Originally posted by bishop375:
The irony is that overall, NHL players have the lowest salary in all of the major league sports (I'm not counting MLS here).

Basebally, Basketball, and Football all have incredible salaries, but, they have a much broader audience. You can play these sports anywhere. Hockey? Natively, you cannot play it in Florida, Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and southern California. That eliminates the Panthers, the Hurricanes, Thrashers, Stars, Coyotes, Ducks and Sharks. These teams are losing money at a steady rate, as nobody really cares. It expanded far too quickly. Stick to the places where you get ice naturally, and people still love the game- Boston, NYC, Detroit, Chicago, Minnesota.





Dead on although you can argue that there are some very successful franchises south such as the Kings and Dallas Stars. The one thing that I don't like to hear all the time is the blame always gets put on the players and people always say "they make so much money, they should stop whining" If your efforts are what makes your company successful and bring in millions of dollars, you should share in that success and your salary should reflect that. Otherwise, you have a bunch of owners some of whom have never put on a pair of skates in their life getting rich. One reason why it came to this is that there are plenty of professional hockey alternatives. Many NHL players are still playing professionally and making very good money playing in Europe so the owners can't grab them by the balls the way Football or Baseball owners can. Bottom line is that hockey has far too many teams in too many small markets like carolina. Put the league back to 6 teams and watch how successful it would be !!!!!