Winnipeg, Atlanta, and Phoenix, by the numbers: I come to quantify the Thrashers, not to praise them. In the wake of the news of the Thrash's impending relocation to Manitoba, while Canadians are celebrating another franchise's return to the country that created the sport, a handful of Atlantans (my eminently pitiable father among them) are left with some reasonable questions. Chiefly: exactly how did this happen? I'm in no position to make an argument about what awful, uncommitted owners the Atlanta Spirit were (and they were) - that's better left to plenty of other people. But I am in a position to type some numbers at you, and sometimes even do some arithmetic to them. So let's go with that one.
Many years ago, there was a hockey team you may have heard of called the Winnipeg Jets. They were some WHA team for a while, then they became some NHL team. They were okay? In 1980-81, they apparently won 9 games of the then 80-game season. But then they got a little better than that. Anyway, they ran into some financial trouble in the early 90s, because NHL players started to make a lot more money, but they were still located in Winnipeg, MB. Also, they had one of the smallest arenas in the league, seating only 15,393.
In 1996, said financial troubles ultimately overwhelmed what was apparently a very small but fiercely loyal fan base, and the Winnipeg Jets were bought by some guy named Jerry Colangelo for an amount of money that I couldn't easily find and did not look very hard for. They were moved to Glendale, Arizona and redubbed the Phoenix Coyotes. The Coyotes, who were actually pretty decent, played in a place called the America West Arena, which seated 16,210 for hockey. The arena unsurprisingly sucked at doing so, since it marked the first-ever time that 60% of Phoenix had ever seen ice outside of a tumbler [citation needed].
I told you the arena sucked so I could tell you that they built a new rink, Glendale Arena, which actually works like an NHL rink and seats 17,534. Despite that, the franchise again ran into financial trouble: turns out a brand new, expensive arena and a mediocre hockey team don't jive well fiscally with the indifferent population of a desert city with an average high temperature of 66 degrees in December, a day's drive from Tijuana and over 2500 miles from Montréal. With no buyers in on the table, in 2009, the Phoenix Coyotes filed for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, 19 years after losing their Flames to Calgary, Atlanta saw a new expansion team drop the puck for its first NHL game: the Thrashers. Like the previously-mentioned Jets, they were also pretty shitty. You know most of this part, so I'll skip it: they stayed pretty shitty, and they stayed in the middle of Georgia, and they were therefore not a super-profitable team.
With similar stages set, the two flagging teams ended up taking radically different paths. When no buyer was found for the Coyotes, the NHL stepped in, proudly proclaiming that it would not abandon a franchise, and bought the team itself, for $140 million. It was labeled a temporary measure, but to date, the Coyotes are still owned by the NHL. Two years later, the same NHL, under the same commissioner, did nothing to prevent the sale of the Thrashers by their disinterested ownership to True North Sports & Entertainment, who intend to move them back to the place our story began, Winnipeg.
Again, I'm not here to focus on the parts that make sense: the ownership of the Thrashers was never looking to make the team good, while the Coyotes showed some promise; the city council of Glendale was working to keep the Coyotes around, while Atlanta wasn't; etc. I'm here to tell you some numbers and come to the defense of a fan base at which Gary Bettman has insinuated blame. I might not be writing this if, in the weeks leading up to the sale, Bettman hadn't said this:
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I understand that there may be dissatisfaction there, but demonstrating your dissatisfaction by not going to games is an interesting strategy. It's your absolute right, but if it becomes a turnoff for anybody who might want to buy the franchise, the long-term consequences could be severe.
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WRONG. Well, not technically wrong, just extremely misleading. Atlanta did not lose the Thrashers due to a waning fan base. Yes, you have to follow the money, but then you have to make sure you keep following it: it is not actually more profitable to own a team in Winnipeg than to own one in Atlanta. Rather, it was more profitable for the NHL to move the Thrashers than to leave them in Georgia. Bettman is bad at understanding hockey, pretty much across the board. But give the guy his due: he's a decent businessman.
I should leave my office now, so let's call this part one of a two-part eulogy. In part two, I intend to look at two factors: 1) why I don't believe that Atlanta is a less profitable NHL city than Winnipeg, and 2) why I do think that the NHL profits from the relocation (moreso than a return of the Phoenix team).
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