In Canada’s less-than-swashbuckling free market in cellular, internet and cable-television service, you basically take the best deal you can get. It’s a bit like Canadian airlines. You never go in expecting superb or even particularly reliable service. You’re just happy if you get there and back with any baggage you’ve had to check. With Canadian internet, it’s a minor victory every time your Zoom call connects the way it’s supposed to.
It’s a bit like Toronto’s sports scene too. This is how I think about Rogers’ now-total dominance of Toronto’s major-league sports market. The telecom behemoth had co-owned Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) with fellow telecom behemoth Bell, but earlier this month bought out Bell’s stake for the nominal fee of $4.7 billion, making Rogers the majority owner.
What does this mean for the the National Hockey League’s Maple Leafs, is the question we hockey obsessives are asking ourselves. (MLSE also owns the National Basketball Association’s Raptors, Major League Baseball’s Blue Jays, the Canadian Football League’s Argonauts and Major League Soccer’s Toronto FC. It is a colossus, just not a very successful one if one measures success in, say, victories.)
I think it can reasonably be expected that Rogers alone will deliver red-hot success at roughly the same rate that Dr. Frankenstein’s Rogers-Bell partnership did, which is to say rarely if ever. (At the risk of sounding un-Canadian: Why were corporate arch-rivals co-owning sports franchises, or indeed anything at all, to begin with? Iit’s almost as if they weren’t arch-rivals at all!)
Reports suggest Bell wanted out of MLSE over debt issues.. And as a cellular and internet customer (not of Bell’s, but I could be! Make me an offer!) I’m all for my telecoms provider not chasing shiny pro-sports “investments” down rabbit holes. That’s my money they’re chasing it with.
But I also have a certain patriotism, I suppose, especially when it comes to our constantly abused national winter sport. Kids’ amateur hockey has become all but inaccessible financially to urban parents — which is to say most Canadian parents — unless they’re fairly well-off, and have at least one car, and are capable of delivering their children to 5:15 a.m. practices on a Tuesday morning halfway across town and then somehow getting those kids to school and themselves to work.
As a childless individual it honestly boggles my mind how anyone manages this. I hate that hockey has essentially become the sport of the rich, to play and spectate alike. The average ticket price to attend a Leafs home game was recently calculated at $335.
Cynical as I am about the state of the sport, I could probably be artificially and inappropriately cheered up were there some Canadian (or non-Canadian!) billionaires or corporations willing to call out NHL commissioner Gary Bettman on his insane, money-losing insistence on ignoring Canada as a growth market for hockey teams.
The National Hockey League makes no sense without teams in Saskatoon, London, Kitchener, Halifax or Hamilton, which is to say some of the largest hockey markets in the world. There are more die-hard hockey fans in Saskatoon than there are in New York City, and New York City has three NHL teams. Los Angeles has two, It defies all logic and reason that Toronto has just one — and that no one is seriously lobbying the NHL for a second.
Canadian billionaires, where are you? Have you no pride? A second GTA NHL team would be a licence to print money. You would sell out every game, no matter how big the arena — enormous, ideally, so real people could actually go. Your mission would be to win a Stanley Cup before the Maple Leafs did. That wouldn’t be all that hard to do. And holy cow would it ever be hilarious.
National Post
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