They have got close a few times (reaching the finals five times in 19 years, losing in game 7 four times, ouch).
The teams are not distributed to have a more consistent fans-per-team ratio everywhere (Canada has lower population, but much much higher hockey interest, so fans-per-team is higher in Canada). Adding 2-4 teams would probably bring the fans-per-team ratio closer to USA numbers.
Not just that, some teams just don't have a vested interest in winning. I mean, why try if people are going to give you money regardless of how you perform?
With maybe the exception of this season, the Toronto Maple Leafs were basically guaranteed to sell out every game.
The Leafs haven't won a Stanley Cup since 67, 3 years before I was born, and I honestly don't think it will happen again in my lifetime.
You can't be serious about that, can you? They usually make an expensive PR move every few years when it looks like they run the risk of fans keeping their money in their wallets, but don't often follow up with results.
Granted, Pat Burns got great results in 92/93 with a team full of scrubs when he took over the Leafs (don't get me started on that non-call on Gretzky in 92 that could have sent the Leafs to the finals), we haven't seen much legitimate excitement since then. Sure, the Leafs made a couple more semi-finals with Pat Quinn, but those were with significantly better teams, so much less of an achievement in my mind.
But the NHL is not the same as it was in the 90s. Everyone is bigger and faster, and the team hasn't had a legitimate superstar on the team in the way that Chicago or Pittsburgh has had for quite some time. And when they have had a superstar, that guy never had much help from the rest of the team. I don't think they've been legitimate contenders for a long, long time. The best that they've ever been is a "threat" or "dark horse".
While I've managed to "check out" on the Leafs for almost a decade now, I feel especially bad for longtime fans like my Dad, who year-in, year-out get set up with trumped up expectations for the Leafs only to be let down every single time. At least he witnessed them winning a cup before I was born though. And in two years, it's going to be half a century without a cup.
You must not talk to many leaf fans... They think they have a shot at the cup every single year. While I agree Mike Babcock is a great coach, he won't save them in 1 season. Typical Maple Leafs fan optimism. They never give up hope. Seems like every season MLSE finds a new way to break their fans' hearts. Perhaps they are all masochists.
>> is there a structural reason why they can't get the talent to win?
There used to be - the financial goals of the Ontario Pension Plan (who owned a huge chunk of the team) ran counter to blowing huge amounts of money every year to increase the chances of winning a cup.
>> or is it simply a poor management issue?
Now that the pension plan is out, I think you can probably attribute the current state to a lot of bad decision making and not having a good long term plan.
that's interesting, I wasn't familiar with the history of the Pension Plan's ownership of the team
seems if the teams current woes are mostly due to poor managment, hiring the best (or at least best paid) coach is a pretty good start, especially considering that they apparently gave him an 8 year leash
Hmm, the OTPP owned the Leafs starting in 2003, and there has been a salary cap since 2005. Are you saying the Leafs weren't spending at the cap from 2005 onward? Or are you saying they should have been spending more money outside of player contracts?
I'm saying they should be spending like Steinbrenner every single year and even paying a luxury tax if necessary, because they're pretty much going to make it back.
If you have a decent team, you're never going to get a Crosby or McDavid via the draft, so you have to at least have the semblance of trying to put a contender in place every year to be attractive to the best free agents.
In my mind, attractiveness to free agents is a combination of performance and an explicit willingness to spend money to fix shortcomings. Babcock, Kessel and Phaneuf are not enough (in my opinion) to make the Leafs a legit contender. They need at least two more elite players (including a top 3 goalie) to make that happen.
Can you imagine what would happen if the Leafs won a cup? The heads of the over 4 million people in the GTA would probably explode. And right after that, you'd have massive spending on merch, etc.
> I'm saying they should be spending like Steinbrenner every single year and even paying a luxury tax if necessary, because they're pretty much going to make it back.
Well yeah, that'd be great if they were in the MLB where it's a Luxury Tax instead of a salary cap. But unfortunately they're a hockey team, and so are in the NHL where there's a salary cap. You can't, by league rules, simply spend more than the cap. So how exactly do you suggest they "spend like Steinbrenner"?
Can a team still send expensive low performing players to the minors to get them off the cap? They'd still be eating salary (which would be spending like Steinbrenner). I wouldn't be surprised if there were other ways for the richer teams to game the cap because they can afford to eat the expense.
It's fairly difficult. Sending a player down means exposing him to waivers (meaning another team can claim his contract). Now, that might be good in some circumstances, but in general you don't want to lose a player with no compensation. The highest player contracts also have clauses which can prevent being moved or traded (i.e. the player would have to agree being sent to the minors).
One tool they can use is the Injured Reserve, which allows GMs to backfill a long-term injury with players of equal or lesser value without contributing to the cap. This is what the Leafs' GM Nonis used to free up cap space by trading Clarkson to the Blue Jackets for Nathan Horton, for example. And even then Clarkson had to waive his no-trade clause (which he was classy enough to do).
> is there a structural reason why they can't get the talent to win?
You might call the salary cap a structural reason, in that unlike the Yankees/rich baseball teams, you can't really buy talent, you basically have to draft it. Not to say that teams aren't on an equal footing, but the Leafs might be in a very different spot with no cap.
Take Mike Babcock, who was recently hired as head coach. Because they weren't limited by the cap, the Leafs were able gave him an insanely high contract (more than twice the next highest paid coach in the league). Now imagine if they could spend like that on players.
The other non-internal factor that's often cited is the Toronto media. Leafs players are put under an enormous spotlight, and given way more scrutiny than any other team's players. This has sometimes lead to players not even wanting to play for Toronto.
or the LA Clippers prior to Blake Griffin / Chris Paul. "This team is on its way up... no, wait, their cheap owner let all his promising young players go, and brought in only midlevel free agents yet again. Here comes a 27-win season!" These teams can do that because they have so many fans and such a big market that they can sell out even if they're terrible.
its not like ticket prices are fixed, even if you already sell out every game, you can always raise prices if the demand will support it
not to mention all the other revenue streams that have nothing to do with how many people are in the building
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I'd look more at the relative tax rates, hockey is a capped sport, Canadian teams can only pay what US teams can pay, however less of it can stay in the players pockets after taxes
its appears that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in the US leveled the field signficantly for Canadian teams (though they were in effect for a signficant portion of the time frame examined in the 538 article) http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2013/10/01/u-s-t...
Not sure I follow you. The Maple Leafs are one of, if not the richest team in hockey. They're rich because they've got incredibly rabid fans who will pay whether the team wins or loses, and prices generally go up in Toronto, not down. Most of my forty-some-odd-years have been "lean" years for the Leafs.
For a long time, the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan owned a huge chunk of the Leafs, and there was little to no interest in spending what it took to produce a Stanley Cup winner, just some occasional lip service.
Taxes might be a factor, but less so for hockey than other sports. Toronto has a lot of cachet for being one of the Original Six (one of the reasons why Babcock chose Toronto over Buffalo) and for being one of the major focal points for hockey fandom.
you and the original author seemed to be indicating that they didn't have incentive to win because they already made alot of money
I was just saying, if they make this much money when they're not winning, there is probably even more money to be made if they actually did win
(though I suppose I may have overstated that, as doing what it takes to win also costs money [though that's probably less an issue in the games current fixed player costs mode])
Interesting article. I think it underestimates the number of regions in Canada that could support an NHL franchise. For example, the Region of Waterloo, with a population of 500,000+. If Junior Hockey attendance can be used as a predictor of NHL attendance, consider that the Kitchener Rangers sell out their 7000 seat arena for every home game.
The problem with that is the Maple Leafs. You're not likely to see any teams pop up within 200km of Toronto, because the Leafs will likely have to get compensated very heavily for the right to do that.
I live in Markham, Ontario -- just north of Toronto, and they wasted a ton of money "studying" the construction of an NHL class arena. I think hell would freeze over before the Leafs allowed another team to enter their geographic monopoly.
Even most Leafs fans I talk to (and myself) think a second Toronto (or at least southern Ontario) franchise would be good for the Leafs, because it might actually force them to be good to draw in fans.
I read an article about the possibility of these teams popping up. One example of how it could work is if the Leafs had the TV rights to the new team. I believe this is how the Nationals and Orioles operate in the MLB.
What would be interesting is to take a deep-dive into the players that American and Canadian teams have - my hypothesis is that American teams just have better players overall, which could be due to the currency differences. As it is, the American teams arguably have a ton of Canada's best players.
All players are paid in USD, regardless of where the team is located. I think American teams have better players because of the living/playing conditions. There isn't a huge expectation to win every single year and for the most part the cities are nicer to live in during the winter.
>> I think American teams have better players because of the living/playing conditions.
To get the best hockey players via the draft, your team has to be among the worst for a few years. If you have a consistently middling team like the Leafs, you'll never be able to draft the likes of a Sidney Crosby, and free agents who want to win a Stanley Cup generally go to cities where it's most likely to happen. I don't think Toronto is at the top of the short list.
I might be wrong, but I don't suspect that forex plays a large part. The NHL has both a salary cap and a salary floor (the cap -$16M) denominated in USD. Further, between 2009 and just earlier this year, the CAD was at par or stronger than the USD for most of the time.
I looked at some data [1] which shows that CA teams have an average salary ~5% lower than their US counterparts. The 2 teams with the lowest salaries are American.
You are right that the Americans have all our best players though. More than 50% of NHL players are Canadian, followed by ~25% American, and ~8% Swedish.
I see. Yes, I am curious as to why most of our best players are on American teams. Wondering also if it's just that Canadian teams struggle with coaching or if it's the fact that we just can't get great players (which I don't believe is true. Despite the Leafs not doing well, the team isn't actually that terrible I'd say).
This article touches on the accepted justification for expanding the league by choosing US cities such as Las Vegas over say Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which that in the USA you have this huge possible range to grow, whereas in smaller Canadian centres hockey may be hugely popular, but its possible that the NHL is already reaching all the hockey fans they'll ever get and there's little room for growth.
The question of whether there's any room for further growth in hockey popularity in Canada is being tested right now. Rogers Sportsnet just bought I think 10 years of exclusive hockey broadcast rights in Canada and I've read some articles that state that Rogers will need to increase the amount of people who watch hockey for this endeavour to be profitable. To start they've already cranked up the total number of games that appear on TV. It's going to be interesting to see if they can move the needle.
> Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals, for example, aren’t merely unlucky to have failed to reach the playoffs in 28 years: they have usually stunk.
I smiled at that given what has happened since. But my smile disappeared when I realized that now my Toronto Blue Jays would be the go-to-example in the Royals' place.
I don't think the Jays have been as spend happy as they were prior to 93. Since then, it seems like the belt has been very tight. 92-93 were great years to be a Toronto sports fan.
What this article has done is outed all the Canadians on HN. Hey hosers!
There is no reason other than the US teams just happen to have drafted better, hired better etc. Nothing to do with economics as there is a hard salary cap.
Edmonton won the lottery this year and will get McDavid. Maybe that swings the tables. Had a Canadian team won the lottery the year Crosby was drafted, maybe that changes things.
Or they will continue to be a black hole for first round talent. They badly need to get their act together at the highest level before they can even think about putting together a competetive team. An ownership change may be in order.
To be fair, Edmonton has also been quite unlucky in the draft. Although they have won the lottery a few times recently, the years inbetween where they went #2 or #3 franchise players like Stamkos and Taveres were drafted.
Luckily they got McDavid, so that kinda evens things out.
Uh, because the NHL, like most professional North-American sports is a completely artificial franchise based entertainment operation thinly disguised as sports?
It has ice hockey teams in California for fuck sake!
(Yes, this is me as a snobbish European speaking. I will never understand how this form of sports competition can be taken seriously. Although come to think of it, compared to most of the world, North America doesn't take sports competitions that seriously.)
Are you talking about the North America that has around 15 universities with higher average (football) attendance than any team in the Champion's League gets [1][2]?
Not a single word about income taxes? I'm not saying it's making a difference, but it should at least had been investigated.
For instance, someone playing for the Montreal Canadians will get taxed for about 55%. That's a significant difference compared to any American team where income taxes of 40% is considered high.
Edit: Wow, I grossly underestimated how rich people are taxed.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadThey have got close a few times (reaching the finals five times in 19 years, losing in game 7 four times, ouch).
The teams are not distributed to have a more consistent fans-per-team ratio everywhere (Canada has lower population, but much much higher hockey interest, so fans-per-team is higher in Canada). Adding 2-4 teams would probably bring the fans-per-team ratio closer to USA numbers.
With maybe the exception of this season, the Toronto Maple Leafs were basically guaranteed to sell out every game.
The Leafs haven't won a Stanley Cup since 67, 3 years before I was born, and I honestly don't think it will happen again in my lifetime.
I expect them to be in the playoffs next year and contending for the cup in the near future.
The Leafs are also the the most valuable team in the NHL. http://www.forbes.com/nhl-valuations/
You can't be serious about that, can you? They usually make an expensive PR move every few years when it looks like they run the risk of fans keeping their money in their wallets, but don't often follow up with results.
Granted, Pat Burns got great results in 92/93 with a team full of scrubs when he took over the Leafs (don't get me started on that non-call on Gretzky in 92 that could have sent the Leafs to the finals), we haven't seen much legitimate excitement since then. Sure, the Leafs made a couple more semi-finals with Pat Quinn, but those were with significantly better teams, so much less of an achievement in my mind.
But the NHL is not the same as it was in the 90s. Everyone is bigger and faster, and the team hasn't had a legitimate superstar on the team in the way that Chicago or Pittsburgh has had for quite some time. And when they have had a superstar, that guy never had much help from the rest of the team. I don't think they've been legitimate contenders for a long, long time. The best that they've ever been is a "threat" or "dark horse".
While I've managed to "check out" on the Leafs for almost a decade now, I feel especially bad for longtime fans like my Dad, who year-in, year-out get set up with trumped up expectations for the Leafs only to be let down every single time. At least he witnessed them winning a cup before I was born though. And in two years, it's going to be half a century without a cup.
or is it simply a poor management issue?
There used to be - the financial goals of the Ontario Pension Plan (who owned a huge chunk of the team) ran counter to blowing huge amounts of money every year to increase the chances of winning a cup.
>> or is it simply a poor management issue?
Now that the pension plan is out, I think you can probably attribute the current state to a lot of bad decision making and not having a good long term plan.
seems if the teams current woes are mostly due to poor managment, hiring the best (or at least best paid) coach is a pretty good start, especially considering that they apparently gave him an 8 year leash
If you have a decent team, you're never going to get a Crosby or McDavid via the draft, so you have to at least have the semblance of trying to put a contender in place every year to be attractive to the best free agents.
In my mind, attractiveness to free agents is a combination of performance and an explicit willingness to spend money to fix shortcomings. Babcock, Kessel and Phaneuf are not enough (in my opinion) to make the Leafs a legit contender. They need at least two more elite players (including a top 3 goalie) to make that happen.
Can you imagine what would happen if the Leafs won a cup? The heads of the over 4 million people in the GTA would probably explode. And right after that, you'd have massive spending on merch, etc.
Well yeah, that'd be great if they were in the MLB where it's a Luxury Tax instead of a salary cap. But unfortunately they're a hockey team, and so are in the NHL where there's a salary cap. You can't, by league rules, simply spend more than the cap. So how exactly do you suggest they "spend like Steinbrenner"?
One tool they can use is the Injured Reserve, which allows GMs to backfill a long-term injury with players of equal or lesser value without contributing to the cap. This is what the Leafs' GM Nonis used to free up cap space by trading Clarkson to the Blue Jackets for Nathan Horton, for example. And even then Clarkson had to waive his no-trade clause (which he was classy enough to do).
You might call the salary cap a structural reason, in that unlike the Yankees/rich baseball teams, you can't really buy talent, you basically have to draft it. Not to say that teams aren't on an equal footing, but the Leafs might be in a very different spot with no cap.
Take Mike Babcock, who was recently hired as head coach. Because they weren't limited by the cap, the Leafs were able gave him an insanely high contract (more than twice the next highest paid coach in the league). Now imagine if they could spend like that on players.
The other non-internal factor that's often cited is the Toronto media. Leafs players are put under an enormous spotlight, and given way more scrutiny than any other team's players. This has sometimes lead to players not even wanting to play for Toronto.
Yeah it is the worst to be a fan of a very popular team that sells out when you are just fighting for 50% win rate.
That is a really good analogy.
its not like ticket prices are fixed, even if you already sell out every game, you can always raise prices if the demand will support it
not to mention all the other revenue streams that have nothing to do with how many people are in the building
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I'd look more at the relative tax rates, hockey is a capped sport, Canadian teams can only pay what US teams can pay, however less of it can stay in the players pockets after taxes
its appears that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in the US leveled the field signficantly for Canadian teams (though they were in effect for a signficant portion of the time frame examined in the 538 article) http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2013/10/01/u-s-t...
Not sure I follow you. The Maple Leafs are one of, if not the richest team in hockey. They're rich because they've got incredibly rabid fans who will pay whether the team wins or loses, and prices generally go up in Toronto, not down. Most of my forty-some-odd-years have been "lean" years for the Leafs.
For a long time, the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan owned a huge chunk of the Leafs, and there was little to no interest in spending what it took to produce a Stanley Cup winner, just some occasional lip service.
Taxes might be a factor, but less so for hockey than other sports. Toronto has a lot of cachet for being one of the Original Six (one of the reasons why Babcock chose Toronto over Buffalo) and for being one of the major focal points for hockey fandom.
I was just saying, if they make this much money when they're not winning, there is probably even more money to be made if they actually did win
(though I suppose I may have overstated that, as doing what it takes to win also costs money [though that's probably less an issue in the games current fixed player costs mode])
I live in Markham, Ontario -- just north of Toronto, and they wasted a ton of money "studying" the construction of an NHL class arena. I think hell would freeze over before the Leafs allowed another team to enter their geographic monopoly.
I'm also guessing, but I am thinking the compensation alone might be enough deter many investors from starting a new team in the region.
To get the best hockey players via the draft, your team has to be among the worst for a few years. If you have a consistently middling team like the Leafs, you'll never be able to draft the likes of a Sidney Crosby, and free agents who want to win a Stanley Cup generally go to cities where it's most likely to happen. I don't think Toronto is at the top of the short list.
A big difference between playing Canada vs. the USA would be income tax. It's going to be north of 50% when playing in Canada.
I looked at some data [1] which shows that CA teams have an average salary ~5% lower than their US counterparts. The 2 teams with the lowest salaries are American.
You are right that the Americans have all our best players though. More than 50% of NHL players are Canadian, followed by ~25% American, and ~8% Swedish.
[1] http://www.hockeybuzz.com/cap-central/
The question of whether there's any room for further growth in hockey popularity in Canada is being tested right now. Rogers Sportsnet just bought I think 10 years of exclusive hockey broadcast rights in Canada and I've read some articles that state that Rogers will need to increase the amount of people who watch hockey for this endeavour to be profitable. To start they've already cranked up the total number of games that appear on TV. It's going to be interesting to see if they can move the needle.
I smiled at that given what has happened since. But my smile disappeared when I realized that now my Toronto Blue Jays would be the go-to-example in the Royals' place.
There is no reason other than the US teams just happen to have drafted better, hired better etc. Nothing to do with economics as there is a hard salary cap.
Edmonton won the lottery this year and will get McDavid. Maybe that swings the tables. Had a Canadian team won the lottery the year Crosby was drafted, maybe that changes things.
Not all trends are explained by stats.
Luckily they got McDavid, so that kinda evens things out.
It has ice hockey teams in California for fuck sake!
(Yes, this is me as a snobbish European speaking. I will never understand how this form of sports competition can be taken seriously. Although come to think of it, compared to most of the world, North America doesn't take sports competitions that seriously.)
[1] http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/Attendance/20...
[2] http://www.worldfootball.net/attendance/champions-league-201...
For instance, someone playing for the Montreal Canadians will get taxed for about 55%. That's a significant difference compared to any American team where income taxes of 40% is considered high.
Edit: Wow, I grossly underestimated how rich people are taxed.