Cleveland has a much larger metro area than Columbus. Cincinnati’s is only slightly smaller. I was told by a friend who lived in Columbus that the city proper was able to annex practically all of its metro area by requiring anyone who wanted city water to be annexed. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would explain the difference in city proper vs. metro area numbers.
That’s because teams worry about the metro area and not the city population. Columbus is behind both Cleveland and Cincinnati in metro area population.
Columbus, not counting the NHL Blue Jackets, is within 207 miles of 4 MLB teams, 5 NFL teams (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Detroit), 3 NBA teams, and 2 NHL teams.
It’s expected that Las Vegas and Quebec City will get the next NHL expansion teams but that hasn’t officially been awarded yet. The NHL may be waiting to see if Phoenix is dumb enough to build then an arena like Glendale was.
The NFL likes having a viable market it can use to threaten to move to if a city won’t help this mega-rich non-profit organization.
Phoenix? You do realize Glendale, AZ, where the Coyotes play, is basically a suburb of Phoenix, don’t you? The two cities are only nine miles apart.
Thats a bit of a shame. I saw some old-time videos of the Rams from the 70s and it seems the fans were pretty rabid for them. Seems perhaps moving to Anaheim was a mistake for that franchise.
Do NHL teams attract fans in the southern United States? It seems that Chicago, New York, Detroit, etc. have kids that grew up playing hockey outdoors in the winter. Not so much the case in southern states. I suppose transplants from northern states might want to see hockey in the South, but would they be enough to support a sport franchise?
Here are the attendane numbers for the NHL. The three teams with the lowest attendance last season are all southern (Arizona, Carolina and Florida). The southern team with the best attendance is Tampa Bay, which ranks ninth out of thirty. St. Louis, which is sort-of-southern, ranks fourteenth. Dallas and Nashville also had below-average attendance. So it looks like hockey is less of a draw in the warm-climate areas.
On the other hand, southern teams do exist. I presume they’re making enough money to stay afloat. Maybe someone who knows more about the NHL can expand on this.
Yes, I do. But I also know that both sides have agreed to terminate the lease in 2017 and the Coyotes are investigating the possibility of moving/getting an arena built in Phoenix or Scottsdale. They feel a significant portion of their fan base that’s in Phoenix or Scottsdale does not want the hassle of driving to Glendale in weekday evening travel.
In a lot of cases sports team owners make the big bucks from selling the team. They buy it with debt at low interest and when the value rises and the tax advantage of writing off players contracts is gone, they sell it. Or they play games with assigning expenses from other businesses to it. Or they can do games with cable revenues if they own the cable network. Many times an owner can get real estate development rights if a new arena is built.
Ah, I see. I wasn’t aware the Coyotes had that short a lease and find themselves forced to be moving soon.
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On the other hand, southern teams do exist. I presume they’re making enough money to stay afloat. Maybe someone who knows more about the NHL can expand on this.
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Well, it’s kind of a long story, but let me see if I can summarize it quickly. First of all, there are hockey teams in the South for two reasons;
- Expansion, and
- Relocation.
The idea behind southern expansion was twofold; first of all, the NHL makes money from each expansion, because the new franchise owner pays a one time fee that constitutes a nice infusion of cash. So if there are people willing to start hockey teams in the south, why not let them?
More importantly, however, is that a broader geographical reach would presumably make the NHL more attractive to U.S. TV networks, and that’s where the money is. The NFL is the gold standard in this regard; the NFL makes more money from broadcasting its games than it does from selling tickets to them. The NHL historically has had very little US TV exposure, and the assumption was that a truly nationwide league could get a network deal.
So that’s reason #1. Those teams include:
The Atlanta Thrashers, who became the Winnipeg Jets 2.0
The Tampa Bay Lightning
The Florida Panthers
The San Jose Sharks (I guess that’s kind of southern)
The Anaheim Ducks
The Nashville Predators
The LA Kings, though that was in 1967
Reason #2 is relocation. Three of the southern teams actually started as northern teams;
The Hartford Whalers became the Carolina Hurricanes
The Minnesota North Stars became the Dallas Stars
The Winnipeg Jets 1.0 became the Phoenix/Arizona Coyotes
Also the Quebec Nordiques became the Colorado Avalanche though I’m not sure they count as a “southern” team.
Relocation was in every case simply something that happened when the team wasn’t doing well in its existing market; except for Minnesota all were in marginal markets and all had very bad arenas and were bleeding money. In every case a taxpayer-supported arena was used to lure them away. And of course, looking for a broader geographical base, the NHL was happy to let them move.
Of course, if you were going to start a new NHL team tomorrow where you could find fans to buy tickets, absolutely the first place you would put it is Toronto. You would sell every seat every night for way, way above the NHL average ticket price and it wouldn’t affect the existing team’s ticket sales a whit. There is nowhere in the world with more demand for professional hockey. But while the new team would make lots of money in ticket sales, that doesn’t help the league in any grand strategic way; in any sense that matters the Canadian TV market is basically yours anyway. Canadians watch hockey as much as they can already; you’ve little to gain.
It WOULD help if you could develop new markets and then entire NBC, FOX, or whomever to give you millions of dollars on the basis of having an Americawide demand for televised hockey. So they tried that. And it’s not working all that well;
- As mentioned, Atlanta lost its team to Winnipeg. That’s the second time that has happened, since in 1980 their first team moved to Calgary.
- Phoenix is a catastrophe and the team bleeds money
- Carolina’s attendance is frightening low,
- The Florida Panthers, who incidentally play in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, are in horrible shape, though it should be noted the team on the ice has been brutal for so long now it’s hard to blame the locals for not going
Some of the southern franchises - Anaheim, San Jose, and Tampa Bay -have been success stories, of course. Dallas has done well too. I’ve heard people say Nashville has its problems but you wouldn’t know it from the attendance figures.
Of course, the location of the southern franchises doesn’t necessarily line up with where the markets are. Houston is either the largest or the second largest market in the south depending what source you believe, but does not have a team, though they have an obvious rival opportunity and much smaller market like Nashville have teams. Atlanta, the third largest market in the south, now has no team. But that’s because a key part of professional sports business is getting a stadium financed by the taxpayer. NHL, NFL, NBA or MLB, a critical part of the business- hell, it’s essentially a rule now - is that the local taxpayer has to pay for the stadium; it’s a zillion dollar bonanza if the team doesn’t have to pick up the tab for the venue.
Now having said all that, the NHL is
- Generally very financially successful, and
- Ludicrously more successful and stable that it was, say, 40 years ago.
Would it be better off, theoretically, if the teams were not where they are now? Probably; in theory, you could at least move Phoenix, Florida, and Carolina to places they’d be much safer, like Toronto, Seattle, or hell, maybe even Milwaukee. But again that serves no strategic purpose and would piss off existing franchises.
Anaheim? That’s a hell of a typo. They moved to St. Louis, MO. A bit farther than Anaheim.
You might be thinking of the Angels, which once were the California Angels and eventually became “The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” or some similar nonsense. However, they’re still playing in the same stadium they were when they were the California Angels - they didn’t move, just shifted alliances.
This is kind of a tangent, but the PGATour makes an annual trip to most major cities with some notable exceptions.
Denver (and Colorado) used to have a Tournament every year until about 10 years ago, and there has been only one tournament since that time.
Seattle (and Washington) hasn’t had an annual event in decades. The USGA played a US Open there for the first time ever, and there was a World Golf Championship there about 10-15 years ago.
St Louis (and Missouri) doesn’t have a regular tour stop.
Minneapolis (and Minnesota) does not have a regular tour stop although Ryder Cup will be played there next fall.
The entire state of Pennsylvania doesn’t have a PGATour stop although the US Open will be played near Pittsburgh in 2016.
The Rams moved their home games from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium in 1979. Locally, it was a pretty big story at the time.
Ah! My bad, I was a child and completely unaware of sports at the time. I barely remember them moving to St. Louis…
That’s a technicality; they have UT-Austin, which for all intents and purposes, is a set of pro teams, and depending on the year and the sport, may have actually been paid players.
Plus, they’re 150 miles from Houston, and more or less fall within the Houston pro sports orbit, with the possible exception of the San Antonio Spurs. I’m not sure if Austinites follow the Rockets or the Spurs.
I’d say that San Antonio has to qualify as the biggest city without a large pro sports presence- they only have the one NBA team, which is the only major pro sports franchise for something like 250 miles in any direction (more, if you go north, south or west).
This is somewhat tangential to the thread subject, but it’s an interesting bit of trivia.
The three cities of the Upper Left Coast (Seattle, Portland, Vancouver) collectively have one franchise from each of the four major sports leagues: NFL: Seahawks, NBA: Trailblazers, MLB: Mariners, NHL: Canucks. Yet each of the cities has an MLS team. There’s probably something siginificant here, although I’m not sure what.
And they are generally considered some of the most rabid fan bases in MLS (Sporting KC has an argument as well). It is very interesting. The success of Seattle’s MLS franchise led to Portland and Vancouver getting in fairly quickly - which has paid off very well for the league.