“If there were going to be a groundswell of interest and passion in playing and enjoying hockey, it would have shown up by now,” writes Drew Maggelet. “But it hasn’t.”
Gov. Spencer Cox and Mayor Erin Mendenhall should put this idea — and all the funding that they have proposed for it — where it belongs: in the penalty box.
Before I go too much further, I feel confident that, regardless of the subsidy, Utah could support a Major League Baseball team. Our media market is large enough and except for Real Salt Lake, which only has around 14 home games a year during MLB’s regular season, there is no overlap with other sports. Beyond that, multiple articles have reported on the strong interest from the MLB to use the Wasatch Front as one of its two expansion markets.
It’s tempting to look at a market like Las Vegas with a similar size and argue that Salt Lake could support a hockey team. But Salt Lake City is not Las Vegas. Setting aside the cultural differences, the key market difference is that we already have a winter sports team — the Utah Jazz. There are plenty of bigger markets, like Atlanta, with similar levels of hockey interest that have tried and failed to keep their NHL teams solvent in the face of competition from existing NBA franchises. Why do the powers that be believe that Utah is more capable of supporting a team than they are?
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