Sunday, the mayor of Quebec City announced the construction of a $400 million, 18,000-seat, NHL-caliber arena will begin this September. This news was hardly more than a blip on the sports news radar, but it has the potential to have major ramifications for the National Hockey League in the coming months.
You see, Quebec City is building the state of the art facility—which will be comparable to the CONSOL Energy Center, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins—in hopes of luring an NHL franchise back to the Quebec capital city, whether by relocation or future league expansion.
Quebecer’s are hoping that the promise of a new arena will deliver a team back to their city more than 16 years after the Quebec Nordiques moved to Denver to become the Colorado Avalanche, and based on all available evidence there is no reason that commissioner Gary Bettman and the rest of the league should overlook Quebec as a future landing spot for an NHL franchise.
Bettman had this grand plan of building his legacy as the commissioner who would grow hockey in the United States, specifically in the American south in cities like Dallas, Raleigh, Nashville, Miami, Anaheim, Columbus, Atlanta and Phoenix.
As Bettman saw it, despite the lack of any hockey history, these cities were major U.S. population centers and big markets should equal a big fan base, which should translate to big money. Maybe when he concocted this plan Bettman had just finished watching “Field of Dreams” and really bought into the whole “if you build it, they will come” idea, but unfortunately, they didn’t.
Now some of those southern market teams have done well, I won’t deny that, but others—such as the Phoenix Coyotes and Columbus Blue Jackets—are bleeding money and are in desperate need of help. The Coyotes are without an owner (they are currently owned by the league) and the Blue Jackets are without fans, both of which are problematic for the future of those franchises in their current cities. As it looks right now both of those teams are going to need to be relocated at some point in the not too distant future, meaning Bettman and the NHL are going to have some decisions to make.
The majority of NHL relocation chatter at the moment focuses on the American cities of Seattle and Kansas City—once again, two major U.S. population centers with little history of interest in professional hockey—and for the most part ignores Canadian destinations like Quebec City, whose metropolitan-area population is just under 766,000 people. But here is my thought; I bet of those 766,000 people there are a lot more who would line up right now to buy hockey tickets than there would be in Seattle or Kansas City.
Case and point: Nordiques Nation is a group of Quebecers whose goal is mobilize and bring attention to the fans’ rabid enthusiasm for another NHL franchise. And mobilize they have. 1,100 of them invaded a New York Islanders-Atalanta Thrashers game in Dec. 2010. Later that season 1,600 of them took 32 buses from Quebec to Newark, N.J. for a New Jersey Devils-Boston Bruins game. They took over Scotiabank Place in Ottawa, Ontario on Hockey Day in Canada 2011 to the tune of 22 busloads of Nordiques fans. 1,600 of them bused the 12 hours from Quebec to hold a pep rally in Times Square complete with a video message on one of the television screens, all of which were solely to demonstrate how devoted the Quebec fan base is to putting another NHL team in their city.
The problem is that Bettman doesn’t want to admit failure in any of his southern market cases, and moving any of them back north would be the ultimate slap in the face. He has fought tooth and nail to keep the Coyotes in Glendale, Ariz., and I can only assume watching the Atlanta Thrashers pack up and head to Winnipeg, Manitoba (population 730,018) last summer was torture to him. He even issued a seemingly sarcastic challenge to Jets fans to prove the cities’ viability as a hockey market to sell 13,000 season tickets. Once that sale opened to general public, that goal was reached in 17 minutes and the season ticket waiting list had to be shut down after 8,000 people signed up in two hours.
There exists an equally fervent fan base waiting in Quebec City and my hunch is that something very similar would happen there should the Nordiques return. In January 2011, the Toronto Star reported that J’ai ma, a non-profit group in Quebec, claimed it had sold 70 corporate boxes for a then non-existent, unannounced rink.
Sooner or later, like it or not, Bettman is going to have to do something about the fledgling NHL franchises in Phoenix and Columbus and relocation remains probably the best option, and if it comes to that hockey hot bed Quebec City should not be ignored. The city has a commitment to a state of the art arena and an avid fan base ready to welcome a team home and fill those 18,000 seats on a nightly basis. So forgive me Gary, but I don’t see how you could do better than Quebec.
Which cities are the best candidates for NHL relocation? Let Ryan know your thoughts via e-mail at rmevans2@dailycardinal.com or hit him up on Twitter @ryanmevans.
