Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Is Las Vegas Ready For The NHL?

01/16/2015 at 5:35pm EST

from Pat Garofalo of U.S News and World Report,

“[The NHL has] had this Sun Belt sort of plan for development, and it hasn’t really done very well if you look at attendance,” says Dennis Coates, an economics professor at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County who studies sports and stadiums. And the prospect of Vegas bucking the trend isn’t good, he adds, saying that the league may “never build a fan base in Las Vegas for the same reason they couldn’t in Atlanta. Nobody skates there! They don’t play hockey. And so the natural followers of the sport just don’t exist there.”

In fact, according to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight, “there are only 91,000 hockey fans in the Vegas media market, which is nearly 40 percent fewer than even Nashville, Tennessee, the least-avid current NHL city, has.” The analysis, based on Internet search traffic, led FiveThirtyEight to the following conclusion: If Las Vegas “follows the league’s heretofore-established relationship between fan base size and financial success, it might be all but impossible for its new team to turn a long-term profit without a change to the underlying economics of the NHL as a whole.”

Adding to the trouble is that Las Vegas has a large Hispanic population, which has not traditionally been inclined to tune in to ice hockey. Vegas is also just the 41st largest television market in the U.S.; the only smaller market that currently has an NHL team is Buffalo, New York.

That said, the Business Journals estimated that, by available personal income, Vegas is actually one of the most attractive potential locales for an NHL team. The league has also successfully hosted NHL preseason games in the city for the last few years. And either way, the Las Vegas Arena is being built thanks to private funds, with or without a major sports tenant, its owners banking on a stream of other events – concerts, boxing matches and the like – to fill seats and pay the bills.

much more with some MLS talk too...

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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