Going home again

Winnipeg already has an NHL-ready arena -- the MTS Centre. Courtesy of WorldStadiums.com

Imagine taking a Burger King franchise and plopping it down in the middle of a city that has wholeheartedly embraced vegetarianism.

For more than a decade, this has been, more or less, the NHL's business plan.

Sometimes it has worked just fine, like in Anaheim, the new carnivore that on Monday was the host of a Stanley Cup Final game for the second time in four seasons. Other times, like in Florida, it has created a perpetual laggard. In its effort to expand what Commissioner Gary Bettman likes to call "a footprint" for hockey in the United States -- proselytizing for pucks -- the NHL has been chasing American dollars and sometimes its tail in an effort to grow the game.

When Bettman assumed the job in 1993, there were eight Canadian franchises. Now there are six. But in a subtle but still noteworthy departure from his intractable stance that the NHL likes its 30 franchises just where they are, thank you, Bettman said the prospect of another franchise in Canada "intrigues me."

In a pre-Stanley Cup Final press conference, Bettman reiterated his desire to keep all the teams in their current location but opened the door, however gingerly, for a team to move to Canada, something that hasn't occurred since 1980 when the Atlanta Flames relocated to Calgary.

The obvious candidate is the Nashville Predators, who have not laid sufficiently deep roots after 10 years in a non-traditional market. If the post-lockout economic model were a panacea for every franchise, the Predators should be gold: decent arena, solid management, terrific and entertaining team. But if the Predators can't nail down a legitimate 14,000 season tickets -- and the city doesn't make up for a shortfall -- the team appears close to putting Allied Van Lines on speed dial. They might be eligible for relocation as soon as the 2008-09 season.

Now, these things are always more complicated than, say, relocating a family to another city; but it seems unlikely that Jim Balsillie, the Research in Motion chairman who earlier this season failed in his bid to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins, would want to keep the Predators in a city where current owner Craig Leipold says they are hemorrhaging money.

Balsillie is a Canadian, who, presumably wouldn't mind moving the team into RIM's back ward of Kitchener-Waterloo, in southern Ontario (but beyond the territorial exclusivity of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Buffalo Sabres). Bettman talked in generalities about returning to markets the NHL lost in the 1990s -- Quebec City and Winnipeg -- but these would hardly make sense for Balsillie. Quebec has no building while the new arena in Winnipeg, although splendid, probably is undersized by NHL standards. And in any case, while these cities are in his homeland, they are not in Balsillie's home.

But the idea of more hockey franchises in Canada is indeed intriguing. Instead of furiously trying to create markets out of whole cloth, there is no reason that the NHL shouldn't be preaching to the choir, where the pent-up, post-lockout demand has made NHL hockey stronger than ever. The imbalance of a league with 24 teams in the States and only six in a country that adores the sport just doesn't make sense.

Thankfully, Bettman, while dismissing the notion of two teams in Toronto -- he referenced the inability of three New York area teams to attract attention when their teams suffer a downturn on the ice -- gave enough of a signal to presage the return of the game to its ancestral homeland.

Maybe this will be nothing more than Bettman's version of the dance of the seven veils, a little seduction for his core audience in Canada. But for the first time, it sounded like the NHL might be willing to go in a new direction. North.