Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
That would require that the NHL Board of Governors approve a relocation. They're not about to kiss half a billion dollars goodbye by doing that.
When, and only when, they have collected their pound of flesh for the two expansion franchises, they'll look at allowing existing franchises to relocate to any markets that are still available.
This is the end game – the real reason why Gary Bettman poured tens of millions of the owners' dollars down the bottomless pit of Phoenix, among other things. A cool billion in expansion fees covers those losses many times over. You may be sure that the owners gave Bettman his marching orders to do exactly that.
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I imagine it would hurt Carolina's chances of being sold/relocated if LV and QUE are out of the running here. Will there be a third party that shows up and buys the team for a fraction of the expansion fee and moves them to Seattle or Kansas City or somewhere else? I kind of doubt that given how no one else stepped up in the expansion process. It hardly seems fair to force 500m out of the two expansion teams and then just sell the Hurricanes to a party that is not as interested in owning an NHL team, AND for much cheaper. I would be infuriated if I was the perspective owner of QUE or LV and the NHL did this, talk about a slap in the face.
It will be interesting to see how they go about this. Will one of them just be allowed to buy CAR while the other gets an expansion team? I would think that LV would be pretty pissed off if QUE was allowed to get a team for cheaper and more loaded with talent. Even if they add a relocation fee to the Carolina sale to make the QUE and LV bids equal, there's still the matter of one team gets to build around Faulk, Hanifin, Fleury, Lindholm and the Staals, and the other gets to build around what they find in the scrap heap.
It seems to me that the NHL should focus on making the teams they already have stable and profitable before they add more teams, especially considering there's a good chance LV becomes another PHX/CAR/FLA instead of the SJ/ANA/TB that they hope it will.