Tweet
Why is Canada so bad at hockey? Nate Silver provides the answer...
So why have the Canadian teams struggled to win Stanley Cups?
Part of it stems from the same reason that operating profits are so closely tied to the number of N.H.L. fans in each team’s media market. N.H.L. teams vary greatly in how many fans they have available to them. But under the league’s current collective bargaining agreement, there is relatively little revenue sharing. There is a hard salary cap, however, along with a high salary floor, so each team’s player expenditures are about the same.
The good news for the Canadian teams is that, with nothing else to spend them on, those extra revenues flow through straight through to the bottom line. The bad news is that they could not spend them by investing in better player talent, even if they wanted to. ...
But even if the Canadian teams cannot spend their extra revenues on better player talent, this does not fully explain why they have been underachieving in the Stanley Cup and not at least winning their fair share of championships.
Much of the reason, I must emphasize again, boils down to bad luck. Canadian teams have reached the Stanley Cup finals five times in the 19 seasons since 1992-93 but have come up short on each occasion, including in four cases where the series went to the seven-game maximum.
One other factor, however, may be that there is so much excess demand for hockey in Canada that the Canadian franchises do not have to field especially strong teams to sell out their stadiums or to make a considerable profit. In the next chart, I have compared the per-game ticket revenues for each team in the 2012-13 season against the number of points they tallied between this season and the last one.
For the United States teams, there is an imperfect but reasonably clear and statistically significant relationship between on-ice success and ticket revenues. There are lots of fair-weather American hockey fans, and they may not turn out unless their team is pretty good. In Canada, there is less competition from other sports, and there are many die-hard hockey fans who attend games almost no matter what.
Part of it stems from the same reason that operating profits are so closely tied to the number of N.H.L. fans in each team’s media market. N.H.L. teams vary greatly in how many fans they have available to them. But under the league’s current collective bargaining agreement, there is relatively little revenue sharing. There is a hard salary cap, however, along with a high salary floor, so each team’s player expenditures are about the same.
The good news for the Canadian teams is that, with nothing else to spend them on, those extra revenues flow through straight through to the bottom line. The bad news is that they could not spend them by investing in better player talent, even if they wanted to. ...
But even if the Canadian teams cannot spend their extra revenues on better player talent, this does not fully explain why they have been underachieving in the Stanley Cup and not at least winning their fair share of championships.
Much of the reason, I must emphasize again, boils down to bad luck. Canadian teams have reached the Stanley Cup finals five times in the 19 seasons since 1992-93 but have come up short on each occasion, including in four cases where the series went to the seven-game maximum.
One other factor, however, may be that there is so much excess demand for hockey in Canada that the Canadian franchises do not have to field especially strong teams to sell out their stadiums or to make a considerable profit. In the next chart, I have compared the per-game ticket revenues for each team in the 2012-13 season against the number of points they tallied between this season and the last one.
For the United States teams, there is an imperfect but reasonably clear and statistically significant relationship between on-ice success and ticket revenues. There are lots of fair-weather American hockey fans, and they may not turn out unless their team is pretty good. In Canada, there is less competition from other sports, and there are many die-hard hockey fans who attend games almost no matter what.
Such a good blog post. I was reading it thinking "this is so like the reason the Chicago Cubs are consistently ****ty" and then Silver made that exact comparison.
So the Canadian N.H.L. teams may suffer from a version of the problem that the Chicago Cubs faced during the “bleacher bum” years. Their fans are so loyal — happy enough to turn out for the spectacle and the beer even if the team stinks — that the franchises don’t have all that much incentive to put out a competitive product.
Comment