Did you hear the one about the NHL team that might be moving?
Sorry, weary hockey fans will reply, you’re going to need to be more specific.
The NHL is once again in the midst of a flurry of reports and rumors about teams that could need new homes. Maybe that means a new arena down the street. Or maybe it means a new home across the continent. The league always seems to have a few teams in the middle of some kind of uncertainty, and these days that’s more true than ever.
At some point, the stories all start to blend together, and it can get confusing. Let’s break out our handy Q&A format to see if we can sort it all out.
So what just happened with the New York Islanders?
Here’s the short version. For years, the Islanders were stuck playing in the Nassau Coliseum, an absolute dump of a building in Uniondale, New York. It was nearly 50 years old, and while it could boast plenty of history, it wasn’t anywhere near modern NHL standards. The team had been trying to find a replacement for years; in 2011, they went to voters to ask for $400m to build a new arena, and were soundly rejected.
And so, in 2012, the team announced that it would move to Brooklyn to share the Barclays Center with the NBA’s Nets, starting with the 2015-16 season.
How’d that go?
Awful, thanks for asking.
Barclays is a nice enough building, but it wasn’t built for hockey. Seating capacity was low, the sightlines didn’t work, and the ice was terrible. And maybe worst of all, the team’s longtime fan base in Long Island had to endure long journeys just to see their team play home games, while potential new fans in Brooklyn never seemed to warm to the team.
The whole thing was a disaster from the start, and within a year everyone was searching for an exit plan. There was talk of an escape clause. One rumor had the team moving to Queens. And late last month, news broke that Barclays was planning on kicking the Islanders out, effective in 2019.
So where would they go?
Right now, nobody knows. The Barclays exit isn’t a done deal, so it’s always possible that they could find a way to stay, although at this point it’s hard to see how anybody would want that. They could revisit that Queens idea, even though it didn’t get much traction when it first came up last year. They could even move in with the Rangers for a while.
And if you really want to get silly, you could note that the old Nassau Coliseum was recently renovated; it’s too small now to be a long-term home, but could work as a temporary measure.
In a perfect world, now would be the time for the Islanders to get a new arena of their own somewhere. But teams normally get arena deals when they have leverage. Right now, the Islanders have none.
Could they move to a new market altogether?
It’s certainly an option, although right now it seems like everyone’s focus is on keeping the team in the New York area. But if they can’t find a fit, at some point relocation will have to be on the table. And there are markets out there that would be interested in taking them, including Seattle, Quebec City or Hartford.
Wait, Hartford? As in the Hartford Whalers?
The very same. The area apparently wants to get back into the NHL game, with a proposal to renovate the old Civic Center arena (now called the XL Center) to get it up to modern standards in an attempt to lure a team. When news of the Islanders’ arena troubles broke, the governor of Connecticut sent the team a letter offering them a new home.
Would now be a good time to listen to the Whalers fantastic old theme song?
Damn right it would.
Awesome. So is anyone taking this Hartford thing seriously?
Not really, no. This all feels like more of a publicity stunt, one designed to remind the hockey world that Hartford still exists and could be a potential home for a team someday down the line. And that’s fine. But a return to the market seems like a longshot. Remember, this is the city that lost its team to Carolina back in 1997.
Hey, speaking of the Hurricanes …
Yeah, they could be moving too.
Rumors of the Hurricanes relocating have been swirling for years, and have picked up over the last year with reports that ownership might be looking to sell. As with just about any struggling US team, they’re usually linked with Quebec City (which really seems to annoy them).
All that talk flared up again right around the same time the Islanders’ arena situation was imploding, with reports that Hurricanes ownership was again open to a sale. That set off another round of speculation that the franchise could finally be on the move.
But didn’t Gary Bettman already quash that rumor?
He did, and fairly emphatically. “There’s no imperative for the franchise to be sold on any immediate basis, and the franchise is not moving,” was his direct quote.
Great. So why are we even …
“Somebody is making stuff up … Whatever is being written is being made up.”
That was Bettman back in May 2011 responding to reports that the Atlanta Thrashers would move to Winnipeg. Literally days later, the reports Bettman had adamantly denied were proven correct and the team was relocated.
The lesson: When it comes to this sort of thing, the NHL’s credibility isn’t exactly top notch.
Well, look on the bright side: At least we’re not talking about the Coyotes moving for the hundredth time, right?
Well, now that you mention it …
Oh lord … seriously?
Yep.
The Coyotes have been rumored to be on the move virtually since the day they arrived in Arizona back in 1996. The market just never seemed like a good fit, and the team’s relative lack of success on the ice hasn’t helped. They’re constantly fighting for a new arena deal, to the point where most hockey fans can’t keep up. They’ve gone bankrupt, they’ve been sold and resold, and at one point they seemed like they were moving to Hamilton.
But through it all, the Coyotes are still chugging along, and still in Arizona. It seemed as if they’d finally found some stability earlier this season when they announced plans for a new arena in Phoenix. But that deal appears to have fallen apart after a key partner, Arizona State University, pulled the plug last week.
Then came a report that team officials had been secretly touring arenas in Seattle and Portland, which the team has strongly denied. It’s all sparked the latest chapter in the never-ending “Where will the Coyotes wind up?” storyline.
The NHL kind of has a reputation for this sort of thing, doesn’t it?
You could say that. The league is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first foray into expansion, which came when the league doubled from six teams to 12 in 1967. Almost immediately, some of those new teams started looking around for new homes – the Oakland Seals were trying to move to Vancouver by 1968 – and it’s been that way ever since.
The Seals eventually went to Cleveland, then merged with Minnesota, who eventually split between San Jose and Dallas. Kansas City became Colorado became New Jersey. A team in Atlanta moved to Calgary. And in the mid-90s, three teams – Quebec, Winnipeg and Hartford – moved in consecutive years.
That’s pretty much the modern history of the NHL in a nutshell. Put a team in a market that can’t support it, watch it struggle, move it somewhere else, and in many cases repeat the process again and again.
So is that it? The NHL is just doomed to churn through failing markets forever?
Well, here’s the thing. All of that history we just listed takes us through 1997. But in the nearly 20 years since then, the NHL has actually been remarkably stable. Not counting the Islanders shifting neighborhoods, only one franchise has moved – the Thrashers to Winnipeg in 2011 – and that’s it.
Compare that to far more successful leagues like the NBA (three moves) and the NFL (two, and working on a third), and the NHL looks remarkably stable. Even MLB has had one relocation of its own over the same time frame.
And while hockey fans won’t want to hear it, a lot of the credit for that belongs to Bettman. He takes the blame for just about everything that’s ever gone wrong in the hockey world, including all those mid-90s franchise moves. But there’s a case to be made that by the time he arrived on the job in 1993, those teams were just too far gone to be saved. Once Bettman was able to get his footing, he made it a priority to keep teams in struggling markets whenever possible. Teams like Edmonton, Ottawa, Buffalo and even Pittsburgh went through serious financial challenges, and any could have moved. But they didn’t, and all are relatively stable today. That’s what the Islanders, Hurricanes and Coyotes are hoping for too.
So how does this all end?
That’s the (several hundred) million-dollar question.
On the one hand, it’s easy for hockey fans to get frustrated by all of this. We want the league to do well, and we want all of the league’s teams to be in stable markets where they can have success. When there always seems to be a team or two – or three, or more – in trouble, fans wonder why the league just doesn’t throw in the towel, especially when there are other markets out there that seem like better fits.
But the league has its reasons for treating that option as a last resort, and they go beyond mere loyalty to existing markets. The recent awarding of a team to Las Vegas left the league with an unwieldy 31 teams, meaning we’ll almost certainly see another round of expansion soon. Seattle would be the prime candidate, and the league would much rather pocket a $500m expansion fee than see an existing team move into a prime location.
As for other markets, they all have their flaws. Hartford already lost a team. So did Quebec City, and even with a new arena in place, they’d need a healthy Canadian dollar to compete. New markets like Portland might be intriguing, but there’s no guarantee that they’d be any better than what we have now.
And a cynic might also suggest that the league needs at least one solid market to remain empty somewhere, to give its franchises a viable threat to hold over their existing markets when it comes time for some taxpayer money to roll in.
So there’s a good chance that all of this leads nowhere, and nothing changes. The Coyotes find yet another new arena deal that eventually falls apart and starts the whole cycle over again, as always. The Hurricanes are rumored to be for sale and on the verge of a move but end up staying put, as always. And the Islanders bounce around second-rate options in the New York area while holding out hope for modern arena to call their own, as always. And then we can worry about the long-term future of the Panthers, Predators, Blue Jackets … you get the picture.
Or maybe we get a repeat of the Thrashers situation, where we’re told everything is fine one day and then a team picks up and moves the next. All we know for sure is that we’ll hear plenty of reports, rumors, conjecture and denials over the coming days, weeks, months and beyond.
Or, as the NHL would call it, business as usual.
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