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Originally Posted by JHikka
It's more NHL the Product rather than Hockey the Sport, if that makes sense. This is mostly conjecture on my behalf but it explains the wide gap between Canadians coming out for NHL hockey but not for CHL, women's, or any other various kinds at different levels. This works out fine for the NHL (money is money) but does a lot of damage to the sport at the grassroots level.
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That makes total sense to me, and about sums up what I think has happened in football as well. People are "NFL Fans", not "football fans" and the CFL struggles because of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by VANRIDERFAN
I sometimes wonder having one or two teams as part of US dominated leagues (including NHL) has hurt Canadian domestic leagues development and acceptance by a wider domestic audience. And as a result there are less positions for Canadians to play professional in their country.
Will the idea of having one or two Canadian teams in the US dominated woman’s professional soccer league help or hinder the establishment of a Canadian domestic woman’s professional soccer league.
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Absolutely. There's no other reason why we couldn't be Australia. They have 10 million people less than us, but have 18 professional AFL teams, 17 professional NRL teams (plus there's one in NZ), 5 pro Super Rugby teams, I think 12 pro A-league soccer teams, 8 pro cricket teams, I
think pro basketball too, plus managing all the more one-off event like horse racing, car racing, tennis, etc.
But instead of leagues building out and developing over the whole country, the biggest cities get pulled to the US, leaving the rest of the country well short of critical mass to become what they could be otherwise. Things are changing, the CPL and CEBL being the best examples but they are still very "minor-league" and nowhere close to the American counterparts. Now I'd argue that the Raptors actually
created a lot of the basketball awareness and fandom that exists, rather than taking away anything that was already there.
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