League Insertion

How are teams added to any league? Can anyone just say " I have the money I want a team and they do it". It seems a lot more people would be buying and starting teams then, yet Mark Cuban is always having problems with it. Is it like a fraternity and you have to get hazed with paddles?

Once we figure out that portion then we would need to insert somewhere between the conferences most likely. If we would expand the league it may water down talent too much. Currently there are 30 NHL teams. 15 per conference. Each conference is made up of 3 divisions which have 5 teams. If we would adopt Phoenix, the West would still work out well, they would just have to shift some teams around but we could build some interesting rivalries. One idea would be to go into the Northwest division of the Western with Minnesota. That way you could move Vancouver to the Pacific. I think there would still be a decent rivalry between WI, IL, MI.

An argument for getting a team in Wisconsin would be to look at how the league is set up now. Below is a map showing what states and provinces currently have hockey. Blue are the Canadian teams and red US.


It seems a little disjointed. Very few border states unless you are on the east coast or Canada. Not a lot of teams within a days travel by car as well. If you look at football, it comes out a little differently.


I added a few more states for New England since that is a regionally named team, and New Jersey since technically the football is played in the state. The NFL is leaps and bounds ahead of the NHL in terms of popularity and revenue so it isn't just as simple as saying where teams are located is the reason but one has to consider the factor of how having border states helps pique interest in something. That is in essence where college sports is coming from. Sure I hate Penn State when UW plays them but I'm not sweating it if they lose to them as much as I would Illinois or Minnesota. Nowadays rivalries can be created in any fashion but one of the quickest is to pit two states with history against each other in something.

The best situation so far - Buying the Phoenix Coyotes and moving them to Wisconsin. Moving teams is somewhat easier than adding them since there usually isn't a lot of reshuffling of divisions. Also for those not aware Phoenix has a few bad seasons and are seeing ticket sales plummet. Since the begininng of the season there have been talks that they will need to be bought by the league. But for some reason they want to keep them in Phoenix??