The NHL lets the sunshine in
The Vegas-Florida Stanley Cup Final displays hockey's growing appeal.
Sunday will be the In Between Day at the Stanley Cup Final, the bridge from Game 1 to Game 2. The forecast high in Las Vegas that day is 100 degrees. Nothing says hockey like 100 degrees.
Then the series will move to Sunrise, Fla., which is about 33 miles northwest of Miami as the Burmese python crawls. There, the high will be 84 or so, with chances of thunderstorms each day.
NHL people are not stunned that Vegas and Florida will decide the Cup. Vegas went to the Final in its inaugural season of 2018 and has probably been the NHL’s most aggressive player-procurer since. Florida won the Presidents Trophy in 2022, a kiss of playoff death that goes to the top regular-season team, and then picked up Matthew Tkachuk, one of the league’s top scorers, hitters and personalities, a transaction that spun Calgary out of the playoffs and gave the Panthers the irritability they needed for playoff success.
Neither is anyone surprised that the Golden Knights and Panthers are thriving in the heat. The Knights have been a sensation from the beginning, primarily because they won, also because they were the first pro sports team in a burgeoning city that was eager to prove it was more than roulette wheels and ladies of the night. They sold out every home game this season.
The Panthers have had their problems on the ice, and they’re in a notoriously finicky market. Yet they drew 16.682 fans, 87 percent of capacity, and a 12.6 percent increase over 2021-22.
Eight NHL teams played to 100 percent of capacity. Four of them — Carolina, Vegas, Tampa Bay, Nashville — are in places with short or nonexistent winters. Tampa Bay has won three Cups, Los Angeles has won two, and Carolina, Anaheim and Dallas have won one each. Florida, Nashville and Vegas have been to the Finals.
It’s true that Nevada, Florida and Texas are appealing to NHL free agents because they don’t have state income taxes. But players also find it nice to visit the mall or go to their kids’ games without becoming an event themselves. That’s harder to do in hockey-obsessed places like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Not everything under the sun is perfect. The Arizona Coyotes, formerly the first version of the Winnipeg Jets, basically got kicked out of sumptuous Gila River Arena and had to play in Arizona State’s 4,600-seat Mullett Arena. They were marking time until Tempe voters approved a new building, surrounded by shops and apartments. The polls told them it would happen, but polls don’t pull levers. On Election Day, fifty-six percent of voters told the Coyotes to get lost.
Again, the Coyotes haven’t won much, and Gila River was on the west side of town, a difficult dinnertime commute for a fan base that was largely in Scottsdale, Tempe or Mesa. Phoenix is the fifth-largest market in the U.S., so commissioner Gary Bettman is loath to abandon it. Scottsdale is also the hometown of Auston Matthews, who won the Hart Trophy in Toronto last year and only became a hockey fan when he began watching the Coyotes, who were led by Keith Tkachuk, Matthew’s dad. If the team isn’t there, Matthews is probably playing something else.
But unless the NHL can join forces with the Phoenix Suns’ new ownership group to forge a deal, the Coyotes appear to be headed elsewhere, and it probably won’t be to the land of ice and snow. Houston, where Gordie Howe and his kids played for the Aeros of the World Hockey Association, is the biggest market available and the most logical.
There is some sentiment toward moving the Coyotes to Atlanta, which already had two teams, which are now the Calgary Flames and the new Winnipeg Jets. One hockey executive cleverly endorses this idea “because it’s the best way for us to get another team in Canada.”
Tropical hockey is not as incongruous an idea as the first widespread NHL expansion was in 1967-68. The Original Six doubled, with Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Minnesota and San Francisco/Oakland. They had their own division, which meant they had a free shot at a Stanley Cup. Were there enough hockey players? Not quite, but they caught up. Six years later the Flyers won the first of two Cups. Four of those teams are still esconced in their original homes, with Minnesota moving to Dallas, and the San Francisco/Oakland Golden Seals becoming extinct, to be replaced eventually by San Jose.
The Original Six evokes nostalgia, mainly from those who weren’t there at the time. They weren’t the first NHL teams, but they comprised the league from 1942 to 1967. And not all the teams were great, and not all the games either. Even though four of the Six got to the postseason, the Bruins were out in the cold for eight consecutive seasons beginning in 1959-60. They did not win a Cup between 1941 and 1980.
The New York Rangers were just as futile. They had a 16-year stretch in which they missed the playoffs 12 times, and didn’t win a playoff series, much less a Cup, between 19509 and 1971. They did not find a companion for the 1940 Cup until 1994, after many years of being serenaded with “1940!” when they came on the ice. Frank Brown covered the Rangers for the New York Daily News and did a book on their stumblings. He and the publisher agreed that a fair price for the book would be $19.40.
So it wasn’t exactly hockey heresy to put new teams in new places. Sure, the crowds in Nashville had to be told not to leave after two periods, and there was the writer in Raleigh who came away from his first game with these observations: “How come there’s two halftimes?” and “Damn, these guys can skate backwards.” Even though the game was completely foreign and counter-intuitive for those who fancied ball sports, it caught on in places where the teams were well-organized and successful, and sometimes in places where they weren’t.
But ultimately the new markets will be judged by how deeply the roots are planted. Will real hockey players really sprout and survive?
Well, defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere and Jakob Chychrun and forward Garnet Hathaway are from Florida. (Jack Hughes and Quinn Hughes were born in Florida but learned the game in Boston and Ontario.)
Defensemen Seth Jones and Tyler Myers and forwards Stefan Noesen and Blake Coleman are from Texas. California is represented by Jason Robertson, Jason Zucker, Cam York, Matthew Nieto, Trevor Moore and Vancouver goalie Thatcher Demko. Arizona has Matthews, Tkachuk and his brother Brady, forward Tage Thompson and forward Matthew Knies, who vaulted from the U. of Minnesota to a secure place on the Maple Leafs during the playoffs, until he was injured.
The growth plates are active on levels below that. The Junior Kings and Ducks have been successful in national and international youth hockey tournaments for years. Las Vegas junior hockey is quickly outgrowing two different arenas and the call is going out for more coaches. In the first five years after the Golden Knights started up, the number of registered youth players in Nevada jumped from nearly 1,400 to nearly 5,500, and the players on the expanded list was much younger than before.
In 2022, there were 18,725 registered youth players in Florida, more than in Ohio or Connecticut. There were 28,167 in California, more than in Illinois or Wisconsin.
Credit the franchises like Anaheim and Dallas that have emphasized rink construction. Credit NHL alumni like Olli Jokinen and Tomas Vokoun for taking over teams in the Miami area. Mostly, credit the game, and the fun of playing it and the contagious thrill of watching the local team chase a Cup throughout the spring and into the summer, and watching all that skepticism melt.
Speaking of which, Vegas and Florida folks need to remember this: Don’t lock up the Cup in your car.