Quote:
Originally Posted by playmaker
As someone who lives in Europe I may be of course wrong, but looking at the map wouldn't Spokane be an ideal destination for the Heat? Not sure about direct flights to Calgary though.
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Spokane has a WHL team and I don't think they'd want to put an AHL team in an existing WHL market. The same goes for places like Saskatoon and Regina.
I think the basic fact is having the team in California made sense when it was just a small group of California-based teams who could all easily travel to play each other. Now that there are teams in Abbotsford, Colorado, Tucson, and Henderson, there's a lot more travel anyway, so that advantage is diminished.
Then, once the decision to move the team is made, why just make the team "closer" to Calgary and not go all the way and put them in Calgary?
The only real disadvantage of putting the team in Calgary is they'll likely have poor attendance and won't be the biggest game in town, but those aren't really important as long as the parent team understands that.