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From: jeff@dciem.UUCP (Jeff Richardson)
Newsgroups: net.sport.hockey
Subject: give NHL teams a more local flavour
Message-ID: <1564@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-May-85 11:16:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.1564
Posted: Thu May 30 11:16:26 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 30-May-85 13:22:51 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 41

As I said in my last article, if we have a couple of American teams
transferring to Canada, we could have a Canadian Conference and an American
Conference, possibly with the winners of each meeting in the finals.
The NHL executives would like that because it would guarantee a US-based
team in the finals, and they could try to promote it to TV audiences as
"USA vs. the rest of the world", a marketing strategy that seems to work
well in other sports.  This would work even better if the American teams
were more American and the Canadian teams were more Canadian.  With the
increasing number of great players coming out of the US, I think it would
be possible to develop a fair and reasonable scheme that would allow that,
especially if the ratio of Canadian to American teams was higher than it is
now.

One possibility would be to have the current NHL entry draft preceded by
territorial draft.  In the territorial draft, each NHL team would be assigned
its own local territory (the territories would be assigned after a careful
analysis of where all the NHL players have come from over the years), and it
would be permitted to draft only players from that area.  The territorial
draft could go for three rounds, and then the regular entry draft would be
used to distribute the remaining players.  To make up for the fact that the
territorial system is not as beneficial for the weaker teams as the current
system, the entry draft phase could be changed so that each team picked two
players at a time.  Since most NHL players still come out of Canada, but
there are more American teams, the American teams' territories would not
have as much total player potential as the Canadian teams' territories,
assuming all of Canada is divided up among the Canadian teams and all of
the US is divided up among the American teams.  That can be compensated
for by allowing the American teams to pick more players in the territorial
draft (say, 5 or 6 vs. 3 for the Canadian teams) and making Europe part of
the American teams' territories.

There are several advantages to giving the teams more local flavour, ranging
from allowing the fans to better identify with their team, thereby increasing
fan interest, to making it beneficial for teams to spend money improving
the local and regional hockey leagues for young players.

I'd love to hear some comments on this idea.
-- 
Jeff Richardson, DCIEM, Toronto  (416) 635-2073
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