Quote:
Originally Posted by optimusREIM
I don't think prospective owners care what position it is in a given city as long as it's profitable. I mean, sure there's a consideration to be had about the fact that hockey is much less popular in some places (which is fair given some of the failures we've seen). I think that no matter what, if you're an owner or the NHL, you'd rather have a lukewarm market that's huge and has a lot of potential and room for losing fans over a small loyal market that has zero room for error in running the team.
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I don't think this is obvious. What % of entertainment or sports revenues do you think an NHL team would collect in Charlotte? Do we think it'll make more money than the NFL or NBA teams? There are others like the MLS team as well. So the NHL team is probably looking at something like a 20% market share or less. It may well flop and get ~0% (never the most fun/interesting option for people) while it's virtually guaranteed to be super popular in Halifax. This factor can be as big as a 3-10x difference in market size.
The limiting factors in Halifax are that it has no suitable venue and may be small enough that even with guaranteed support the revenues just won't be high enough. I think that first issue is likely going to be fixed as the old arena gets replaced (no-brainer to build it to NHL standards; the old one is nearing 50 years old) and the economic/demographic growth is resolving that second issue.
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