Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Could it Work?

The greed held by the company Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment is, in my view, the one thing holding back any chance of a second NHL team in Toronto.

But a rumoured proposal to quell the concerns of sharing league revenues with a second team was posted on the website Hockeybuzz and to me, on the surface at least, sounds very interesting.

Basically, this unidentified group lead by a wealthy Canadian (Jim Basillie?) wants to build a new 35-40,000 seat arena to open in 2015 that would be shared with the Leafs. It would have 75% more suites, a hotel and obviously be the largest arena in the NHL. Another selling feature is that 30% of the building seats would sell for just $10 a ticket. Of course, that's not really the motivation behind this scheme: this group is trying to sell MLSE on the idea that they can make more money by having a second team, and a rink twice the size with more suites is something rather appealing to the suits running the Leafs.

So this would mean instead of 41 games with about 19,000 attending each game, Toronto would now have 82 games with 40,000 in attendance. That's about 4x the amount of tickets that could be sold, and in a league that is gate-driven, this certainly sounds like a good idea.

Would it saturate the market? Would Leaf nation actually consider embracing a team not called the Leafs? Hard to say. But this idea certainly has some merit.

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