How? Wouldn’t it just be a vote of all the NHL teams? Can a single team veto an expansion location? It’s a shame, because there are so many hockey fans in the Toronto area that never get a chance to see an NHL home game.
I would not be surprised if a team is able to veto having a new team move into its home market.
I’d go bonkers if I lived there.
Bumping the thread because it’s looking possible we will have a redux.
At the rate things are going, it is very possible that the Eastern conference finals will be Pacers vs Knicks and the Western conference finals will be Thunder vs Timberwolves.
The Pacers, Thunder and T-wolves have never won an NBA Finals. The Knicks haven’t won one since 1973. So we are very likely going to see a fresh new champion this season.
I was a Sonics fan so I’m hoping it’s not the Thunder. Out of pettiness.
I’ll admit, I feel like Indiana deserves it the same way the Detroit Lions deserve a Super Bowl. The Pacers have been close, very close, but not had one. Good for this group if they do what Reggie Miller never could.
I’d be cool with the Knicks as well even though they:
- won one before
- knocked out my Pistons
Of course, New York has to get past Boston first. There’s no guarantee of that. They blew their chance to close them out in Game 5.
Reggie Miller is my personal favorite player of all time (not my pick for best player ever, just my favorite). It bothered me that he made it to the finals one time and never won a ring. Let’s do it for him!
Go Pacers!
You want to talk about the definition of clutch. He seemed to have a knack for always performing best at the most critical times.
I was not a Pacers fan but I could not help but admire the guy. Plus he always seemed so calm.
Just did a Google search of him being clutch and I was reminded of the time when he got 8 points in 9 seconds at one point during the last 32 seconds of a game to bring the Pacers from behind to win. I mean, for crying out loud.
Knicks now leading the Celtics by 24 points. Closeout game.
Either Tyrese Haliburton, Jalen Brunson, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, or Anthony Edwards will win their first championship this year. Four guys who will be key figures in the league for years to come.
Here’s hoping it’s Halliburton.
Fun fact, if the 6th-seeded Twolves advance to play the 4th-seeded Pacers, it will be the lowest-seeded NBA Finals of all time (combined seeding of ten).
And even if they meet the No. 3 seed Knicks, it would still tie for the lowest-seeded Finals too. The current record, if I recall right, is when the No. 1 seed Spurs played the No. 8 seed Knicks in 1999 in the Finals (combined seeding of nine).
The Leafs could put up enough of a fight to stop it. It’s a 3/4 vote usually, but they are a powerful and influential force and pumps a huge amount of money into the league.
North American pro sports leagues are very weird in that they tend to not put teams where the customers are. They put teams
- Where they can fleece governments out of stadiums, and
- To a much lesser extent, where they think they can CREATE fans.
If MLB expanded, the absolutely perfect place for a new team would be somewhere in or around New York City. That however would offend the Yankees and Mets, and wouldn’t create new fans in Portland or Vancouver or whatever.
The NHL is an even more extreme case because Toronto is the biggest hockey market on the planet and is LUDICROUSLY underserved. It’s not that Toronto could support two teams. Toronto could support three teams, easily. (I am defining “Toronto” as the entire metro sprawl; the teams might actually be best located in places like Mississauga or Vaughan.) Four teams would not be out of the question if one is in a place like Kitchener. The NYC metro area has three teams but most reports conclude Toronto actually has more hockey fans. Experience demonstrates you need about 1 to 1.5 million Canadians to support an NHL team comfortably. The Toronto metro area has six or seven million Canadians.