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Originally Posted by Suffolk Shippers
You're way off. The NHL went downhill with Gary Bettman's pipe dream of removing the game from niche markets and regionalization and into areas like Arizona, Florida, etc. Hockey can work in SOME non-niche regions, like LA, Dallas, Anahiem even.
However, doing so at the expense of franchises in core areas, like southern Ontario, or Quebec, Minnesota (until the Wild), or even a second team in Toronto is terrible business. It's the thing that plagues the NHL most today. Oh, and the labor strife a few years back didn't help.
Horse racing can learn a lot from the NHL. The NHL did not need to expand it's horizons beyond a regional niche sport to be successful. Like any business, if you can carve out your percentage of the market, and maximize profit and revenue within that percentage, you're doing a lot better than most. Racing doesn't need to try and grasp at straws to burn money to find ways to bring in more casual fans. It sounds a lot like the NHL moving teams to Phoenix. A waste of money (as is being proven out) to foolishly expand the market.
I would be furious if racing foolishly spent money to get on ESPN, at the expense of much needed improvements within racing itself. All too often, those of us who make up the market for horse racing get stepped on and ignored. Why on earth would we want racing to try and foolishly spread it's wings where, we, the consumer, become even more irrelevant?
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This is a separate discussion, but when you have a shrinking base you need to find ways to grow. People are saying keep the core, core people rarely leave, whether its hockey, horse racing, or political parties etc, but you need to find ways to expand that core, and that is what the NHL did in LA Phoenix, Dallas, Tampa, and I would not say that was a total failure, I believe they had some really bad ownership, bad salary structure, and the final nail was bad tv deals.