The sad part about Carolina is why are they still there? They’ve been a consistent playoff team for a very long time. If that team were in Quebec City, it would be rampant and the fanbase would be reactionary like the Leafs and Habs fanbases. Bettman is a dwarf and doesn’t understand the Canadian hockey economics. It will never change. They’d rather be in the land of the Confederacy than in the home of hardcore hockey. He worries about places like Atlanta and Phoenix, where there’s been nothing but red ink. So much wasted equalization payments, when they could have a great fanbase. It’s the biggest travesty in sports.
Carolina is still there because they fill a geographical market the league wants for TV ratings. It’s not a big population, there aren’t big corporate sponsors but it’s still valuable for the NHL to be able to broadcast games in that part of the US because even the worst US state is better than pretty much every Canadian province for GDP. The Canadian dollar is weak. The stadium isn’t that big. The population isn’t that big. The corporate dollars aren’t that big and are fleeing Canada at record rates. With the French supremacy mentality, the players are less likely to want to play there with their ownership, fans and media expecting everybody to speak and do things the Quebec French way.
Bettman doesn’t give a fuck about you. There are 32 owners he cares about because his job is to maximize their profits and more importantly his job is to maximize franchise value. That means relocation doesn’t make him a dime unless the team is seriously underwater like Phoenix and Atlanta were. Expansion makes the league huge dollars in expansion fees and in raising franchise value. Even teams like Carolina, that probably break even every year, make huge money on year over year franchise value increases. It’s like real estate for billionaires. They buy something for 400 million and 8 years later it’s worth 2 billion. If they made 0 dollars in profits for 10 years, it doesn’t matter because they increased the value in the franchise by 1.6 billion. Then, they can use that high value asset to borrow money against and invest it into other projects. Rinse, repeat.
You also have to have Canadian billionaires (Americans don’t own Canadian teams) that want to own franchises in Canada knowing full well their money is better off invested outside of Canada. The Canadian hockey market is already pretty much maxed out. The biggest cities already have teams and the cities that don’t have teams, probably couldn’t sustain it. The average person in Canada can barely survive these days, they won’t be running out to spend huge amounts of money on season tickets and merchandise on a new team. Another team in the GTA would work if not for the Leafs absolutely always vetoing it because they enjoy their monopoly. But teams in Quebec City, Nova Scotia, Regina; those are really hard to make a reality in Canada right now. Maybe if Brookfield Environmental Scammers weren’t running the country, the Canadian dollar and economy could handle another franchise or two, but right now, they’re fucked like the rest of the country.