Against NHL Expansion
There should be fewer NHL teams, not more
When I started Nordiques Fan Corner, I said that I was going to experiment with “hockey conservatism” or “hockey traditionalism”—not necessarily right-wing political views, but certainly ones that fit the conservative thinker William F. Buckley’s description of a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” You may have heard this somewhat famous definition before, so it is perhaps worthwhile to include the second half of the quote: “…at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” A conservative, in this sense, is someone who sees that things are changing, sees that everyone else is either enthusiastic or neutral about those changes, and feels nervous and unhappy as a result. Almost by definition, conservatism has to be uncool.
Note, again, that there is nothing in Buckley’s definition that implies a link between conservatism and being “on the right,” though Buckley himself was very right-wing, and nowadays everyone who identifies as “conservative” also identifies as “right-wing” to the extent that it might seem strange to even question the link between these two categories, or point out that they are not quite synonymous in principle, even if, again, in practice, they largely are. But change happens all the time; sometimes it is left-coded (think gay marriage) and sometimes it is right-coded (think rollback of the welfare state). You can, in theory, be conservative about all sorts of stuff, some of which might well be left-coded, if you perceive it as being under attack. “Conservative” obviously shares a root with “conservation,” a left-coded ecological value that is mostly (at least in its current formulation) about preventing radical, destructive change to the ecosystem. One of the most striking features of politics in the 2020s is that the people who are “yelling Stop” the loudest are liberals, leftists, and progressives of various stripes, while the people with the historical wind at their backs, enacting or at least cheering for radical, sweeping, incautious change, are right-wing.
Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and especially Pierre Poilievre might disagree with some or all of the above characterization, and that’s okay; I disagree with them about everything else, too. But the point of Nordiques Fan Corner is, in part, to look at some of the things that are going on in hockey culture, become nervous and upset about them, and yell Stop. NHL expansion is a great case study in “things that change,” because it is very easy to reflect on it and see how changes become permanent. As an example, let’s take the Columbus Blue Jackets, pictured above. Now, I am not explicitly a Blue Jackets fan (obviously: I’m a Nordiques fan) but every fan of a specific team also has a list of other teams about which they have warm and fuzzy feelings. Plenty of non-Quebec hockey fans have sympathy for the Montreal Canadiens because of their history and mythology; almost everyone has a Crosby vs Ovechkin preference, and feels a particular way about the Penguins and Capitals accordingly (don’t worry, I have a planned post on Crosby/Ovechkin discourse coming up). The Columbus Blue Jackets are on my list of teams I don’t really cheer for or follow, but about which I feel strangely affectionate. Part of it is that I think their original jerseys were really cool—though I don’t care for their current ones. Part of it is that they’ve had a few of my favourite players over the years, guys who you forgot had stopovers in Ohio, like Sergei Fedorov, Geoff Sanderson, and Jonathan Marchessault. But really, I like the Blue Jackets because they were always doomed.
The Blue Jackets joined the NHL for the 2000-01 NHL season, alongside the Minnesota Wild, but whereas Minnesota is obviously a great hockey market that simply happened to lack an NHL team ever since the North Stars left in 1993, Columbus was not a natural, intuitive fit for hockey. Rather than being an existing market into which an NHL team could be fairly straightforwardly deposited, Columbus was a place in which the market would have to be created from scratch. The city itself was ambivalent, voting against a publicly financed arena in 1997 before quickly relenting. The previous Ohio-based NHL team, the Cleveland Barons, had been one of the most financially disastrous propositions in league history, folding in 1978 after two seasons and being infamously memorialized as the “Mistake by the Lake” (hockey turns of phrase used to be so great). In the 1990s, there was hardly any grassroots hockey infrastructure in Ohio, and the tone of media coverage at the time was pretty derisive. By all accounts, Columbus is a great place to live and raise a family, but it wasn’t and isn’t top-of-mind if you’re thinking of American cities associated with hockey.
But that was the project of Bettmanism: rather than deepening hockey’s existing appeal, the NHL would broaden it, aiming for shallower coverage cast over a wider area (yes, I will have an essay on this soon as well). And so the Blue Jackets came into being. Several of the players they picked in their inaugural expansion draft forced their way out, and the franchise has had persistent difficulty attracting free agents or retaining draft talent. It took them seven seasons to make the playoffs (the Minnesota Wild made the conference finals in just their third season) and seventeen to win a playoff series (which, other than the qualifying round victory over Toronto in 2020, remains their only series win in franchise history). The Blue Jackets have been and remain a bit of a mess. I love a lost cause—this is a Nordiques blog, after all, and Quebec fans are in no position to throw stones—but if you like the Blue Jackets, as I do, you do so a bit wistfully, a bit condescendingly. Nobody fears the Blue Jackets; they’re not like the Tampa Bay Lightning, a non-hockey-market team that has managed to strike fear far and wide. It probably wouldn’t matter very much to NHL history if the Blue Jackets had never existed at all; the Montreal Canadiens are currently pretty hapless, but they remain among the most important and lucrative teams in the league. The surging profits of the Bettman era have kept Columbus afloat in a way that was impossible for the Cleveland Barons, but the result has been much the same.
Do I think the NHL would be better off without the Blue Jackets? I don’t know that I really have a settled opinion on this question. Insofar as I think the ideal number of NHL teams is probably about 28, and that a few of them should move to other cities, the Blue Jackets probably would not make my dream NHL scenario. I don’t think abolishing them in a vacuum, in 2025, without making any other changes, would do any good. I would certainly miss them, and so would the hockey fans in Ohio, who definitely do exist, even if not in vast numbers. I think it was very cool when Ohioan Jack Roslovic got to play for his hometown team—cooler than the comparable hometown stories of Mitch Marner or Charlie Coyle, precisely because hockey players usually don’t come from Ohio. So I guess I am not a “defund the Blue Jackets” guy, even if, on balance, I probably would not have voted for their existence at the time.
So teams come and go, and we generally get used to them. The Nordiques were a brand-new team at one time, and so were the Habs, and Leafs, and everyone else; and maybe a truly doctrinaire conservative would have been against all of them, which is partly why I am not a conservative about real-life political questions. The Vegas Golden Knights seemed ridiculous at the time, and they seem ridiculous now for a different reason, but they are also profoundly entertaining and have leaned into city-identity branding (which I like) harder than just about any NHL team; nobody could now suggest getting rid of them (a conservative would point out here that long-established norms are easy to break and hard to re-build). But there is an actual, structural reason that expansion above about 30 teams is bad—that we are actually, now, currently, at the point of team saturation—and that reason is the Stanley Cup.
Although players are not paid for participating in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and although the Stanley Cup is really just 35 pounds of silver-nickel alloy, it nevertheless matters so much to hockey players that they routinely cry when talking about it. The injuries sustained, and played through, in unpaid pursuit of the Cup each year are literally more egregious than those deemed tolerable in wartime, in the sense that Patrice Bergeron would certainly not have been certified for combat duty in 2013 (though, of course, nobody dies in the NHL, sort of). NHL players act as if the Stanley Cup is outrageously, existentially important, because it is: although it is a MacGuffin, a plot device that exists merely to advance the plot, it nevertheless holds enormous value for the people who believe in it. Like money, the Stanley Cup is only important because of what we all collectively believe about it, but given that we all do collectively believe this about it, the Cup is, like money, absolutely crucial. An NHL season without the Cup, or in which the Cup mattered a bit less, would hardly be worth watching, since everything that happens in an NHL season is only retroactively given meaning by the fact of its eventually being either true or false evidence of Cup-worthiness.
Allow me an example from my non-hockey life. I am a professional academic, which means that I spend a large chunk of my time at work applying for academic grants. For those unfamiliar, the basic way this works is as follows: a granting body (a government, or a foundation, or a university) will allocate X amount of money to fund Y grants (e.g. $100,000 to fund 10 grants of $10,000 each, etc). A grant is usually meant to fund a specific academic project. Each grant opportunity attracts far more proposals than can be funded in any given cycle, and the most competitive grants are generally the most prestigious. My current grant had a 7% success rate in the year I was awarded it; that is low-ish but fairly standard, making it a prestigious grant, but not an unattainable one. A more typical success rate is about 15%, but there are plenty of grants with success rates of around 1%, or even less. One might expect that “prestige” scales linearly with “competitiveness,” but this turns out not to be true. Studies show that while a grant with a 7% success rate is perceived by academics as more prestigious than one with a 15% success rate, that subjective perception of prestige falls when a grant’s success rate dips below about 5%. If you are one of 7 applicants out of a pool of 100 who succeed, that’s great; but if you’re the only person who succeeds out of a pool of 2000 applicants, your success is—correctly, in my view—perceived as pretty random. At that level, it comes down to what people on the selection committee had for breakfast, what their grandchildren mentioned last week, what the main news headline was that morning. Things that are too competitive are also seen as kind of arbitrary, and the prestige goes down; and as a result, studies also show that the most competitive grants paradoxically attract lower-quality applications, since most academics simply view those grants as impossible and unreasonable, and focus their attention elsewhere.
This applies, I think pretty obviously, to the Stanley Cup Playoffs as well. For a long time, winning a Stanley Cup was perceived as the main test of greatness for elite players; that’s why Ray Bourque’s career-capping win in 2001 was such a great moment. Bourque was one of the greatest defensemen in NHL history, but his lack of a Cup meant that his career, his historical position, was incomplete. When he won, the joy and the sense of release came so intensely not just because we were all happy for Ray Bourque, but because we were relieved that the natural order of things had endured. Sure, he’s good, someone might argue, But, if he hasn’t won a Cup, how great can he truly be? Not having won a Cup was implied to be evidence of individualism, a lack of team-first spirit; and you could occasionally see takes suggesting that a player who had only won a single Cup might not be truly, historically great.
Nowadays, there are 32 teams, and despite the salary cap’s enforced mediocrity, there are really only a few teams with a persistent chance to compete. When Wayne Gretzky won his Cups, there were 21 teams, which meant that each team had just about a 5% chance of winning each year (assuming a random playing field, which there never has been). 32 teams reduces that percentage to about 3%. Connor McDavid is probably the third-greatest offensive player in NHL history (or, in absolute terms, the greatest ever) and he doesn’t have a Cup yet; the odds are strong that he never will. He came close last year; maybe he’ll get it done this year. But statistically, he probably won’t, and I don’t think anyone would make the argument anymore that McDavid is less great because the Oilers didn’t win a Cup under his leadership. There are just too many compounding factors that aren’t his fault and have nothing to do with him. Certainly, nobody would suggest, as some did for Sidney Crosby around 2015, that having only one Cup would make McDavid less of an all-time great; instead, we would all feel tremendous relief at him finally getting it done.
There will probably be 34 NHL teams soon, and I don’t think we can rule out 36 eventually. If there are 36 NHL teams, the average chance of winning a Cup in a given year will be about 2.8%, and the odds of winning a Cup during a 10-year NHL career will be a little under 24%. The more teams there are, the more true stars there will be who never win a Cup. That will mean, inevitably, that winning a Cup is decreasingly relevant in debates over all-time greatness, which I think is sort of a good thing, since I think most fans have consistently overrated the agency of star players in driving team results. And if winning a Cup confers limited material benefits but lots of prestige, then when the prestige of winning declines, then so will the motivation of individual players to make transcendent sacrifices in pursuit of something seen as essentially an arbitrary luxury. As the Cup becomes more and more like an unattainable academic grant, it will attract, as such grants do, a proliferation of lower-quality, throwaway applications. I don’t think NHL players will simply stop trying in the playoffs, but it seems clear that the mystical quality attached to playoff success hinges on the perceived possibility that the effort and sacrifice expended in the course of an NHL season might reasonably result in a Cup.
And this is what I mean by thinking through the ways in which hockey changes. I think NHL expansion is inevitable, even though I am usually against it. We are going to have 34 teams, and maybe more, and we have to live in that world. But that will inevitably mean changes in how we assess and allocate prestige, and changes in what we think of as important, attainable, and relevant in hockey. The Stanley Cup won’t become irrelevant overnight, and it will never become an afterthought. It might mean that we attach more and more importance to the President’s Trophy, given for regular season success. It might mean that we attach less importance to team success altogether, and focus more on star players and their individual statistical achievements. It might mean that the salary cap will have to evolve and allow for more concentrated accumulations of star talent. But in all cases, the role of the moderate conservative in any area of life is to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. I want more mystique, more magic in hockey; and that means the Cup has to feel attainable, even when it isn’t. And so, Columbus, I’m sorry, but I was against it from the start, even though I love you.