Before the puck is dropped to open the Stanley Cup Final on Wednesday night, Gary Bettman will give his state-of-the-league news conference.
The NHL commissioner has much to brag about: The 4 Nations Face-Off was a rousing success, there is relative labor peace, the NHL will return to the Olympics next year, and no Coyotes-like sinkholes are affecting the league's business.
For a guy who often greets the media like a benevolent king who's granting the poor serfs an audience, the smugness meter will be off the charts.
And when the subject inevitably turns to possible expansion, Bettman will get the chance to do something pro sports commissioners love to do: He'll talk about how great it is to have so much interest and insist that if the NHL did consider expansion, it would evaluate those opportunities with the utmost care.
Naturally, no one will believe any of it.
It's been reported for months that expansion is seriously on the NHL's table. The collective bargaining agreement with the players' union is up for renewal, and once that is squared away, an expansion process would bring a giant pile of cash to share among owners and, crucially, not players. (Expansion fees do not count as hockey-related revenue under salary-cap rules. It's like a giant "Free Money" sign hanging in front of the owners.)
Meanwhile, the success of new teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, plus the Coyotes' relocation to Utah, has generated interest from a few billionaire types who see an NHL franchise as a key piece of a big real-estate ploy in underserved markets. And with formerly struggling franchises in places like North Carolina and Florida doing fine business at the moment, Bettman can claim that expansion, and the financial windfall it would bring, is relatively low-risk.
He's probably right. But the NHL shouldn't do it.
When Seattle became the league's 32nd franchise, that was already a big number. The league had 21 teams throughout the 1980s and has added 11 since 1991. That's meant a much larger group of franchises competing for the same 16 playoff spots and one Stanley Cup. Purely from a math standpoint, the chances of your team being successful today are much lower than they were 30 years ago. (Insert joke about the Toronto Maple Leafs here.)
The league at least seems to be aware of the issue; there's been speculation that expansion to 34 or even 36 teams would be accompanied by an adjustment to the playoff format. There wouldn't necessarily be more playoff teams, but some kind of play-in tournament could make postseason hockey available to more than 16 clubs and ensure that more than half of the league didn't go dormant when the regular season ends in April.
But that would bring a whole new set of complications. The NHL season is already far too long. It's the first week of June, and the Final hasn't even begun. Unless the league starts the season much earlier, adding even more weeks when it would go head to head with the twin behemoths of NFL and NCAA football, an additional postseason round of any sort would extend the hockey season even further into the summer. Playoff runs threatening to bump into July would be ridiculous. People have cottages, man.
And yet, neither problem seems likely to trouble the NHL. The whole idea behind expansion is that more hockey means more inventory to sell: more games and gate receipts during the regular season, and, more importantly, more postseason games, which are by far the most valuable part of the league's broadcast schedule.
The specifics of potential expansion sites become somewhat irrelevant in comparison. Atlanta is touted as a possible destination, despite the fact that the NHL has tried and failed there - twice. Phoenix is also high on the list, with the league evidently convinced it could avoid a redux of the disastrous Coyotes era as long as the team doesn't go anywhere near suburban Glendale.
Houston? San Diego? Kansas City? Milwaukee? None seem like booming hockey markets, but if the NHL simply wants to add more teams and more games, that's less of a concern. Bettman has essentially admitted as much whenever the subject of expansion has come up in the past. His two key elements for a potential expansion franchise are a stable ownership group - meaning a very wealthy one - and a suitable arena, or at least a viable plan for the building.
(Fans in Quebec City will correctly note that they had those elements in place years ago, and it hasn't helped them much.)
The very existence of expansion rumblings is ultimately proof that expansion will happen. If the NHL was concerned about becoming too bloated and unwieldy, after all, it would have stopped growing some time ago.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
