Ain’t it the truth.
And sorry about that adam. I apologize and should have known better.
The market for professional hockey is simply too large for the Leafs to service. There’s an enormous amount of unmet demand. The popular blather is that Leafs fans don’t know any better, but of course they do; it’s just that there’s four or five times as many fans in Toronto as there are tickets. And in Toronto, it’s the big leagues or nothing.
Of the six remaining Canadian teams, it’s worth nothing that the three small ones - Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary - each have metropolitan populations of about a million. The two that left, Winnipeg and Quebec, aren’t that big. I think experience would suggest that a million is about what you need in Canada to host an NHL team. Below that, the teams were lost; above that they seem profitable.
Greater Toronto has about five million people; if you count some of the municipalities within range of a Hamilton franchise, more like six million.
Well, it wouldn’t be at the same level in the sense that it would not have as many franchises. But would the Canadian teams draw about the same? I would argue they would probably do BETTER, since the chances of a Stanley Cup would increase. There’s definitely a sort of depressing effect to watching the Cup pointlessly swapped between places where people don’t care about hockey.
Shit, we have OHL teams that draw as many actual spectators as I’ve seen at NHL games in the U.S. south. London, a city of 400,000, regularly pulls in 7500 and up to see the Knights. This is the hockey two levels BELOW the NHL; it is the logical equivalent of a AA baseball team pulling in a million fans a year, which I don’t believe has ever happened.
I’d say a high school football team might be a better comparison, although you have to adjust the total attendance to account for the number of home games.
You’ve got your opinion, and I’ve got mine. That said, I have to take some contention with the following statement:
C’mon, there is no way to call the OHL 2 steps below the NHL; the true equivalent of AA would be the ECHL. OHL would be more equivalent to a US college team, as a developmental league.
How about ONE level below the NHL, the American Hockey League??
http://stats.theahl.com/stats/schedule.php?view=attendance&season_id=12
Capacity stats from Wikipedia
Hershey, PA - avg. attendance - 8870, capacity - 10500
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, PA - avg. attendance - 7667, capacity - 8343
Manitoba (Winnipeg) -avg. attendance - 7807, capacity - 15,015
That said…
Hamilton, ON - avg. attendance - 4575, capacity - 17,383
Toronto, ON - avg. attendance - 4348, capacity - 7907