Bettman's dream (and the owners' dream) is that hockey will somehow, someday become the international game that basketball is. For example, take the big announcement of games being broadcast on Asian TV last year, like that was going to somehow result in every kid in China wearing Sean Avery jerseys and carrying their Anze Kopitar lunchkit to school. I laughed out loud when I heard it, but people on here thought it was a great idea to get people in Asia interested in hockey, like they would ever give a crap about this game.
It will remain a dream, but they are not going to give up easily.
If Phoenix goes, it takes away a regional rival for a future US team, like Las Vegas. They want a team in Vegas. Then the dream expands. Now kids in the dessert are buying hockey cards and playing in the sand with their Sidney Crosby skateboard or Alex Ovechkin water bottle.
It is a joke. The game is played on ice, and yes, it finds some people who have never walked on ice, but for the most part, people in those areas see it as a novelty at best.
There is no point in moving to Hamilton, because kids in Hamilton already have a handful of hockey cards and their Ottawa Senators light switch.
They keep hockey away from current fans in order to keep the dream of world domination alive. I hate it, personally.
I understand the crux of your statement here, I really do...I just don't agree with it.
Yes, Bettman wants to take the game international. Yes, he wants to maintain teams in the southern US that don't experience naturally forming ice. And yes, kids out here in the "dessert" already do buy hockey cards, skateboards, et. al.
But if NHL owners and commissioners had always thought the way you do and kept their heads buried in the sand (wait, you don't have sand in Canada...kept their heads under the ice) refusing to expand their businesses, the NHL wouldn't be much more than a beer league played in glorified rec centers or on ponds. It's because they decided to expand outside their traditional boundaries that we have today's NHL.
Granted, it's not feasible to maintain an NHL team in China or in Europe, just like the NFL can't maintain a team (or even a league) in Europe and MLB wont expand to Japan. That isn't what any of those leagues want to do. They want to diversify their revenue streams, pure and simple. If the NHL put all their eggs in the Canadian basket, they would fail. They need as much American money (including the southern US) and overseas money as they can get their hands on to keep the league growing.
The last thing they want to do is shrink the game. It's already in 5th place among major North American sports (behind NFL, NBA, MLB and Nascar) and the NHL can't afford to lose market share. If you eliminated all those southern teams (you know, where fans can't ever experience "real" ice) and contracted the league back to 22 teams, do you think that somehow would help the NHL gain ground on any other league in terms of popularity? That fans will somehow be better served by a poorer league? That the premiere talent (especially European and Russian) will want to stick around for smaller paychecks instead of make more money in overseas leagues closer to home?
Bettman is a lot of things, but he's not foolish for continuing to make inroads into non-traditional markets. You may not agree with keeping a team in Phoenix that seems to be failing, but I assure you it has nothing to do with fans having sand dunes instead of snow drifts in their backyards.
...wishful thinking