Earlier this year, the NHL stated that they were in a “listening stage” as far as future expansion of the league was concerned, and four cities, Toronto, Quebec, Las Vegas, and Seattle publicly stated they would bid for a team, should expansion be officially announced.
Most people applauded the move, but when opponents of expansion (for every league) raise their voices, one of their objections is always that the product will be diluted, “watered down”.
How true is this term? What does it mean?
The opponents of expansion contend that when games are played, they will be at a lower standard than what they should be.
Certainly that was true for a long time when the NHL first expanded in 1967. At a stroke, the size of the league doubled from six to twelve teams. When one of the six new teams visited an older established team, it was usually a mismatch with the occasional upset. It would take seven years before an expansion team (the Philadelphia Flyers) would be a true contender for the Stanley Cup.
That, however, did not mean that continuous bad hockey was played. For one thing, although there were now a lot of “fringe” players in the NHL, there were far more who were good enough to compete in the NHL, but who had been buried in the established teams’ farm systems. Expansion finally gave these players a chance to play, and demonstrate that they were good enough all along to play in the NHL.
Moreover, there is a good argument to state that non-competitiveness is a product of bad ownership and management.
There is no better example than the New York Islanders, who set a then-record for losses when they joined the NHL in 1972, but the following year, the Islanders were significantly better defensively, and the year after that, they made the playoffs, and took the Stanley Cup Champion Flyers to the maximum seven games in the semi-final before they were eliminated. Most of their players came from the expansion draft, players that established teams decided were not good enough to be on their roster, but the Islanders developed them. These “watered down fringe” players proved that they were good enough. With good management and drafting, the Islanders had managed to become Stanley Cup contenders in only three years.
The same can be said of the Edmonton Oilers, when they joined the NHL after the WHA folded, and they were allowed to keep Wayne Gretzky. They also became contenders within three years.
Today, the Oilers are the worst team in the NHL, but they are stocked with number one draft picks, junior players who were expected to be league-dominating stars. Instead, there is good reason to call these players flops, but with all these “stars” on the worst team in the league, does that mean that the talent in the NHL is “watered down”?
When the AFL merged with the NFL in 1970, the size of the NFL doubled, but nobody complained that the quality of football was diluted. Everyone was glad that the football war was over and the upstart AFL had won the last two Super Bowls.
Moreover, there are several ways of correcting the situation.
One way is to restructure the “big four” leagues like English professional soccer. The Premier League always has the top 20 teams in English soccer, and all the lesser teams play in lower leagues and get promoted or demoted as their record speaks. However, no North American sports league would consider such a concept, and all the opponents of expansion who cry “watered down” would never want that system, because they would be afraid that their own favorite team would be demoted.
Another way would be to expand the CHL and US college hockey to allow more good players to reach the junior or college ranks, but the best way of all would be to develop hockey in Europe.
As related in two of my earlier articles, international hockey has stagnated. In 42 years, since the Canada-USSR contest of 1972, only the quality of team in Switzerland has significantly improved to compete effectively with the established hockey powers, Canada, United States, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia. That’s not very good for four decades of development.
Meanwhile, Denmark, Germany, Kazakhstan, Lativia, Norway, Italy, France, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus have remained at the B Level. Developing players in these countries would provide an enormous surplus of talent for several NHL expansions.
Certainly NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is not concerned about “watering down” the league. Most leagues expand cautiously, by two teams. Under Bettman, the NHL has expanded in bunches, and the next expansion is projected to be four teams, making the NHL the largest of the “big four” leagues with 34 teams.
There are almost 60 Canadian and American cities with a metropolitan population that could support a professional sports team, plus possible expansion to Europe and other parts of North America. So the current size of the ‘”big four” leagues is only a small fraction of what they could be.
There are always going to be bad teams in every league. Someone has to be the loser. That’s the nature of sports. But that doesn’t mean that the quality of the sport is declining. “Watered down” is a relative term, perhaps used by fans who are stuck with a bad home team, or have the misfortune to watch games that are mismatches.
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