Quote:
Originally Posted by isaidso
1 team for all of southern Ontario with nose bleed seats starting at $100? Instead of growing professional hockey and cultivating new fans in this region, Bettman and the NHL have ignored this market completely. He went to places like Atlanta and Phoenix instead.
When demand far outstrips supply people will eventually move on to other sports and other leagues. In southern Ontario you have huge swaths of the population who've moved on. Some were hockey fans who've gotten frustrated with being shut out and switched to something else but most are people that could have been lured to the NHL but were never given a product to get behind. They picked up basketball or soccer instead.
'Fortress Hockey' was so dominant that even after 3 decades of neglect there's still a huge fan base. On the surface everything looks fine but the NHL has nothing close to the dominance it once had. If they keep this up I can see hockey slipping to 2nd or even 3rd in southern Ontario within a generation. Of course lots of hockey people won't even notice because all they'll see is a full arena and conclude that everything is fine.
Quebec City is another obvious example. People will only wait so long before they give up. Laval football has filled in the vacuum.
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I tend to agree with this. Hockey is still very strong but not what it used to be and is declining. In Canada the NHL could or should be what the NFL is in the US at the moment. They have squandered this opportunity.