What NHL Teams Would Survive Relegation—Part One
Mark Pyzyk for GORDIE Magazine
The NHL has a draft lottery problem. More specifically, it has a tanking problem. Lots of people say so (for instance, here, here, here, & here). I personally don’t hate it that much — anyway, it’s fun to watch tanking backfire. More to the point, it’s not really a new thing: most infamously (and most effectively), the Pittsburgh Penguins dropped their 1983–84 season to get Mario Lemieux. Nevertheless, it’s a topic that comes up every few years.
In 2015–16, a significant number of NHL teams tanked their seasons to try to get Connor McDavid. Now, whether Edmonton — the eventual winners — actually did this on purpose is unclear, but Buffalo and Arizona certainly did. In the end, it was an abysmal Oilers organization that got to announce his name on draft day, something even Edmonton fans are now starting to lament (at least in an “O God, I feel sorry for him” sort of way). In that season especially (but also in the next, when the perennially dismal Maple Leafs took Auston Matthews after finishing dead last), many teeth were gnashed on this question.
Such complaining took on a chattering momentum of its own, in part because the NHL wasn’t alone in the struggle: basketball was dealing with the same thing. So, how to fix it?
There were lots of suggestions:
- The so-called “Gold Plan”, endorsed by Down Goes Brown and others: a pre-playoff tournament of losers, the winner of which gets first pick (here, here).
- A plan that rewards the team that wins the most after being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs (here, here).
- A draft pick “future” market (here), meant for the NBA, that was endorsed by Five Thirty Eight.
- Needlessly complex solutions, like counting losses differently at different points in the season (here).
- A hybrid system, implementing several of the above (and probably solving nothing: here).
Honestly, whatever. None of these solution will ever be implemented. There is exactly no appetite in the NHL for a radical realignment of the lottery system. So, with that in mind, I want to address the problem of tanking in a different, weirder, even less realistic way, but one that hopefully opens up a wider and more searching range of possibilities for what the sport could look like.
That solution is: Relegation.
What’s Relegation?
The last 10, 12 years, we’ve been in the premiership. But unfortunately, it just went wrong.
So says a middle-aged Englishman at the start of the Netflix documentary Sunderland Til I Die. He’s followed by another — also middle-aged — man, this time in a steamy looking pub.
Sunderland — nevermind the football club — Sunderland football club is Sunderland. And if it doesn’t get up, we haven’t got much going for us to start with. It’s just another nail in the coffin.
These men speak with earnestness and a sense of doom. Both are describing a phenomenon that no fan west of Gibraltar (or north of Brownsville, TX) has ever felt, but that’s fairly ubiquitous in other parts of the world. Their team, Sunderland AFC, after playing an awful, depressing season of football, has been — rather than simply embarrassed, or rewarded with the first pick in a prospect draft — sent down to a lower league. They now play in the English equivalent of the AHL.
Sunderland Til I Die covers the first year of play for the club after it had been demoted from England’s highest level of football — the Premier League — down to its second — the EFL Championship League. And the show’s central mystery is whether the club rises to the occasion and earns promotion, or whether it will sink deeper into failure.
This system of relegation is common across most of the world — in the English Premier League, the German Bundesliga, as well as hockey leagues like the Swedish SHL and Czech Extraliga — everywhere, of course, except North America. The American aversion to it even extends to the MLS, which has pretensions of being a world-class football league: Fifa has tried for years to introduce relegation to the MLS, which has stubbornly refused to adopt it.
So what if NHL teams had to contend with relegation? If the Maple Leafs, to take one example, had to worry about playing their next season in the AHL, the tanking problem would vanish overnight. Of course, there are all sorts of other aspects that wouldn’t be fixed, in part because they come from that other world. The draft would simply have to be abolished: it wouldn’t make much sense in a world where clubs could go up and down the ladder. Or it would have to stay in a state of odd limbo, as it was when the WHA and NHL competed for players, with clubs selecting players who might opt for one league or another.
More likely, a team-based development system on European lines might have to be adopted: it wouldn’t be unlike the pre-1963 system in the NHL, which preceded the first league amateur draft. This would obviously create its own problems, benefitting teams that resided in talent rich pockets of the United States and Canada. Oh well. Not my problem: I’m not here to solve every little complication.
But assuming such a system was adopted: what teams are most likely to survive? Sunderland FC was ultimately never promoted back to the Premiership (SPOILER ALERT: they were relegated a second time in 2017–18). So which NHL team would survive a similar move? Are there any? Our North American system is so different that any knee-jerk reactions we might have are probably a bit misleading. Sure, the Dallas Stars have been successful, broadly, across their tenure in the league: But how sustainable would that be if they suddenly played in the AHL?
In what follows, I’m going to set up my thinking on this. In subsequent parts, I’ll actually go through the league team by team to decide who’s resilient and who isn’t.
The General Theory of Relegativity
This is less a statement of methodology than a defense of my avoiding it (at least in any strong sense). In another world, I’d run a series of statistical tests on team performance and seasonal attendance or some such. But really that would be a waste of time: this is a thought experiment, not a prediction, and unlike fancy stats models, you can’t even test this post hoc.
Instead I’ve thought about relegation loosely, along five parallel lines. Each has a bearing on the question of whether a team would survive, following demotion. Of course, even this is sort of a mystery: European-style relegation and the North American system are really two separate universes. We are reading educated tea leaves here.
So what are these five considerations?
First, does the team keep up its attendance when it is playing poorly (for instance in years when it’s missed the playoffs, and especially after multiple such years)? This seems like an obvious criterion. Teams that are relegated typically do so because they play poorly — poorly enough that they miss the playoffs by a significant amount — so you’d like to know whether their fans are going to stick around or not, when they do so.
Some teams are hard to judge on this criterion, partly because they’ve been so good for so long. Take the Penguins. They haven’t missed the playoffs since 2005–2006, so a whole generation of fans has grown up with them as winners. This becomes a philosophical question: i.e., is this even the same basic group of fans? Is it the same cohort that had given up on the team by 2006 and were staying home, so much so that the team was slated to be sold to Jim Balsilie and moved to Hamilton? Maybe, maybe not. There’s something of a Theseus’ Ship conundrum at play here. Luckily, this is by far the longest playoff streak in the NHL, with Anaheim and Minnesota both tied for 2nd: they last missed the playoffs in 2011–12.
Second, do they have good attendance in good times? This seems even more basic. If a team can’t sustain full attendance when they’re making the playoffs, year after year — or God forbid, making the conference final, as Ottawa did in 2017 — then there are deep problems afoot in the fanbase. In a totally free market, such teams would immediately move somewhere more profitable. But the NHL doesn’t work on free market principles, as we’ll remark on further: The NHL is basically a cartel designed to maximize profit, in part by controlling access to the highest level of competition.
In this world, teams like Arizona and Ottawa stay where they are, subsidized by the NHL for reasons that have nothing to do with the fanbase or with good corporate governance. For our purposes, though — in a world of relegation — that wouldn’t be the case, and teams that consistently failed would need to ride out a few seasons in a lower division. For that to work — and for a team to earn promotion — fans need to keep returning, regardless of result. This is something we can assume they’d fail to do for weak NHL teams, given fans’ lack of commitment in good times.
Third, is ownership solid? I more or less count any ownership group that doesn’t spend up to the cap as fickle. Is that fair? I think so. However smart the management group may be, and however economical they are in trading, developing, and managing assets, dropping to a lower league can be disastrous, messing with the team’s baseline cost estimates.
There’s a really basic conundrum at play for owners of relegated teams. Revenue will decline; salaries won’t, unless the team sheds top talent. The problem with that, of course, is that they need that talent to claw their way back to the big leagues. It’s all well and good to be the Colorado Avalanche or the New York Islanders, both of whom are nearly $10 million below the NHL salary cap and surviving comfortably. But how likely is ownership to stick with the team if overall revenue declines by a third, or even by half? I’d say unlikely. And lest we pick exclusively on poorer teams, it goes without saying that there are ownership groups that do spend up to the cap and are not solid (I count Darryl Katz among these, along with a number of other eccentric tycoons): each requires a case-by-case analysis.
Fourth, has the city ever seen a professional team leave (let’s say since 1967)? This is important because it can reflect some historic weaknesses in a sports market.
Winnipeg comes to mind as hockey city that grieved the loss of the Jets, but that nevertheless failed to convince then-owners that there was a lot of money to be made there. This can have as much to do with the US-Canadian exchange rate, prospects for long-term growth, or a city’s place in the broader continuum of North American urban spaces. In the case of Winnipeg, you can fault Gary Bettman and Richard Burke for moving the franchise from Winnipeg, but only in retrospect: in 1995, Phoenix was by far the market with greater potential for growth.
The counter to this is that the modern Winnipeg franchise has done really well. That’s right. But consider: 1.) they took on a franchise that was failing even harder than the Coyotes are today (i.e., the former Atlanta Thrashers); and 2.) in 2011, the Canadian and American dollar were closer to parity than they had been since 1974 (in fact, the Canadian dollar was worth $1.01 USD). Would Winnipeg be chosen as a landing spot today? I honestly doubt it, and you can see the flip side of this in the league’s hesitance to return to Quebec.
As a side note, I’ve considered WHA teams for this purpose. This is partly because the WHA is the only historical example we have of a league that not only claimed parity with the NHL, but sometimes (if only in short spurts) rose to the occasion, signing legitimate stars like Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe. The behaviour, often shameful, of contemporary NHL owners showed this quite clearly. Harold Ballard and his son, Richard, made life impossible for the Toronto Toros because they feared competition from another professional hockey team in the Toronto area. This was a larger pattern for NHL . The Islanders were effectively conjured out of thin air to keep the New York Raiders from playing at Nassau Coliseum. Anyway, it’s a testament to the sad state of North American sport that the WHA (or ABA in basketball) were the hardest competition the traditional leagues ever faced — which is to say, not much. For our purpose, though, this is as close as we can get to a natural test case for fan commitment to relegated (i.e., non-NHL) teams.
Fifth, and finally, has the team won a Stanley Cup in the last 15 years? I don’t have much to say about this one. I think this one is pretty self-explanatory: Teams that win the Cup earn a lot of goodwill from fans, ownership, and sponsors. So winning a cup should contribute to team resiliency in the medium term.
With all that said, we can move on to the rating some teams.
Tier Five: The Insta-Fold Teams
While we’re saving team-by-team analysis for the next part in this series — where teams will be divided into four tiers, from most to least resilient — I’m going to dispense with the easiest category: the Insta-Fold team.
These are the teams that would immediately collapse, not even making it a week into the season. More than anything, these are teams that would have no chance to really test a fanbase. It’s a case of incompatible assumptions about the essence of NHL franchise-hood. Both teams paid enormous sums to enter the league as expansion teams, and in both cases this was conditional on uninterrupted NHL membership. These are the easiest teams to analyze, in part because their very existence is impossible in a system that incorporates relegation.
32. Seattle Somethings
The NHL’s newest addition may be the topic of much excitement and speculation, but the merest whiff of relegation would scuttle the whole project. No one spends $600 million on a franchising license if they think their team could be demoted. The guarantee of playing in the NHL is part of the point, one of the major linchpins of the North American cartel system. Unlike Europe, where clubs theoretically have a deeper and more local connection to their fanbase (which means that fans are born into fandom and die in it, wherever their squad may fall), this system, such as it is, is more about soaking people for entertainment dollars, rather than asking for lifelong fellowship.
31. Las Vegas Golden Knights
I put Vegas into the same category. They’ve played one extremely, unbelievably, wildly successful season in the NHL. But that could change quickly, and without the guarantee of NHL play, they never would have come about in the first place. At the moment, their games are entertaining, and their fans are enthusiastic. They even brought in Mark Stone at the trade deadline — a sign that the franchise feels comfortable it has hit its stride. I am putting them in the bottom tier primarily because we have very little in the way of a track-record to judge by. So this is therefore more of a default dismissal than a real one. We’ll see how resilient Vegas is in the next decade or so.
So much for the Insta-Folds. If anything, the title is a bit unfair. More appropriate might have been “The Question Marks”. But the mystery ends here. For every other team in the league, we have enough of a track record to render judgment, something we’ll do in subsequent parts of this series.
Next Time
And that’s it for this week.
This is Part One of a three part series! In Part Two (which can be found here), I’ll actually dive into four tiers of teams that might survive relegation (from most likely to least). Then, in Part Three, I’ll discuss what promotion (as opposed to relegation) would look like (in this case, from the AHL: which teams would be most likely to come up, and what this would mean for the NHL?). I’ll also discuss some general thoughts on relegation as a mechanism and what it tells us about the differences between European and North American sport.
Even if we don’t solve all the league’s problems, relegation is a fun fantasy to think with. Stay tuned!
Mark Pyzyk is a writer for GORDIE Magazine, which is dedicated to exploring the world of hockey and hockey culture. If you liked what you saw here, please sign up for the GORDIE newsletter, and you’ll receive an issue every Friday, just in time for the weekend!
