Comes now Jeremy Jacobs, owner of the Boston "Bruins" National Hockey League franchise and avers that in NHL "minds" as 16>14 it follows ipso facto that Las Vegas should get an NHL expansion franchise over Quebec City.
?
Yeah, well that is the way these puckheads think. You see, the NHL is balanced geographically over the continent into western and eastern conferences and there are 16 teams east of the watershed and only 14 in the west, an imbalance in the balance which cries out for rectification by these rectums. Jacobs lusts after the homeless bimbo in the emerald dress in Starbucks Nation, oblivious to her lack of interest in him, and ignores the adoration of the beautiful French-Canadian with the impressive dowry living alone in a mansion. The latter is too "exceedingly small" for Jacobs. Geography is destiny and size is everything, those are Jacobs' two looney principles of evaluation here and he still manages to get half of that exceedingly small database wrong.
In 2013 Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight looked at an expanded list of 15 possible North American cities for NHL expansion. Silver ranked the cities on the exceedingly important criterion of number of resident HOCKEY FANS. The importance of this criterion is best illustrated by an anecdote told by the original owner of the Los Angeles "Kings" franchise. Jack Kent Cooke said he had bought the team for SoCal because demographic research indicated that there were 250,000 transplanted Canadians living there. After owning the woebegotten "Kings" for a few years Cooke remarked that he had figured out why there were 250,000 Canadians living in L.A.: they hated hockey. In Silver's list Quebec City ranked numero un with 530,000 human beings meeting the specs and Louis Vuitton came in 14th with 91,000.
Missing from Jacobs' looney criteria are two unstated, but not unthought, and of some significance, the loonie and Nielson ratings. Hockey suffers from television anemia in the U.S., always has, always will. And Nielson doesn't count Canada! So a 50/75 rating share across all of Canada for an Edmonton-Ottawa Stanley Cup game is the equivalent of this here in Nielson: 0/0.
The Canadian dollar is currently 76 cents to the American greenback. The disparity is one of two major issues (the other, now moot in Quebec City's case, was suitable arenas) that drove the original Winnipeg "Jets" to Phoenix and the Quebec "Nordiques" to Denver. There are a couple of other inextricably intertwined unstateds: the French language, and the Parti Quebecois which has led a French Quebec separatist movement since the 1960's. Some English-only players, Eric Lindros, stand up, have and will simply refuse to play for a Quebec franchise, even one in a province still part of Canada. NHL capitalists are as sensitive to political instability as are capitalists everywhere. Whether sensibly sensitive or too sensitive, if this constellation of socio-cultural-economic issues thwarts Quebecois love for the Canadian national past-time now, with this bid for a team by Quebecor, with this new hockey arena up and already hosting NHL games, then Enough: Quebecor should lead funding for a new six-team all Canadian Hockey League. Poof! Just like that, concerns with the loonie, with Frogs, with Nielson-Shmielson, with Quebec separatists vanish, and six Canadian metro areas currently without hockey get a team.
In the beginning there was the Original Six and one-third of all NHL teams were Canadian. Come 1967 and 17% of the NHL was Canadian. Since Original Expansion it has been as low as 20% and as high as 31% and currently is at a 23% "share." Every wave of expansion between 1967 and 1991 was fueled by real or threatened competition from a rival league. Between 1967 and 1979 exactly one Canadian city was added to the NHL. In the latter year the NHL absorbed four teams from the rival World Hockey Association, three of which were Canada-based and in 1980 the Atlanta franchise relocated to a fourth Canadian city, Calgary, which had had a WHA team. Competition from the WHA therefore was directly responsible for the number of Canadian teams jumping from three to seven. Competition does that.
The reality is that there have been ten "failed" franchises in modern NHL history, one "contraction," or elimination, and nine relocations and there are a number of current teams with flat lines. Of those ten failures, seven have been in American cities, Atlanta twice. Only one Canadian city that once had an NHL team, Quebec City, does not have one now. Quebec City now stands first in the continent in
Nate Silver's heart but second in the NHL's to Silver's number 14, Luscious Vulvas. The other six Canadian teams are right where they've always been or, in Winnipeg's case, lost one, to an American city, Phoenix, and then got it back from another American city, Atlanta II. Of the current distressed teams, and there are a gaggle, all are in the lower 48: Nashville, Raleigh, Miami, Tampa, Phoenix, Columbus.
Enough. Bring on the CHL.
?
Yeah, well that is the way these puckheads think. You see, the NHL is balanced geographically over the continent into western and eastern conferences and there are 16 teams east of the watershed and only 14 in the west, an imbalance in the balance which cries out for rectification by these rectums. Jacobs lusts after the homeless bimbo in the emerald dress in Starbucks Nation, oblivious to her lack of interest in him, and ignores the adoration of the beautiful French-Canadian with the impressive dowry living alone in a mansion. The latter is too "exceedingly small" for Jacobs. Geography is destiny and size is everything, those are Jacobs' two looney principles of evaluation here and he still manages to get half of that exceedingly small database wrong.
In 2013 Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight looked at an expanded list of 15 possible North American cities for NHL expansion. Silver ranked the cities on the exceedingly important criterion of number of resident HOCKEY FANS. The importance of this criterion is best illustrated by an anecdote told by the original owner of the Los Angeles "Kings" franchise. Jack Kent Cooke said he had bought the team for SoCal because demographic research indicated that there were 250,000 transplanted Canadians living there. After owning the woebegotten "Kings" for a few years Cooke remarked that he had figured out why there were 250,000 Canadians living in L.A.: they hated hockey. In Silver's list Quebec City ranked numero un with 530,000 human beings meeting the specs and Louis Vuitton came in 14th with 91,000.
Missing from Jacobs' looney criteria are two unstated, but not unthought, and of some significance, the loonie and Nielson ratings. Hockey suffers from television anemia in the U.S., always has, always will. And Nielson doesn't count Canada! So a 50/75 rating share across all of Canada for an Edmonton-Ottawa Stanley Cup game is the equivalent of this here in Nielson: 0/0.
The Canadian dollar is currently 76 cents to the American greenback. The disparity is one of two major issues (the other, now moot in Quebec City's case, was suitable arenas) that drove the original Winnipeg "Jets" to Phoenix and the Quebec "Nordiques" to Denver. There are a couple of other inextricably intertwined unstateds: the French language, and the Parti Quebecois which has led a French Quebec separatist movement since the 1960's. Some English-only players, Eric Lindros, stand up, have and will simply refuse to play for a Quebec franchise, even one in a province still part of Canada. NHL capitalists are as sensitive to political instability as are capitalists everywhere. Whether sensibly sensitive or too sensitive, if this constellation of socio-cultural-economic issues thwarts Quebecois love for the Canadian national past-time now, with this bid for a team by Quebecor, with this new hockey arena up and already hosting NHL games, then Enough: Quebecor should lead funding for a new six-team all Canadian Hockey League. Poof! Just like that, concerns with the loonie, with Frogs, with Nielson-Shmielson, with Quebec separatists vanish, and six Canadian metro areas currently without hockey get a team.
In the beginning there was the Original Six and one-third of all NHL teams were Canadian. Come 1967 and 17% of the NHL was Canadian. Since Original Expansion it has been as low as 20% and as high as 31% and currently is at a 23% "share." Every wave of expansion between 1967 and 1991 was fueled by real or threatened competition from a rival league. Between 1967 and 1979 exactly one Canadian city was added to the NHL. In the latter year the NHL absorbed four teams from the rival World Hockey Association, three of which were Canada-based and in 1980 the Atlanta franchise relocated to a fourth Canadian city, Calgary, which had had a WHA team. Competition from the WHA therefore was directly responsible for the number of Canadian teams jumping from three to seven. Competition does that.
The reality is that there have been ten "failed" franchises in modern NHL history, one "contraction," or elimination, and nine relocations and there are a number of current teams with flat lines. Of those ten failures, seven have been in American cities, Atlanta twice. Only one Canadian city that once had an NHL team, Quebec City, does not have one now. Quebec City now stands first in the continent in
Nate Silver's heart but second in the NHL's to Silver's number 14, Luscious Vulvas. The other six Canadian teams are right where they've always been or, in Winnipeg's case, lost one, to an American city, Phoenix, and then got it back from another American city, Atlanta II. Of the current distressed teams, and there are a gaggle, all are in the lower 48: Nashville, Raleigh, Miami, Tampa, Phoenix, Columbus.
Enough. Bring on the CHL.
