Duhatschek: Why the NHL should move the Coyotes to Salt Lake City and avoid

Whenever NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gets asked about expansion, he tends to touch on the same talking points over and over again. Usually, Bettman will begin by noting that while the NHL is not actively looking to expand, the league gets overtures all the time from interested parties. If any of the overtures make sense, from a business point of view, they’ll look at them.

Boilerplate stuff and all designed to convey one important underlying message: The commissioner is overseeing a thriving business, and who wouldn’t want to get involved in a thriving business such as the NHL?

Those of us who’ve listened to some version of this communication for decades now sometimes see NHL expansion as a pure cash grab because: A) The cost of joining the league is soaring; B) There do seem to be people willing to pay the rising asking price; C) Best of all, NHL owners don’t need to share expansion fees with the players because it is not factored into hockey-related revenue.

When the NHL added four teams in three years between 1998 and 2000, it cost $80 million to get in. Seventeen years later, the price soared to $500 million for Vegas to join the league. Four years later, the NHL upped the ante even higher for Seattle to $650 million. What’s next? One billion dollars, or more. So, a lot of money.

But let’s go back in time to just before Vegas was granted entry to illustrate a further truth about the expansion process and why some bids are more attractive than others. That time around, once the league formally began to solicit interest, two bids met the NHL’s expansion criteria. The one from Vegas was successful. The other, from Quebec City, was not.

Even though the overture was backed by the considerable weight of a corporate heavy hitter, Quebecor, and had a former Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, stumping on its behalf, the NHL said thanks but no thanks.

And that’s the other little dirty secret of expansion, one that not everybody is prepared to concede. Expansion is partly a cheap cash grab. But it isn’t exclusively a cheap cash grab. Expansion also has to make sense on many financial levels beyond simply lining the owners’ collective pockets with a one-time-only windfall.

This too is a part of Bettman’s consistent messaging and probably doesn’t draw nearly enough attention. He’ll also note that every time you add a team, it shrinks the pie for everyone when it comes to the league’s shared revenues. So, a one-30th slice of the pie became a one-31st slice when Vegas entered the league and a one-32nd share when Seattle joined.

There’s indisputably a secondary financial consideration in play, which is why expansion only makes sense if your newest partner(s) immediately also become one of your most efficient revenue producers. Cash cows, as it were.

This happened with both Vegas and Seattle and also explains why Quebec City remained on the outside looking in. Just too small a market, with too limited a…