Does NHL need more than 30 teams?

Gary Bettman’s occasional sessions with a group of reporters often have the air of an exasperated parent.

The NHL commissioner will sigh when he is asked about a contentious issue, and he will explain that the premise is all wrong, and he has said before that it is wrong and why won’t you just listen to him and eat your peas.

This has been the case on expansion talk for about a year. From the moment early last December when Bettman gave his blessing to Las Vegas businessman Bill Foley to gauge interest in the market with a season-ticket drive, the commissioner has insisted, often with heavy sighing, that the NHL was no closer to expanding beyond 30 teams on that particular day than it was the day before.

As the Vegas drive ticked onward, and Foley reported that sales were brisk, official word from the NHL was that there had remained no serious discussions about expansion at the board of governors level. They hadn’t even discussed discussing it.

This remained the stance even as the NHL announced in June that it would accept expansion applications for a $10-million fee — that’s just the cost to apply, not for a franchise — and in July, when it confirmed that Foley in Las Vegas and Quebecor in Quebec City had submitted bids.

At every point, Bettman has sought to quash speculation that the league wanted to expand even as it was inviting applicants to do so. This was all just due diligence, the commissioner would say. But it was nice to know that there were interested parties. Especially wealthy parties who come bearing arenas.

And now, with the governors meeting in California, Bettman has announced that another hurdle has been passed: the discussion. Or, at least, the warm-up discussion.

The commissioner told reporters that the governors’ executive committee discussed the applications from Las Vegas and Quebec City, although he made it sound more like a fact-finding discussion, a review of all the information they have been provided and what they have discovered themselves.

At some point, Bettman said, the executive committee would have “substantive” discussions. But no timetable was set for that.

It was yet another instalment of Honestly, It Might Look Like We Are Expanding But We Haven’t Decided Anything, starring Gary Bettman.

“We’re going to go through this process, complete this process one way or the other, and that’s where we’ll be,” Bettman said, as reported by The Canadian Press. “If we decide at another point in time to reopen expansion, and I’m not saying we would, that’s a subsequent decision. This process is this process for these two applicants. Period.”

The slow movement on the process remains a bit perplexing, if only because the key expansion factors haven’t changed in the past year.

The broad argument in favour of expansion, from the perspective of the NHL’s 30 owners, is the prospect of something like $1 billion in expansion fees, which would work out to a tidy $33 million each. That was the argument in favour of expanding last December, and it’s the argument in favour of doing it today.

It’s also pretty much the only argument. Las Vegas and Quebec individually have their pros and cons as prospective cities; the former is a glitzy destination in a non-hockey market, the latter is a rabid market but with far less glitz. But nothing in this process has changed the larger question of whether there should be more than 30 NHL markets.

In June, when the league said it was open for applications, it seemed obvious they were taking advantage of the brief window in which ownership and arena questions in troubled markets such as Florida, New Jersey, Carolina, Long Island and Arizona had been settled. But six months later the bottom five teams in attendance: New Jersey, Arizona, Florida, the New York Islanders and Carolina.

The Islanders, despite relocating a good young team to new digs in Brooklyn, are averaging fewer than 13,000 fans per game, down from under 16,000 last year on Long Island.

Carolina is averaging fewer than 11,000 fans a night. And in Arizona, the briefly stable ownershiparena situation is once again unstable, with the Coyotes on a two-year lease in Glendale after city council blew up their 15-year arrangement last spring on a technicality.

Team owner Anthony Leblanc has now said he’s open to exploring a move to downtown Phoenix, maybe even Tempe, and leaving Glendale behind. Egads. How interested is Glendale going to be in supporting the Coyotes as they consider a move elsewhere?

The NHL was a 30-team league with a handful of weak markets last December. Whatever has gone on in the discussions, or discussions about discussions, that have taken place in the 12 months since, that part of the expansion calculus hasn’t changed one bit.