Shrug, whatever.

Posted by Earl Sleek from Anaheim, CA on 01/02/09 at 03:57 PM ET

“Original” 6 team match-ups do have a little extra sometimes just because they have so much history… but this leads to a major problem for the league right now. The relatively new teams in major markets haven’t had enough success and history.

The league is still dealing with the fall-out of contracting the league to 6 teams (news flash: they weren’t “original") and staying that way for so long. They lost the chance to grab so many eyeballs across the country for so long…

If the league wants to be a continent-wide major league, then they need to do better in the ‘non-traditional’ major TV markets: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington, Miami, Phoenix, Tampa, Atlanta, etc.

Long playoff runs by teams with large, strong fan bases won’t help the league in the long run. Playoff runs by the teams listed above will. Unfortunately it looks like the Sharks and Caps are the only ones with a prayer in that regard.

Posted by pwnicholson from Nashville, TN on 01/02/09 at 04:17 PM ET

The best the NHL could hope for is a long playoff run by the likes of San Jose and Washington that ultimately ends in the Conference finals and delivers a Detroit/Boston (hopefully) final. That would assure them of ratings like last year while at the same time hopefully pulling some new viewers from the SJ and Washington mega TV markets. A SJ/Wash final would be bad for national ratings in my opinion. As good as SJ is nobody outside of San Francisco knows who the heck they are

Posted by kevin from boston on 01/02/09 at 06:53 PM ET

As good as SJ is nobody outside of San Francisco knows who the heck they are

Well obviously the way to fix this is to televise them as infrequently as humanly possible.  Way to keep a secret, league!  Who really wants to know about the best hockey team of the season if they have the nerve not to play in an Original Six city?

Posted by Earl Sleek from Anaheim, CA on 01/02/09 at 06:59 PM ET

Plenty of people know who the San Jose Sharks are.  Being an excellent regular season team, a frequent playoff team, and a team that is picked by many experts to be a Cup contender at the beginning of every season doesn’t go along too well with anonymity.  I’ve heard they have a good base of season ticket holders and they seem to have good attendance at the games I’ve seen.

Long playoff runs by teams with large, strong fan bases won’t help the league in the long run. Playoff runs by the teams listed above will. Unfortunately it looks like the Sharks and Caps are the only ones with a prayer in that regard.

The problem with that is that the teams with substantial fan bases are the teams that usually pull in decent money from tickets and merchandising and also demand decent performance on the ice - so those are the teams that actually spend money on good players and don’t skimp on coaching or scouting or development.  The teams with smaller, less robust fan bases sometimes can’t afford to ice consistently competitive teams, reducing the likelihood that they can make the playoffs year after year and not have to rely on the hope for a Cinderella run in the playoffs to get a few extra dollars in the coffers.  With revenue sharing from playoff revenues I also suspect that the league does better financially in the short-term if the “more popular” teams make the playoffs because they will pull in enough money to help keep some of the non-playoff small-market teams afloat as long as they keep their payroll low enough.  I think Ted Leonsis said that even if the Capitals win the Cup with maximum home playoff revenues, they still would lose about $5 million this year.

(And unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee a team from a non-traditional market such as, oh, I don’t know, Tampa, doesn’t win a Cup and build up a decent fan base, then wind up getting sold and the new owners promptly turn off some of the fans with trades and hires - or a team such as Atlanta keeping an incompetent and hated GM, thus alienating the fans the team does have.)

It would be great if Los Angeles wouldn’t act as though they had a dinky small-market budget and put together a solid team, and it would be great for the fans in Atlanta if the ownership situation was cleared up and the GM was replaced so they could assume that the team would actually start building for the future with some kind of vision, but you can’t make a horse drink no matter how much you lead him to water - and you can’t wave a magic wand and make management instantly competent. I also wonder how many owners can’t wait a decade or more to build a solid fan base, even if they are willing to, because they can’t afford to keep losing money that long in the hopes that they will recoup it many years down the road.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 01/02/09 at 10:59 PM ET