pittmike wrote:
It was long ago but there had to be a reason the Avalanche left.
There were several reasons and I will give them to you.
1) no salary cap. The big cities were going nuts with spending (well, not
ours), and Quebec couldn't keep up anymore, though in the '80s they generally fielded competitive clubs with Michel Goulet and the Stastnys. They were rebounding in their final years after cratering in the early '90s, though a lot of that had to do with Sakic's emergence as a superstar and the goody-bag they got for Lindros.
2) Weak Canadian dollar. By 1995, it was around 65 cents American. Revenues were in CAD, expenses were in USD, even if you're doing pretty well for a small market, you're ultimately fucked.
3) No subsidies for a new arena. The Colisee was just as shitty and old 20 years ago, having been jury-rigged several times over into meeting capacity minimums for the NHL after serving as a junior/WHA venue. (The same thing happened in Winnipeg, though while the Colisee has always been revered as a delightful old barn, the Winnipeg Arena was always a shithole.) The city and provincial governments put their foot down on not paying for a new arena while they were struggling and failing to keep hospitals open, and you know what? I commend them fully for this, even if it did kill one of the more interesting sporting institutions in North America.
4) No real television deal. It's hard to imagine now in the Rogers Sportsnet era, but even well into the mid-1990s, NHL coverage in Canada was a shitty patchwork quilt of Hockey Night In Canada, its francophone counterpart
La Soirée du hockey, and occasional telecasts on TSN and elsewhere. The Nordiques were owned by Carling O'Keefe, a brewery which is remarkable only because it's not Molson, which owned the Canadiens and had a stranglehold on Canadian hockey television about as long as there had been Canadian hockey television. In fact, it was Molson and their ad agency that produced HNIC/SDH
for the CBC until about 1997, when the CBC finally started producing the show in-house. Because of this, Molson would not show the Nords' home games, so they got very little play from the CBC and Radio-Canada (that's the name of the French CBC
television service, it's really best not to ask). The Nordiques eventually cobbled together a syndication package, but this was eventually bought up by, go figure, Molson, and so they never really could compete on the television front.
So with the Diques losing money to the exchange rate and to the skyrocketing payroll with little TV revenue and no help on the way from the province (who, to be fair again, weren't helping the Habs either; they not only had to build their arena out of pocket, they even pay property taxes on it), it was no surprise that the owner sold when investors from Denver came calling. Fan interest was never, never an issue. The Nordiques always had high attendance figures, even in those years leading up to Lindros where they were just astoundingly terrible in ways that no team will reach again (the 1990 Nords went 12-61-7, giving up
one hundred and sixty-seven more goals than they scored). Detractors have pointed out that while the Save The Jets rallies were huge events, there was hardly a public gathering to protest the move to Denver, but that's because the Jets' move was dragged out over two years while the Nords' was a relative blindsiding. Fan support has always been there, and even to this day, many fans in Quebec City and the Eastern Townships follow the Avs, the Bruins, or the Senators -- anyone but Montreal.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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