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Originally Posted by jayswin
No, not comparable. You can't go back the 80's. I mean many teams in the league were playing in 11-13k arenas back then. So the direct comparison would be a team playing in a 14-15k arena while everyone else plays in 18-21k.
The Islanders just finished playing in an 11k (actual viable seats) at Barclay and the revamped Nassau Coliseum (13k). Winnipeg plays in a 15k arena permanently.
Maple Leaf gardens was 12k capacity for perspective.
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Ha, some interesting facts and math going on here. I'll deconstruct your argument, even though it's entirely irrelevant to the comparison that was being made, and then I'll wrap back around to the overarching point you glossed over.
First of all nobody in the '80s was playing in "11-13k arenas". In 1980 the smallest capacity arena in the league (other than the Corral) was the Colisée de Québec, which was undergoing renovations. Official capacity that '80-'81 season was 10,012 but for '81-'82 it was expanded to 15,250. Next smallest was the Met Center in the Twin Cities, which was ~14,400. Biggest was Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, at 19,275. Median was Maple Leaf Gardens @ 16,316 seats, and mean (ignoring the Colisée and Corral) was 16,097 (16,359 including the expanded Colisée).
As such your "direct comparison" to today of "a team playing in a 14-15k arena while everyone else plays in 18-21k" is way off-base. The Corral was about 6,500 seats in a league where the average was over 16,000. Not "everyone plays in 18-21k" arenas today either; only about half of teams do. In point of fact the average capacity in the NHL today (ignoring Arizona) is 18,276, and mean is the 18,437-seat Rogers Place in Edmonton. And capacity continues to trend downward, as the average capacities of new arenas opened in the last 20 years (NYI, DET, EDM, VGK, PIT, NJD & WPG) is 17,510. (Little Caesars Arena is far and away the largest of these seven @ 19,515, and Rogers Place and PPG Paints Arena are the only other ones >17,368.)
Restated the way you'd phrased it in the first place, the Flames were "a team playing in a 6.5k arena while everyone else plays in 16-19k".
The overarching point was that the Corral was temporary, was always intended to
be temporary, and whether the plan for the Coyotes to play at ASU is 5,000 seats or the 7,350-seat 'league-average-capacity-adjusted' analogue to the Corral, the precise numbers are irrelevant. You wrote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by jayswin
It was an Arizona special in terms of helping them out that's for sure. Imagine if the Flames said they'd play in the Centrium in Red Deer (7k seats) for 3-5 years while an arena deal is finalized and then built?
You think the league steps in and okays that?
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And the answer to that question is a categorical "yes": the League okayed such a scenario in Calgary 40 years ago. The Flames played an entire season in a rinky-dink temporary venue before construction of the Saddledome was approved, and another two seasons before it was built and finished.