of 95 per cent capacity, second to none in North America.
Yet thanks to baseball’s Dodgers, football’s Rams and LeBron James and the Lakers, it’s also an interesting time to be an Angelino in the world of sport. And it’s not only quality, it’s also the sheer quantity of options for Los Angeles sport fans.
The second-largest media market in the U.S. — with a metro population of almost 19 million and about five per cent of the country’s TV viewers with 5.48 million TV households — Los Angeles is home to 10 franchises, two in each of the five major leagues. Only metro New York has more, with 11.
BEARS OF THE WEEK
It has been another bearish week for the neglected hockey fans in Quebec City. Yet the real bear is NHL chairman Jacobs and his number-spinning.
There’s no discounting that Houston is an attractive target for the NHL, with 2.45 million TV homes, a willing deep-pocketed owner in Tilman Fertitta of the NBA Rockets, an NHL-calibre arena in the Toyota Center and a ready-built rivalry with the Dallas Stars.
Yet Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight estimate that Houston has fewer than 200,000 hockey fans in a metro population of 6.3 million.
Sure, it’s almost seven times the size of Quebec City. But as the Winnipeg Jets have proven in a market one-seventh that of Atlanta, while size matters, it’s not as important as market demographics.
There are an estimated 550,000 avid hockey fans in Quebec City, all of them on the outside looking in when it comes to the NHL.
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