A Bit More Detail

This post at The Economist‘s Game Theory blog, wondering why the NHL continues to invest in failing Sunbelt teams despite economic and sporting rationales to the contrary, is worth reading.

Although this year marks an unusual low, Canada has been in decline since the 1990s, when teams were lured to America by the promise of bigger audiences and a more lucrative television market. To the dismay of Canadians, it has been almost 20 years since one of their teams won the Stanley Cup (the Montreal Canadiens in 1993). Yet hockey has failed to capture the public imagination in America in the same way as baseball, basketball and American football, or to attract the support it enjoys in Canada. With Canada’s economy now in better shape than America’s, a few teams may be considering a move in the other direction.

The Phoenix Coyotes are the most likely to uproot themselves. Although the Coyotes have advanced to the conference finals in the Stanley Cup playoffs, turning in their best performance since making Arizona their home in 1996, they have been struggling financially. After declaring bankruptcy in 2009, they were taken over by the NHL. This year, they are expected to report annual operating losses of about $30m, despite receiving $25m in aid from Glendale, the suburban Phoenix community that owns their rink. Quebecois hope the Coyotes’ recent travails will persuade them to relocate to Quebec City, where Quebecor, the province’s largest media company, says it will support the construction of a C$400m ($400m) arena. Since losing the Quebec Nordiques to Denver, Colorado in 1995, locals have been desperate to acquire a new NHL side.

Even so, Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, wants to keep the team in Phoenix and may finally have found a buyer pledging to do so for another ten years. Although the NHL has denied those rumours, its resistance to a move north of the border would not come as a surprise. For a start, Glendale might object to any deal that would let the Coyotes depart Phoenix and leave the community with an empty arena. The NHL may also be unwilling to sell the team at the price suggested by prospective buyers, having sunk a lot of money into the Coyotes since 2009. Ultimately, the NHL may still believe that Phoenix is potentially a more profitable market than smaller Canadian cities. Mr Bettman was also the main force behind the strategy to relocate to America in the first place. He may think a retreat is tantamount to an embarrassing admission of a mistake.

Nevertheless, the NHL’s continuing enthusiasm for the Sun Belt is hard to fathom. Even before the sub-prime mortgage mess demolished the economies of many southern cities, hockey had struggled to win over the region’s sports fans. Back in the 1990s, the Canadian dollar was worth just 72–73 American cents, and its value had fallen to 63–64 cents by 2001–2, making it impossible for Canadian teams to match salaries paid in American dollars. But the loonie is now worth the same as the greenback. Bringing teams back to Canada would strengthen the league and make economic sense.

The latest incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets already provides some encouragement. Having moved from Atlanta last summer, the Jets just missed this season’s playoffs. But they won 37 games over the course of the season, three more than their seasonal average over their last four years in Atlanta, and were much better defensively, conceding 246 goals compared to the Atlanta average of 270. Could the difference have been down to the level of support they received at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg, compared with attendance at Atlanta’s Philips Arena? Within minutes of tickets going on sale, the Jets had sold out for the season. Average attendance per game in Atlanta was just 73% of seating capacity (although this still meant 13,469 fans per game, compared with 15,004 for each sold-out game in Winnipeg).

I think that the NHL only has a limited amount of time. A January 2011 History and Futility post I made argued that, slowly, as a result of ffactors including the high cost of equipment, the emergence of other sports, and immigration from hockey-lacking countries, the sport of hockey is on a slow decline in Canada. There’s still a huge fan base–Quebec City is still trying to echo Winnipeg’s achievement in getting its NHL team back–but will it last indefinitely? I fear not.

Back in May 2009 I’d explored the interest of Jim Balsillie, ex-co-CEO of troubled Blackberry makers Research in Motion, in bringing a second NHL team to southern Ontario, perhaps to Kitchener-Waterloo. This never materialized, not least since the appearance of a second NHL team in the Maple Leafs’ hinterland would lead to decreased profitability and/or require the team to become better. Now in 2012, the southern Ontario city of Markham, in suburban York Region just north of Toronto, is interested in building a hockey arena with a sufficient number of seats to support a NHL team.

As the Toronto Star noted, this is part of a substantial project aimed at making Markham a coherent city. It’s a rather risky gamble, though.

For decades, Markham has been planning to create a downtown where there was none before. Because the town was cobbled together from three smaller municipalities, it never had a natural core.

Nearly 400 hectares of vacant lands straddling Highway 7 provided an opportunity.

A big chunk of that area was owned by development company Remington Group, whose chairman is Rudy Bratty.

Remington and the town hashed out a downtown core to rival any forward-thinking metropolis, with high-density dwellings, dedicated transit lanes, and ample green space. In 2007, a 20-plus year construction process began.

[. . .]

As [Brad Humphreys, a sports economist at the University of Alberta] points out, a large and expanding body of academic research shows that arenas are not the boost they might seem to be.

Humphreys, who was hired by Markham as a consultant to evaluate the town’s financial contribution, said he could not comment on the specific advice he gave.

But a report prepared by town staff echoes his basic point: that “building such an event facility does not generate significant tangible economic benefits for cities.”

As Humphreys explains, most consumers have a fixed budget for entertainment spending. A Markham resident who pays for a ticket to see the new hockey team play is probably not going to buy a movie ticket that week too. If she buys a jacket from the new team’s store, she’s not going to buy another jacket on Main Street.

The largest benefit of an arena, both Humphreys and the report agree, are intangibles: civic pride, a heightened sense of community.

[. . .]

If Markham succeeds, it could be another Winnipeg, whose “intangible” benefits from getting the Jets back would probably rival the GDP of Canada.

Or even a mini-Brooklyn, the borough Manhattanites once loved to snub, whose cool status was cemented by the acquisition of the Nets NBA team.

As in Markham, the private group which brought the Nets to Brooklyn and built the team an arena is also building a significant downtown neighbourhood centred around the sports facility.

Scott Stinson at the National Post, meanwhile, seems almost certain that any new hockey arena capable of supporting a NHL team would be used by the NHL only as a pawn in negotiations with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Could an NHL team come to Markham? It could, but only after significantly compensating the owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and only after Bettman has exhausted all other options. He’s made no secret of being loath to move teams. More likely, Markham’s council has put up $162.5-million just to help the NHL’s current owners gain some negotiating leverage.

It is a baffling turn of events. The town has tried to reassure residents that this is all no big deal, since its share of the arena costs are to be recouped via development levies that are tacked on the construction of new residential units. It won’t cost taxpayers a thing, council has purred.

Except it will. Once those millions start to roll in, it becomes public money. It could be used on pools, libraries, garbage collection, whatever. It will be used to pay down the cost of a new arena. Taxpayers, that is, will be paying for it.

Don’t worry, the town assures soothingly: There’s a business case for it. Think of the economic benefits! Except arenas don’t spur growth. Last year, I spoke with Judith Grant Long, a Harvard professor who wrote a book about public-private arena deals. She summed up her research like this: “It is very difficult to make a case that significant economic benefits are to be derived from developing new major league sports facilities.”

So there’s that. Meanwhile, what if development slows and the funding isn’t easily recouped? What if the arena runs over budget, as such things are wont to do? What if the NHL stays away? The councillors of Markham might want to talk to their counterparts in Kansas City, which built an arena in 2007 that was intended to host an NHL or NBA team.

I live in Leafs Nation. That’s not only the name of the official and heavily promoted Toronto Maple Leafs‘ fan club; that’s the name Toronto has gotten by proxy.

Toronto has traditionally been devoted to the Toronto Maple Leafs. No matter that they haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967, or been in the playoffs since I moved to Toronto back in 2004, or are really any good. They’re the Leafs Nation team, and obeisance is due them.

(That sort of attitude upsets me. You’ve noticed I’m not a hockey fan?)

Obeisance was due, at least; faced with being shut out of the playoffs, early last month the team management made the surprising move of apologizing to the fans for their failure. Over at Torontoist, Jamie Bradburn has an extended two-part essay (1, 2) examining the sad downwards trajectory of the team. For the first two decades of the team’s relative failure, its faults could be blamed on one man.

Until his death in April 1990, many of the franchise’s faults could be blamed on one man: Harold Edwin Ballard. From the time he entered the Leafs’ ownership as part of a triumvirate with John Bassett and Stafford Smythe in 1961, Ballard seemed driven less by a love of the game and more by greed and a near-pathological need for attention. The same year the Leafs won their last cup, that greed appeared to drive the decision to sell their top farm teams in Rochester, NY and Victoria, BC for just under $1 million. The move robbed the Leafs of 45 players, many of NHL calibre. The combination of the sale, the expansion draft to stock six new teams in 1967, changes to player development rules that denied the team the use of the junior Marlboros as a feeder team, and aging stars thinned the Leafs’ depth pool, which led to a last place finish during the 1969/70 season.

But after Ballard died, things never got better. The most recent iteration of hopes for a revival has been dimmed.

On paper, the tandem of general manager Brian Burke and coach Ron Wilson appeared to be a swell idea. Burke blew into town full of bluster, speaking of truculence and then demonstrating his intentions by challenging other GMs to fights in barns. And yet, the product he put on the ice in 2009, his first full season, finished dead last in the conference. The acquisitions of defenseman Dion Phaneuf and forward Phil Kessel have proven to be worthwhile, but one wonders if the cost may have been too steep. Signs of incremental improvement in 2011 did not carry over to this past season, leading to a mob mentality that forced Burke’s hand in dismissing Wilson.

And now, here we are, not a taste of the playoffs since 2004, wondering once again how to right the ship. Ask any fan in the city and they will have a detailed plan for success—sturdier defense, a veteran goalie, speedy Europeans, or bruising fighters that will teach opponents a lesson. Toronto is teeming with folks that are, above all else, tired of losing. They are demanding not the apologies that they have been given, but only an immediate honest-to-goodness winner. If that seems unreasonable or irrational, such is the nature of these things. Fair or unfair, rabid fan-bases don’t much care how you do it, just that it gets done.

Can there actually be significant change? Will the Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup in my lifetime, or at least make it to the playoffs? Stay tuned.

Of Toronto’s many generally sub-par professional sports teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs are the worst. I’ve commented in the past about how the fans have come to accept subpar performances from the team’s players and coaches, linked to a management policy aimed at maximizing profit as opposed to athletic success, notwithstanding a ticket sales policy that ties up seating for Toronto games not for fans but for corporate events. The Maple Leafs have been able to get away with anything.

That’s why I’m surprised that the Toronto Maple Leafs actually issued an apology to their fans, publshing an open letter in the various dailies.

The team did very badly.

[The] Maple Leafs team [sat] sixth in the Eastern Conference on Feb. 6 but plummeted to 11th place and five points out of both a playoff spot and last-place in the 15-team conference.

It didn’t end there as Toronto went on to lose a franchise-record 11 straight games on home ice, dropping 12 of 18 starts after head coach Randy Carlyle replaced the fired Ron Wilson on March 3, and finishing a once-promising campaign 26th of 30 teams with a 35-37-10 record and seventh straight season out of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Refreshingly, the fans don’t seem to have been placated by this.

A Twitter poster who uses the handle HockeyHumor said “Q: What do college students and the Maple Leafs have in common? A: They’ve both finished their year by April.”

CBC News showed copies of the newspaper apology to fans. Their reaction was mixed.

“That’s sports, you win some, you lose some,” said a fan taking a break outside the Air Canada Centre shortly after Burke’s press conference.

“Go Blue Jays,” said another.

Another fan who spoke to CBC outside the Air Canada Centre said the team needs “less apologies, more action.”

Might things be made to change?

• Daniel Drezner links to an analysis of the import of Taiwanese-American basketball star Jeremy Lin that makes the point that Lin likely never would have come to prominence had he (say) grown up in China instead of the United States: not only is he not tall enough, but the concentration of China’s sports bureaucracy on sports to the exclusion of all else puts off the parents of many potential players.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s SEK fisks an essay claiming to be literary analysis in its conspiracy theory claiming Obama’s books were ghostwritten by one left-wing radical or another.
• NewAPPSBlog examines the connections between economist Adam Smith and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, seeing the extent to which their conceptions of freedom were compatible.
• Not Rocket Science reproduces the news of the thirty thousand year old seeds frozen in the permafrost which were made to flower.
• John Lorinc at Spacing Toronto reacts to yesterday’s firing of Gary Webster by arguing that the anti-Ford majority on Toronto’s city council should mobilize against him.
• Toronto transit blogger Steve Munro thinks the same.
• Finally, Sublime Oblivion’s Anatoly Karlin posts a brief note suggesting that, with recent population growth driven by immigration and rising fertility along with falling mortality rates, Russia has left its demographic crisis period.

• 80 Beats reports on a proposal to protect New Orleans from risk of inundation by restoring the marshlands that once provided a natural buffer for the metropolis against the ocean.
• Anders Sandberg argues against the surgical sterilization of the transgendered on the grounds that it’s not only intrusive, it’s linked to effort to enforce a gender binary that doesn’t exist.
• blogTO celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Eaton Centre with photos and videos from throughout its long history.
• The Burgh Diaspora discusses the appeal of foreignness–or out-of-stateness–on prospective migrants’ attractiveness to natives, starting from Texas.
• Centauri Dreams reports that Vesta, unlike the Moon, has no permanently shadowed craters where water ice could exist on the surface on account of its pronounced tilt. Ices would exist below the surface, rather.
• Language Hat links to a contentious article claiming that no such thing as an Arabic language exists, but rather regional Arabic standards, inspiring an interesting debate about the dynamics of language in the Arab world.
• Progressive Download’s John Farrell traces the origins of hockey in Montréal, referring to an Adam Gopnik essay suggesting the sport took off as a product of an alliance of Irish Catholics and French Canadians against Anglo-Scottish Protestants.

On the steps of the College TTC station adhere decals advertising Loblaw’s at Maple Leaf Gardens, the newest outpost of that Canadian grocery-store chain housed in the refurbished former hockey arena that once was home to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

A recent Derek Flack photo essay at blogTO catalogued the changing shape of the sports arena’s marquee over time, from the 1950s to the present, if you’d like a peak at the actual building.

• Crooked Timber reports on a recent study demonstrating that, as a rule, regime change–foreign interventions aimed at replacing a government–don’t work.
• Geocurrents traces southern African support for Gaddafi to that region’s very late, and very contested, decolonization, in which Gaddafi was actually on the side of the angels.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Robert Farley wonders whether the American sale of bunker buster bombs to Israel represents bad American policy or incompetent American policy.
• Livejournal’s James Nicoll makes the point that, contrary to the claims of some, there’s vastly more exploration of more targets in space that in the Apollo era in the 1970s. It’s just robotic.
• Slap Upside the Head is rightly unimpressed with a farmer’s market in Ontario that removed a transgendered worker because it was “family-friendly”.
• Spacing joys of cycling in Vancouver and the travails of cycling in Toronto.
• Towleroad comments on how African-American Philadelphia Flyer Wayne Simmonds, was alleged to have directed a homophobic slur at famously gay-friendly player Sean Avery just days after Simmonds received a racially-motivated slur. (The NHL chose not to investigate.)
• At Understanding Society, Daniel Little analyzes the advertising industry in the context of the Frankfurt School’s notes on capitalism’s transformation of every relationship.
• Wasatch Economics’ Scott Peterson is quite displeased with anti-sprawl activists who prevent the expansion of communities into farmland, even rural communities which really can’t densify.

• At Border Thinking, Laura Agustín discusses the ways in which many international migrants in sex work might actually welcome this employment.
• Daniel Drezner suggests that Israelis have chosen to ignore Obama’s critiques for the sound reasoning that he’s a weak president who may not get re-elected.
• Eastern Approaches comments on the latest rhetorical rounds between Greece and ex-Yugoslav Macedonia on the patrimony of the region of Macedonia.
• Far Outliers points out that the Jews of Soviet Minsk were unique by virtue of their high degree of assimilation, this enabling a high rate of survival.
• Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis describes how the Tuli Block, a mountainous area separating South Africa from Botswana, may become a major destination for wildlife tourism.
• The Global Sociology Blog makes the argument that high rates of diagnosed mental illness might serve the function of displacing social ills from society at large to individuals suffering from society, an individualized and chemical responses to systemic collective problems.
• Language Log comments on the sectarian language used in Scottish football.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on a race issue of a century ago: “Are Finns white?”. (Trans-Uralic barbarians, I suppose.)
• Mark Simpson argues that if metrosexuality is seemingly gone in the zeitgeist, it is so only because it has become as normative as oxygen in air.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money points out that, at least as defined by an ability to get below-market prices for raw materials like oil, China does not have an empire, the closest thing beng the very low prices for oil China got from Venezuela on account of the parlous state of that latter country’s state oil company.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that Calgary’s mayor, unlike Toronto’s, led his city’s pride parade.
• At Spacing Toronto, Ken Greenberg and John Alschuler author an essay criticizing Ford’s lack of vision for Toronto that remain relevant two weeks later.
• Understanding Society describes, contra the libertarian conservative vision, the philosophical justifications for social democracy with reference to the Nordic model.