{"id":187208,"date":"2025-10-03T10:38:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T10:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/187208\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T10:38:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T10:38:07","slug":"instead-of-waiting-for-a-canadian-team-to-win-the-stanley-cup-canada-should-launch-its-own-domestic-hockey-league","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/187208\/","title":{"rendered":"Instead of waiting for a Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup, Canada should launch its own domestic hockey league"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Fans cheer as the Los Angeles Kings and the Edmonton Oilers hit the ice for Game 1 of first round NHL Stanley Cup playoff hockey action in Edmonton last year.JASON FRANSON\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Henry Mintzberg and Karl Moore hold professorial positions at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University.<\/p>\n

Here we go again. The 2025-2026 NHL season begins on Oct. 7. Will this be the year that our cherished Cup comes home? Don\u2019t count on it. But it should be the year that we ask ourselves why.<\/p>\n

It is hardly a coincidence that it\u2019s been 33 years since a Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup \u2013 which Lord Stanley created for \u201cthe champion hockey team in the Dominion of Canada.\u201d The last to do it? The Montreal Canadiens in the 1992-1993 season. There are seven Canadian teams in the National Hockey League and 25 American teams. A statistical analysis recently published in Forbes<\/a> put the probability of no Canadian team winning the Cup in all these years at one in 300,000. What\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n

Are we that bad at our own game? We\u2019re certainly great at playing it. The Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup with more Canadians on their team than Americans. And in international play, we are great at managing as well as playing the game: we are the dominant force in men\u2019s, women\u2019s and junior hockey.<\/p>\n

Opinion: NHL cleverly outsources moral judgement to its paying customers<\/a><\/p>\n

As for supporting hockey<\/a>, we have the most enthusiastic fans, the most lucrative franchises, the most significant television audiences. Hockey is, by far, Canadians\u2019 favourite sport, whereas in the United States, a 2024 Gallup poll<\/a> put football at 41 per cent, basketball at 10 per cent, and baseball at nine per cent. \u201cIce hockey\u201d got four per cent, presumably ahead of field hockey. <\/p>\n

The average franchise value<\/a> of the seven Canadian teams in 2024 was US$2.08-billion \u2013 almost 20 per cent higher than the average American team. Last year, Forbes <\/a>reported that 30 per cent of the gate receipts in the NHL and 55 per cent of the league\u2019s operating income come from the seven Canadian teams. Rogers recently signed<\/a> a deal for Canadian broadcast rights set to begin in 2026-27 at US$7.7-billion, compared with the current U.S. streaming rights deal with ESPN and Turner Sports, valued at US$4.5-billion. This is truly astonishing! How much of this stays in Canada?<\/p>\n

Is there something about the NHL that saps our confidence? For example, might it be the sheer loss of pride in having ceded control of our game to the Americans? Gary Bettman, the New York lawyer who has run the league since 1993 \u2013 when a Canadian team last won the Cup \u2013 seems more interested in putting hockey in the American desert than the Canadian snow. <\/p>\n

Opinion: Ken Dryden was a national hero. Now that he\u2019s gone, he has no replacement<\/a><\/p>\n

Are we too nice? One recent study<\/a> found Chicago Blackhawks fans to be the most aggressive in the league. Sure, our players can give it and take it as well as any, but is bullying part of our national makeup? <\/p>\n

Face it Canada: when it comes to the NHL, we are not just losers; we are wimps \u2013 already the 51st state, behind Arizona and South Carolina. So let\u2019s take the gloves off and get those elbows up \u2013 and become as gutsy as our players. <\/p>\n

Imagine, for example, a national hockey league \u2013 a real one, not just called that \u2013 to serve Canadians from coast to coast, with teams in Halifax, Quebec, Hamilton, Regina and Victoria, plus a team in Edmonton called the Spoilers, in Calgary called the Ice, in Toronto (York) called the Blues, in Montreal (Laval) called the Habitants? After all, if the New York area has three teams in the NHL and Los Angeles has two, why must the most enthusiastic hockey marketplaces in the world, Montreal and Toronto, each have just one? In England, six of the 20 soccer teams currently in the Premier League are based in London. A Canadian league would enable us to tailor changes in the game to our own liking. <\/p>\n

Sports leagues around the world are national \u2013 for example, soccer in Germany, Spain, Italy, and England, even Scotland. In North America, while baseball and basketball are wholly American, except for one token Canadian team in each league, the National Football League doesn\u2019t cross borders. Why not hockey? Could we support our own league? A 2011 University of Toronto study<\/a>, subtitled \u201cWhy Canada can support 12 teams,\u201d stated that \u201csmall Canadian cities are bigger hockey markets than most large American cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how about if we stand up for ourselves for a change, and push our substantial hockey weight around off the ice, supported by the activism of our devoted fans? Mr. Bettman will not take us seriously until we take ourselves seriously. It\u2019s time to beat him at our own game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Fans cheer as the Los Angeles Kings and the Edmonton Oilers hit the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,44,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-187208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-alberta","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-news","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}