A good old fashioned rant

I haven't ranted in a while... so here it is. Yes I know I said I might make a more coherent post... hopefully this is that, but not quite so much on the lines of about me.

So I'll begin by asking you when you have a product, that is a pretty good product but has varying levels of reactions from varying levels of the population, and when forays into different niches of the market really don't pan out very well, what does one usually do? Usually you decide that you leave those markets alone where it's just more resources in then profits out in terms of all the advertising, time, and energy spent trying to make it work in said markets. The competition is just so well established, that it's not really worth your time or money to grab market share - all of your attempts to do so flop miserably. So what does any good business do? Well I don't know what they would do, but I know that I for sure would pull out and spend my time trying to milk the markets that I do have for now while attempting to perfect it so that in the future I would be able to interest those other markets at some point. In the end, you want to ensure long term survivability of your product.

What does this have to do with anything you may ask? Well today, I read an article on Yahoo! Sports that said that the NHL is considering adding two more teams to the NHL. Where are they going to put them? Winnipeg? Quebec? Some Canadian city that cares about hockey?

No.

They're thinking of putting them in....... Kansas City and Las Vegas.

One word. PUH-LEEEZE..........

Sure the NHL will rake in about 300-500 million dollars in franchise fees to set up these two teams. In the SHORT term. But what happens in the long term? You just have two more teams leeching the revenue sharing trough, which means a smaller cut of the pie for teams that are already in the league that are also feeding from that trough, which means even less teams that actually turn a profit which means garbage like another lockout as the NHL tries to lower the salary cap by even more because the teams just can't afford to pay their players.

And seriously now... the statistics show that people would rather watch Law and Order reruns then hockey in the United States (this information courtesy of that article). How is hockey expected to compete with the entertainment that goes on in Las Vegas or against football in Kansas? It'll just be two more cities with hockey pages buried somewhere 3/4 of the way through the sports section of the paper, never read, and only found to be useful when you get a new pet and are in the process of house training them.

Don't believe me? Anaheim just won a Stanley Cup... yet you'd be hard pressed to find a citizen of that fair city that could probably tell you where the hockey arena was. Sure Kansas or Las Vegas overall population is probably at least 5 times that of Winnipeg or Quebec... but I'd be willing to bet my academic career on the fact that more people care about hockey in these Canadian smaller population markets than in those apathetic cities. I'm sure the average attendance will never pan out to more than 20 000 a season.... and as for selling out? Forget it! Meanwhile, if we were to have the Jets again or the Nordiques... watch those season tickets sell out faster than you can say Hockey Night in Canada. Need proof? Ticketmaster has already posted that you can put down a deposit to guarantee purchases of seasons tickets for the Predators in the event that they move to Hamilton. If they don't come you get your money back. Interest payments on all that money aside (does anyone else realize that Balsillie is milking a cow that he doesn't even own yet?), the big picture implications are huge! Southern Ontarians are willing to pay for season tickets to a hockey team that DOESN'T EVEN EXIST YET! Is that not evidence enough that in terms of fan base revenue, it would make so much more sense to take those deadbeat teams that do nothing but sap revenue from the teams in cities that care about hockey and either cut them or move them to Canadian cities (and arguable more Northern State cities). Anywhere that gives a hoot about hockey.

Although I'm sure that the players in the Western Conference really wouldn't mind their road trips as much with a Las Vegas team. Who knows? Jeff O'Neil might actually enjoy his flights. They'd sure enjoy their trips a lot better than if they had to come to dirty old Hamilton 8 times a year.