This Reality Is Pure Fantasy

It's hard to imagine that the NHL would ever find a home in Europe simply due to the NHL needing billionaires to fund teams and fans to fill arenas on a nightly basis where the sport is mildly popular in specific cities across that continent. Yes, there are lots of fans who come out for games played in Europe, but a European division in the NHL seems like pure fantasy as salaries continue to climb past the eight-digit mark and expansion costs are astronomical. That's why reading an article from 2010 that made it sound as if it were happening in the next decade is nearly laughable in knowing what we know today. That is, it ain't happening.

An August 22, 2010 article from Postmedia News' Matthew Coutts stated that a "European division in NHL inching towards reality" which, as we know, never materialized. That article is below.

It's not that the NHL wouldn't or couldn't make the jump across the ocean, but it becomes a question of business and I don't think that European hockey fans would appreciate paying over $10,000 USD annually to watch hockey 82 times per season. Yes, you can convince them to do that on a weekend when the NHL comes to town, but I don't think you'd see many of them drop the obscene amount of money that season tickets cost today. Heck, I don't even do that!

Some of the phrasing used by Coutts in this article seems to put the cart before the horse because the option of moving overseas might have been there, but there logistics were never really in place. He writes, "there is little doubt the league has entered into a fill-on flirtation with the continent", "Europe's emerging hockey hotbeds", and "expanding the European market is a focus". There's little doubt that hockey has its place in Europe, but let's not try to sell the shed as a mansion: NHL hockey would be a distant sport in its popularity when compared to football (soccer), F1 racing, and basketball.

According to Coutts' reporting, "NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly called it a dream he would like to see happen within a decade," but we know all the financial problems that some teams have faced over the last fifteen years. The Coyotes are the obvious answer, but we can talk about the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Nashville Predators, the Atlanta Thrashers, the Florida Panthers, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Los Angeles Kings, the Calgary Flames, and the Edmonton Oilers as teams that had significant financial woes. If you can't keep your own house in order, expanding to Europe would be ludicrous.

NHL International senior vice-president Ken Yaffe acknowledged this reality of the NHL in the article, stating to Coutts, "That doesn't mean the ultimate focus is develop a division or expansion into Europe. There are a lot of major challenges to doing that.

"The reality is, we are a North American sports league that is focused on building the strength and viability of 30 clubs across the US and Canada. That is still the primary business and the primary focus."

As we know, that "primary business and primary focus" remained the only thing that the NHL had as a priority as expansion didn't happen again until 2017 when the Vegas Golden Knights joined the NHL circuit. The NHL also added the Seattle Kraken as the 32nd team, moved the Arizona Coyotes to become the Utah Mammoth, moved the Atlanta Thrashers to become the Winnipeg Jets, and shored up ownership in a pile of other cities across the North American landscape. In short, they took care of the business at-hand.

Personally, I don't want to see the NHL in Europe outside of a handful of games. The game played by the British EIHL, the German Penny DEL, the Swiss National League, the Finnish Liiga, and the Swedish SHL are great with the NHL's shadow hanging over them, and it's fun to watch these leagues clash in the Champions League where the best teams can show the world why they should be crowned as Europe's best squad. Keeping that intact makes European hockey unique!

I'm not saying that the NHL will never have a European division of hockey in the future, but the logistic and financial situations to do that are far more complicated than Matthew Coutts makes it out to be. I don't fault Coutts for chasing down a story like this, but framing it as he did in 2010 where it sounds like it's on the verge of happening is irresponsible reporting. It simply was never in the cards.

Let's be honest: the NHL expanding to Europe "in the next decade" could happen at any time just like humans could terraform Mars and be living on that planet in the next decade. It's a great story, but it's a fantasy that has zero basis in reality no matter what the NHL says.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!