Well, longer term than Nashville anyway…

Posted by PRC. on 10/21/08 at 09:23 PM ET

Hopefully, this is the like all the hollywood couples that claim they are not getting divorced a month before it actually happens.

Posted by Shawn on 10/22/08 at 09:47 AM ET

If you look at the post-67 expansion teams that have folded up shop and moved on, there are a few common reasons for the occurence.

One common one of the day was teams playing in older, smaller arenas, without luxury boxes or seating capacities needed to drive up revenues (the new Pittsburgh arena to replace the Igloo certainly contributed to the team staying put). As arenas grew bigger, the inability to draw crowds has been another common symptom. Their lack of crowds, currently at the point where teams are in jeopardy of losing out on revenue sharing, is a big sign that you are in jeopardy. Not only do you lose revenue for empty seats, but have too many empty seats and you lose the extra boost that helps you ice a more competitive team.

The other main factors involved ownership issues. When owners are greedy and want more money, or have felt too pinched by bad times, that is also when franchises have moved on.

The best example of troubled ownership, unfortunately for the Forechecker, would be Nashville and Boots’ troubles. However, as he is anything but the sole owner, that indeed helps protect the team in a big way. The attendance trend for the League has been positive overall, with post lockout showing 6 teams below 15,000 in average attendance, followed by 7 and 4 in the following years, and currently we sit with only 3 teams below that 15,000 seat imaginary line. While there are teams commonly in the bottom of the attendance standings, there appear to be few that have been on a consistently downward trend.

In Florida’s case, the attendance fell after the we-miss-hockey post-lockout season, but has steadily (if slowly) risen ever since in the pure numbers sense. You can have a look at a set of attendance stats here, and in the process show ESPN that hockey fans don’t hold on to hard feelings. If there is any team that’s feeling the pain, it’s LA, who’ve only dropped post-lockout, with two drops of over 1,000 in that span, though you would tend to attribute it to the rebuilding nature of the team, which only certain teams (read: Toronto) seem to be able to thwart the downward effect of.

Posted by SENShobo from Waterloo, ON on 10/22/08 at 10:15 AM ET