From Dave Naylor of the Globe & Mail:
Ted Rechtshaffen was performing due diligence for a client who is looking to sell his share in a current NHL team when he started crunching numbers on such things as ticket prices, attendance and market size to see which NHL markets made sense.
His conclusions? Size of market, unlike the case in most instances concerning the NBA, Major League Baseball and even the NFL, does not have much to do with where it is viable to support NHL hockey. What matters in most instances is geographic location, with the league’s strongest franchises located in places where the game of hockey has a long history and it at least part of the cultural fabric.
Read the entire story here.
This article doesn’t surprise me, but it sure sheds a little bit more light on something that I’ve believed for a while now. Market size doesn’t matter that much when the people in that market just don’t care about the sport. Last night, on The Score television in Canada, there was an excellent piece explaining the lack of attention that the entire Jim Balsillie controversy is getting in Arizona. The sports radio stations hardly talk about it, it isn’t the main story on the Arizona Republic sports page and people just generally don’t care. I know the Phoenix area is highly populated, but what does highly populated mean when those people couldn’t care less anyways?
