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Originally Posted by Resolute 14
Not really, no. The league wants $500 million from Las Vegas and Seattle too. The league isn't fighting to prevent relocation to Quebec in favour of expansion - if that were the case, there wouldn't be rumblings about the league stalling to try and get Seattle in the expansion picture at the expense of Quebec.
The league is going to fight tooth and nail to prevent *any* team from relocating. They succeeded (for now) with Phoenix and failed with Atlanta. But as long as someone is willing to own and operate a team in places like Florida and Carolina, the league will always support those cities. But Quebec will be held in reserve in case one of those markets finds itself with nobody willing to operate a team.
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It's my belief that Quebec will be ‘held in reserve’ until someone is willing to pony up the fee for an expansion team there. $500 million is $500 million. $1.5 billion is $500 million more than $1 billion. There's nothing magic about having two and only two expansion teams. Yes, it would look nice and neat with eight teams in each division; but the league has often run with unbalanced divisions in the past.
I suspect that the ‘rumblings’ may have more to do with not wanting to put 17 teams in the Eastern Conference and only 15 in the West. Since both Detroit and Columbus refuse to change conferences again, this probably has some bearing on the situation. But mainly, the problem in Quebec is that the market is not big enough to justify spending $500m for an expansion franchise.
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Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
It's also in the league's best interest to have a Quebec willing and ready to go immediately. It keeps the threat of relocation real, so there is some leverage on the fans.
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As far as I know, the NHL (as opposed to individual owners) has never used relocation as a threat. If one owner wants to relocate to Quebec, there are 29 other owners who want to hold out for their share of that expansion money.
We've already seen that the league will subsidize losing teams or even take over ownership of a franchise outright, rather than allow relocation. That shows how little they care about having ‘leverage on the fans’. All told, the league has probably poured somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100 million into the black hole of Glendale in order to keep the Coyotes from moving. If and only if they can sell an expansion franchise to whichever city the Coyotes would have moved to, they make a profit on the deal in the end. They'll never get that $100m back from the fans in Arizona.