NHL in Las Vegas Poses Important Questions About Expansion

The business side of sports always comes with internal dilemmas and contradictions. The new NHL team in Las Vegas represents both positive and negative repercussions. I’m just not sure which side outweighs the other at this point.

In the early 1990s when the NHL began its southward expansion into areas of the United States more associated with football than hockey, it was viewed with skepticism. Would hockey be able to thrive in places like Texas and Florida?

Hockey still lags in popularity in the U.S. compared to football, basketball, and baseball, but from a personal standpoint, I can attest to the impact that hockey has had in areas not previously known as a breeding ground for passionate NHL fans before a team arrived.

I’ve lived in northern California all my life, and I can confidently say that if the San Jose Sharks hadn’t arrived as an expansion team during the 1991-1992 season (I was born in April of 1992, so the Sharks are only slightly older than I am) I never would have gotten into hockey.

I probably would have viewed the sport in a similar way that one anticipates a relative bringing over a dish unique to their geographic location.

A good portion of my mom’s side of the family lives in British Columbia, and had I never gotten to grow up watching Sharks games, I probably would have protested more when a relative would stay the night and insist on watching whatever hockey game was on ESPN (yes, back when ESPN showed hockey).

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My story isn’t unique to just me, though. I guarantee that somebody living in Tampa Bay, Miami, Anaheim, Dallas, or Phoenix could say the same thing.

Even though Ottawa was home to an original NHL franchise, this current version of the Senators serves as a great example to the positive impact of expansion. A new generation of Ottawa Senators fans has been allowed to cheer on the team when they would have been forced to look for another squad to root for, perhaps farther away from the place they call home.

To say that this expansion of teams was purely altruistic on the NHL’s part would be naive. More teams equals more money, and a new fan glued to the TV watching a game previously unfamiliar to them represents not only an intangible moment of newfound passion ignited towards a beautiful game, but also a very concrete measurement of that $50 jersey being proudly donned while cheering for the logo emblazoned on the front.

This is where the emotional turmoil comes in, because while the NHL planned on expanding the amount of teams, they also allowed for teams to move to new cities in search of more profits. To deem this as being motivated purely by greed isn’t fair; the revenue gap between big market teams and small market teams was simply growing too large.

The sad part is that it doesn’t matter that people in Winnipeg care more about hockey as a collective whole than people in Phoenix (thankfully Winnipeg eventually got their team back when the Atlanta Thrashers relocated).

21 teams were in the NHL in 1990. By the year 2000, that number would grow to 30. Relocation has a heartbreaking aspect to it. For every new fan in Phoenix, Denver, Greensboro, and Dallas, there’s a devastated fan in Winnipeg, Quebec, Hartford, and Minneapolis.

That’s very hard to reconcile, and expansion seems like the perfect remedy to creating new fans without alienating old ones.

This brings its own problems, though. More teams means more players in the league, and the talent level gets diluted compared to past eras when there were less roster spots.

A third-line center today may not have even been in the league 30 years ago. Just looking at the amount of roster spots available in 1989 compared to 2016 is eye-opening.

21 teams equals 252 forward spots in the lineup around the league. With 30 teams, that expands to 360. That has an effect on the product on the ice. More spots available means that worse players get to play in the league.

Its ramifications are powerful even if the consequences aren’t necessarily foreseen. The idea behind expansion is essentially to expand the league fan base, but the product ends up being worse as a result.

These critiques are more apt in general examinations of expansions in any sport. Interestingly enough, NHL expansion in the 1990s happened to coincide with the fall of the Soviet Union, and more players from Russia and Eastern Europe were able to come to the NHL.

More talent was being flooded into the NHL through political circumstance, and whether this was something that the NHL took into account when deciding on expansion is unknown.

Even with that caveat, the theory still holds in principle: less spots means more concentrated talent in the league. Let’s say that the NHL never expanded past 21 teams. Russian and Eastern European players would have either pushed out certain NHL players, or proven not good enough to be in the NHL.

Expansion means accumulating more fans, but whether that offsets the negative repercussions of a decreased collection of overall talent in the league is hard to quantify.

Since the 1990s, the Ottawa Senators, San Jose Sharks, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers, Anaheim Ducks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota Wild, Nashville Predators, and Atlanta Thrashers (later becoming the new incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets) are expansion teams that have come into the league.

The Colorado Avalanche, Dallas Stars, Arizona Coyotes, and Carolina Hurricanes are teams that have relocated from elsewhere in that same timeframe.

Relocation doesn’t effect the product on the ice, but it does create displaced fans. Expansion doesn’t create displaced fans, but does effect the product on the ice.

It’s a difficult predicament for the league to navigate around. Personally, I tend to lean more towards expansion than relocation as a means to spread out the NHL as a product into different regions, just because a fan losing their team seems like a worse scenario than the league having its talent slightly watered down.

Maybe that’s not the “correct” answer in terms of a commissioner fulfilling his duties to ensure that hockey as product thrives at the most optimum levels, but from an emotional standpoint, it prevents that awful feeling of taking away a treasured part of the community with no motivating factor besides profits.

Relating back to the NHL in Las Vegas, I’m happy at what has transpired. A team will not have to be uprooted to expand the NHL fan base to a region with no prior connection to NHL hockey.

If the NHL wants to make more money, it can do so without ripping a team from a passionate group of fans in a city that loves it.

Yes the product on the ice will be negatively impacted, but the NHL has to decide whether making more immediate money is worth it.

Next: Ottawa Senators Sign Ryan Dzingel to Two-Way Contract

I can speak to how the Sharks captivated people like me towards hockey, and I have a positive experience with expansion. It’s a victory for the league if just one kid in the Las Vegas area becomes a lifelong hockey fan because of this new expansion team.

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