Tastes like chicken
Hockey tastes like chicken. I guess I had better back that up somehow.
Think of it this way. This country loves spin-offs. We love characters and settings so much that we want them to have their own shows. I don’t know what the first spin-off television show was. It could be “Caesar’s Hour” which came after “Your Show of Shows”. That was 1954 so I’m assuming 75% of anyone reading this thinks Sid Caesar is the guy who invented that salad dressing. Shows like Benson, Frasier, Joey, Trapper John MD… okay, maybe not all of them.
Spin-offs say “We like what you’ve got going on there, let’s get one of our own.” That’s why spin-offs are like sports franchises. In 1970 there were 26 teams after the NFL merger. In 1976 folks in Seattle and Tampa Bay said “Hey, we’d like to get in on that action.” Same was true later on for Baltimore (after the Irsay debacle) and Cleveland (after the Modell debacle) and Houston (another debacle).
The NHL is the same way. They’ve added franchises in Columbus and Tampa, gone back to Minnesota and Atlanta, entered San Jose and Anaheim, moved to Dallas and Phoenix.
The difference between the two is that the NFL makes money. The NHL does not.
If the NFL contract is nothing to sneeze at, the NHL contract is a big box of lotion-soaked facial tissue. NHL ratings sink to a 1.0 with regularity. You could play reruns of “Your Show of Shows” from 1950 and pull a 1. You could slice up a tin can and then a tomato and still pull a 1. You could show a Fall Guy-Hunter-Automan marathon and pull a 1.1 rating.
But how do I back up my initial statement? Simple – the NHL is like Boston Chicken. Boston Chicken hit the ground clucking in 1991, restaurants popping up all over the place. They were the hot, oven-roasted new thing. Unfortunately the hot new thing wasn’t on the menu. While they claimed approximately a billion dollars in profit in 1993, BC’s problem was they weren’t earning their really big money from selling, oddly enough, chicken. They were making their money selling franchises. Trouble is, Boston Chicken, like the current NHL, ran out of (Boston) market to expand into and the Market became saturated.
The current NHL can’t expand further. Just like Boston Market, there aren’t any new markets to ice into. In fact, the NHL should probably retract. While baseball’s contraction talks were minimal and focused (should be eliminate or move Montreal and should the Florida teams merge or be broken apart), the NHL could really use a massive withdrawal. The NHL could legitimately dispose of a half-dozen teams without much grief. In fact, if the NHL resumed play without Carolina, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Phoenix and didn’t saying anything to anyone about it I think it’s safe to say we’d be well into the second month of the season before anyone noticed there were no ‘yotes, Preds, Sens, Canes and… um, the other one that I can’t remember.
The NHL has virtually no revenue from its television contract but luckily for them, they combine that lack of income with escalating player salaries and a slumping fan revenue in Canadian cities. Folks, if you tried to run a business like this out of your own basement, you wouldn’t be in business for very long. With salaries in American currency and payouts from Canadian citizens, the franchises up North start out every season about 40% in the hole.
The NHL is just like Boston Chicken – too many franchises and not enough meat. Soon enough the only feasting in NHL camps will be the bankruptcy vultures picking the carcasses clean. And there’s gonna be some lean pickings there you can bet.
