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TORONTO • It's no secret that the National Hockey League likes to expand. It has become so much more important that it has become apparent that it has had an early success on its hands with the new team in Seattle.
There is also no secret to the motivation here: the league 's owners get to charge a fat expansion fee to the newcomers. Free money! Everyone loves money, especially when it comes to collective bargain agreement, and you're in the business of making it happen.
Goal will eventually be made in North America. It is already happening, but it is not enough that the NHL has had a handful of franchises in various levels of crisis for years now.) And so, rumblings occasionally burble forth about expansion in Europe. There have been an unusual amount of such burbles in recent days.
Bill Daly, the NHL's deputy commissioner, said in Toronto on Monday, while in the midterm of the mid-term, he considered NHL teams based on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean to be "probably inevitable." Perhaps more surprisingly, Daly said the biggest impediment to European expansion is a lack of NHL-style arenas, which is to say that they can house 20,000 paying Swedes or Finns while entertaining their most wealthy corporate citizens in luxury suites.
That does not sound unbearable, until you start trying to figure out how to work
Leaving aside the question of whether or not anyone in Stockholm or Helsinki is not enough to speculatively build an NHL-ready arena – ask Quebec City how is working out – it is intriguing to hear someone as a senior Daly offer such enthusiasm for European growth. He was restrained next to NHLPA boss Donald Fehr, who said "the sooner the better." Fehr said it would be a "real positive statement" to create the first truly transcontinental league, and it would be particularly positive for his membership because it would be a lot more NHL-level salaries.
And while possible European expansion was not a subject of discussion at the NHL general managers meetings in Toronto on Tuesday, nor was the possibility entirely ruled out.
Montreal GM Marc Bergevin, asked if he could imagine squeezing a Europe trip to the already tight NHL schedule. "If you fly from Montreal to L.A.," he said, then gave a little nod to the other direction: "I mean, you just go the other way. It's about the same distance. "So, a left of the airport in Montreal, instead of a right. Bergevin said he could see the NHL doing it. "We have the first team in pro sports in Vegas, I would not be shocked if we were to go to Europe," he said.
If it happens, I would still get myself down as shocked. Other than the usual questions about expansion, such as the dilution of talent and the need to add teams to the league that has four franchises averaging less than 14,000 fans per game so far this year, there are tremendous logistical hurdles that a move to Europe would bring. Fehr offered some back-of-napkin doodles for a system in which five European teams would go to Europe once a year. That does not sound unbearable, until you start to figure out how to shoehorn that trip across the ocean into the calendar of each team.
One example: the Chicago Blackhawks, conveniently located in the center of this continent, have two consecutive days off from mid-October to early April. One of those breaks comes after a long trip to the west coast, and one is over Christmas. (They also have a bye week, which have been grudgingly added to all teams when the players are at all-star changes.) The Blackhawks, meanwhile, also have separate territories in which they play back-to-back -back nights. And they have a 15-day stretch in which they play on every second night for eight consecutive games.
There is no doubt about the Atlantic, the badumption that a team has a European swing would be given at least a couple of days in the morning on game days. Someone who is very keen on an NHL team in Prague might be able to overcome this problem, but that person would be a professional athlete. On the hockey player's hierarchy of needs, "game-day nap" comes right between safety and love, and right after Corsi and Fortnite.
It's a great idea in theory, this European expansion, but there are practical concerns. Then again, this is the league that keeps putting hockey teams in the desert.
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