Quote:
Originally Posted by getbak
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.
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It may also be relative. The attendance may be down here in saturation of the market, but it may be better than Stockton overall.
Also, this Canadian franchise is paying American currency for the team down there, including travel costs for management and staff to visit and stay down there. There may be other cost savings that the team looks at to off-set the loss of ticket revenue.