NHL hands Knights a golden opportunity

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/11/2016 (3222 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For more than five years, the Winnipeg Jets have been the answer to the question: name the last new team to join the NHL.

That officially changed Tuesday night when the expansion franchise that will next season replace the Jets as the newest NHL team was finally christened with a name of their own — the Vegas Golden Knights.

With that, a Jets team that for five-plus years has been the youngest member of the NHL family finally gets a little brother of its own to push around.

Or do they?

While the Jets have struggled mightily since moving from Atlanta to turn a once moribund franchise into a contender that can compete on a nightly basis in the NHL, the unusually generous expansion rules that will usher the Knights into the league next year are designed to ensure this baby brother is born a 25-pounder with a full head of hair and biceps.

Next year’s expansion draft is set up in such a way the Knights are guaranteed to get a decent player at every position from all 30 teams in the NHL — and at least a few outright gems. There’s a bunch of expansion draft simulators on the net: check one out. No matter how I played it, Vegas ended up with a surprisingly deep and talented roster.

On top of that, the Knights will also get an exclusive head start on NHL free agency next summer and a very favourable draft position — the Knights will draft no worse than sixth overall and have the same chance at the first overall pick next summer as the third worst team in the league this season. Plus, the Knights are guaranteed the third pick in every draft round after the first.

Quick tangent: let’s compare those expansion rules to the nightmare that was Jets 1.0 entering the NHL back in 1979-80, when an Avco Cup winning team was stripped naked by an expansion process that saw the Jets allowed to protect just two skaters and two goaltenders — and then given an NHL draft position that year at the bottom of the order for their troubles.

It took the Jets years to recover from that denuding and you can argue the team’s eventual relocation to Phoenix in 1996 can at least in part be traced back to a pillaging of the Jets roster by the NHL that set the franchise back years right from the very beginning.

But I digress.

If there is any lesson to be drawn from the way the current Jets came into the league in 2011 as a relocation team and the way the Knights are now coming in as an expansion team, it’s that the latter course looks, on paper at least, to be the much easier path.

But only if you can afford it. Bill Foley, the owner of the Knights, paid a half-billion (U.S) dollars to the NHL as an expansion fee, while the Jets ownership paid just one-third of that — US$170 million — to move the Thrashers to Winnipeg.

And that is an important caveat. It is difficult, even today, to conceive of any way the current Jets ownership could have paid US$500 million for a new expansion franchise and still somehow been economically viable in a tiny market with the smallest building in the league.

Winnipeg has NHL hockey today because Mark Chipman and David Thomson got an incredible bargain — Forbes magazine last year valued the Jets franchise at US$350 million, more than double what True North paid, although the Jets dispute the Forbes valuation as too high.

Whatever the Jets are worth today, what is clear is what works financially — or at least the NHL hopes will work financially — in Vegas would have never worked in Winnipeg or, for that matter, Quebec City, which was denied an expansion team this year for precisely that reason and despite having a building, ownership and fan-base that was NHL ready.

You get what you pay for in Gary Bettman’s NHL and about the only thing the Jets and Knights have in common in terms of how they came into existence is the Knights don’t yet have a farm system or prospects and, basically, neither did the Jets when they moved from Atlanta.

All of which is to pose the interesting hypothetical: leaving aside the fact Winnipeg couldn’t afford the expansion fee, would the Jets have been better off starting from scratch, like the Knights, than having to unpack all the baggage — real and figurative — that they brought with them from Atlanta?

Yes, a Jets team that was an expansion franchise would not have begun play with critical Atlanta pieces in Dustin Byfuglien, Blake Wheeler and Bryan Little. But then they also would not have begun play with the headache that is still Alexander Burmistrov, the migraine that became Evander Kane and such forgettable Thrasher holdovers as Nikolai Antropov, Tim Stapleton and Spencer Machacek.

So yeah, pick your poison.

Perhaps most damaging to the Jets in their first few seasons in Winnipeg was a culture of losing they brought with them from Atlanta. The Thrashers were bad for a long time and you can make the case that there were lingering strains of that culture still running deep in the Jets dressing room until the exorcism that was the hiring of Paul Maurice in January 2014.

In terms of draft position, the Jets in 2011 inherited the seventh overall pick when they moved from Atlanta — which is at least one spot later than the Knights will draft next summer and potentially as many as six spots, if the Knights get lucky and win the 2017 draft lottery.

On the plus side, the Jets used that seventh overall pick to select Mark Scheifele. The six players drafted ahead of Scheifele in 2011: Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Gabriel Landeskog, Jonathan Huberdeau, Adam Larsson, Ryan Strome and Mika Zabanejad. Discuss among yourselves.

Now, to be clear, the Jets team as presently constituted is light years ahead of where the Knights will begin play next season, regardless of how well Vegas does in next summer’s expansion draft, NHL draft and free agency.

But man, were there ever a lot of long winter nights in this town to get to this point and from where I sit, it’s hard not to be a little envious of the silver platter the NHL is serving up to the Vegas ownership in exchange for that half billion dollar expansion fee.

True North will get its share of that expansion fee, of course, something around US$15 million. And in return, Vegas will get every possible opportunity to succeed.

It’s worth noting the sad history of hockey in the U.S. south suggests they will need it. Did you see the tiny crowd in Carolina for the Jets game on Sunday — and the rink board advertising that Winnipeg companies had bought up down there as a cheap way to be seen on the TSN broadcast?

The Hurricanes have had three home dates already this season with crowds of less than 9,000 fans. Add to that the continuing attendance struggles of the Panthers in Florida, the Coyotes in Arizona and an Islanders team that suddenly cannot draw flies in their new home in Brooklyn and what emerges is that for all the advantages the Knights are being afforded, the biggest one of all still belongs to Winnipeg: we actually have hockey fans up here.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek