On September 29th, the NHL will open its 90th season in London, England. As professional sports leagues go, heck as far as anything goes, surviving 90 years is pretty impressive. More impressive is the fact that the NHL has survived despite the people who run it.
How many new NHL fans are likely to come out of a couple of Ducks/Kings games in London? How many young people will be inspired to drop their cricket bats for hockey sticks? Is England even fertile ground for future expansion? Here are the most likely answers to those 3 questions: Precious few, zero and no.
As a publicity stunt these London games are fine. Other than that, once again the league has missed the mark. If the NHL was serious about taking their game to fertile new ground, why not go to a country that actually produces NHL caliber players? Russia, any Scandinavian country, the Czech Republic and Switzerland all have much deeper hockey traditions than England.
The 2 London games aren’t the real problem, though. They do, however, point out how out of touch the deep thinkers at NHL HQ are. While they’re busy planning a junket to Old Blighty, they’ve ignored their biggest problem – putting bums in the seats of the clubs they already have.
The NHL should send Commissioner Gary Bettman back to business school for a refresher course. These days, big corporations are getting back to their core business after years of expansion and acquisition. Too bad the NHL hasn’t heard.
With failing franchises all over the map, the NHL, a gate-driven league if ever there was one, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge its core constituency – Canada and the northern United States. Instead of setting up shop where the fans are, the NHL seems intent on going where they aren’t.
Even if one considers the league’s Sun Belt expansion as some kind of noble experiment (as opposed to a bald-faced cash grab), it’s still obvious that the experiment failed miserably. South Florida, Nashville and Phoenix are all huge drains on the league’s coffers.
Yet, when Blackberry billionaire Jim Balsillie wanted to buy first the ailing Pittsburgh Penguins and then the Nashville Predators, he was not greeted warmly.
It’s not like the member clubs didn’t like Balsillie’s money. Bettman and his bosses would happily trample a couple of grannies if they spotted a fiver lying on the sidewalk. What they don’t like is the idea of Balsillie purchasing an ailing team and moving it to a place where someone might actually buy a ticket. That smacks of business smarts and it might make the league look bad for not thinking of it first.
Unfortunately,the league already looks bad. Balsillie arranged a tentative lease agreement at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, just down the road from Toronto. Then he put season tickets on sale and sold over 6 million dollars worth. That alone should signal other NHL owners to get back to the cardinal business rule: Set up shop where your customers are.
The NHL needs to get back to the core business of selling hockey to hockey fans. Once they’ve tapped out that market they should feel free to pitch it to London soccer fans and Sun Belt retirees.
