NHL players survey: 21 of 31 say Quebec City should be next for expansion

[The Count of Merkur Cristo]

Great Day for Quebec...there's hope yet and there's 'light at the end of the tunnel'!

If it happens...where would the Nordiques history reside? The NHL & Quebec or Colorado (Avalanche)

I'm just saying...if the history and all 'proprietary and/or intellectual property', belongs to the NHL and Quebec...why not bring back that 'classy' Nordiques look from their 79-95 (their last), season;

Kevin Allen - USA TODAY Sports - 11 Sept 17

"If the NHL decides to add a 32nd team, players would want it to be located in Quebec City, Quebec.

USA TODAY Sports polled 31 high-profile players [from 28 different NHL teams] at the NHL/NHL Players' Association media tour and 21 (67.7%) chose Quebec as the venue the league should next embrace.

Seattle finished second in the survey with nine votes, and Houston totaled one vote.

Previously Quebec had been the home to the NHL's Quebec Nordiques (1979-95) before the franchise was sold and moved to Colorado. The NHL economic scheme is far different today [in those days...Quebec was a small market in the NHL], and it is presumed a new Quebec franchise would have a much easier time being a financial success.

The lure of Seattle is that it would be a natural fit in a Western Conference that currently only has 15 teams after the addition of the expansion Vegas Golden Knights, who are set to play their first season. The Eastern Conference has 16 teams.

Read More: NHL players survey...Quebec city should be next for expansion

"Hockey...The Coolest Game on Earth"!! NHL Official Slogan

 

[Pebcak]

Unfortunately Gary the weasel will do what he always seems to do. Put the new team someplace that makes more sense for hockey. Like a desert state.

 

[Rhody]

Just back from Quebec so I hope it happens

 

[RealPretendPsychic]

Interesting. I was under the impression the Quebec team would be a transfer franchise rather than an expansion. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for Kansas City. We’ve got the luxury of having a new arena (Sprint Center) that doesn’t have a permanent fixture. At this point it seems like Quebec would be a front runner for any team movement, but stranger things have happened.

 

[Doc4]

I suspect the rights to the old logo, name, jersey &c stayed with the franchise when it moved. The same thing happened with the Winnipeg Jets moving to ... where did they move, Phoenix? ... and when Winnipeg finally got a new franchise they were not going to be able to use the old stuff ... until the old team (let's call them the Coyotes just in case I'm right) decided it was the decent thing to do and allowed them to do so.

Would Joe Sakic ... who played for the Nordiques and the Avalanche, and is now the big mucky-muck with the Avalanche ... relent and do the same?

ve still got my fingers crossed for Kansas City.

You had your chance ...

(JK. If the city will support a franchise, I've nothing against it getting one.)

 

[RealPretendPsychic]

You had your chance ...

(JK. If the city will support a franchise, I've nothing against it getting one.)

Well I’m (unfortunately) a Flyers fan for life. But living in the KC area I’d like to see some local NHL hockey. They’ve got the arena to support it and the city is growing right now. With the recent success of the Chiefs and Royals I’m sure the City is looking more attractive. But I imagine the owners are looking for larger market cities.

 

[The Count of Merkur Cristo]

I suspect the rights to the old logo, name, jersey &c stayed with the franchise when it moved. [..]

Doc:

...and good point.

But lets say...just to 'toss it' around...what would be a great name (and logo perhaps), for the team if Quebec is the next new franchise

"NHL Hockey in Quebec...it's the smart move". CBJ

 

[Graybeard57]

I think it would be good for hockey to have a team in Quebec. Canada is under represented in the NHL, IMO.

 

[Doc4]

what would be a great name (and logo perhaps), for the team if Quebec is the next new franchise

I certainly think it would be a good first choice to see if they can get the old Nordique stuff from the Avs. I'm sure it could be had 'at the right price' ... just a question of whether or not the Avs would make that price reasonable, or even (like the Coyotes and "Jets") generous.

 

[Badgerstate36]

Id be very happy for the people of Quebec if they get a team but I kind of feel like they had their chance and lost their team. Quebec is too small of a market to support an NHL team, which is why the Nordiques left in the first place.
IMO, theres other cities who deserve a chance before Quebec does. I'll tell you what though, given the choice Id rather see a team in Quebec than to see Toronto get a 2nd team.

 

[Badgerstate36]

I certainly think it would be a good first choice to see if they can get the old Nordique stuff from the Avs. I'm sure it could be had 'at the right price' ... just a question of whether or not the Avs would make that price reasonable, or even (like the Coyotes and "Jets") generous.

It would be an interesting situation, kind of like how it is with the Cleveland Browns in the NFL, where they got the team's name and colors back but all of the old team's history still went to Baltimore.

 

[The Count of Merkur Cristo]

Id be very happy for the people of Quebec if they get a team but I kind of feel like they had their chance and lost their team. Quebec is too small of a market to support an NHL team, which is why the Nordiques left in the first place. [...]

Badgerstate:
Wasn't the original Winnipeg Jets also one of the smallest markets in the league

“Hockey...The Coolest Game on Earth”!! NHL Official Slogan

 

[Badgerstate36]

Badgerstate:
Wasn't the original Winnipeg Jets also one of the smallest markets in the league

“Hockey...The Coolest Game on Earth”!! NHL Official Slogan

Yup and they shouldnt have gotten a team again either, IMO. Every time the topic of expansion comes up, it seems like every Canadian city who used to have a team thinks they should be first in line. As far as Im concerned, if you used to have a team and lost it, for whatever reason, you should go to the back of the line. The same goes for Atlanta too. They had a team twice and lost it both times.

 

[Doc4]

The same goes for Atlanta too. They had a team twice and lost it both times.

The fourth one ... will stay up!

 

[The Count of Merkur Cristo]

By Norimitsu Onishi - Reporting from Quebec - 6 Jan 24

"Quebec Still Longs for its Lost Hockey Team - a Nationalist Symbol"

"Ever since the Quebec Nordiques decamped in 1995, leaving a hole in the Francophone city, vote-seeking officials have vowed to bring them back.
But younger voters may be starting to forget the team".

"When the Nordiques left Quebec nearly 30 years ago, the hockey team’s departure fueled the kind of mythologizing and nostalgia familiar to fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Nordiques’ stint in Quebec, playing there in the NHL from 1979 to 1995, overlapped with the French-speaking province’s two failed attempts to secede from the rest of Canada, and the team’s identity melded with that of their fans: a linguistic minority struggling to assert itself in a part of the world dominated by English speakers.

The Nordiques wore their politics on their sleeves, literally, putting the Quebec flag’s fleur-de-lis on their uniforms. They also sang Canada’s national anthem only in French.

The team’s exit “left a hole in Quebec City and Quebec regional politics, and a hole in Francophone identity, as well,” said Jean-François Lisée, who led the separatist Parti Québécois from 2016 to 2018, and who is now a columnist for the newspaper Le Devoir.

So ever since the financially ailing Nordiques decamped for Denver, generations of Quebec’s political leaders have sought to bring them back, going as far as building an arena that cost 370 million Canadian dollars (nearly $280 million), even as economic changes have made the team’s return increasingly unlikely.

“People see themselves in a national concept and in a hockey team, or in the memory of a hockey team, and politicians have tried to harness this sense of nationalism for political gains,” said Martin Pâquet, a historian of Quebec at the University of Laval in Quebec. “That’s essentially why they keep calling for the return of the Nordiques.”

The latest to do just that was the government of Premier François Legault, who was overwhelmingly reelected to a second term in 2022, but whose approval ratings have been falling this past year because of a series of missteps, including approving a 30% salary raise for lawmakers.

In November, his government announced with great fanfare that it had agreed to pay CA$5 million to CA$7 million for the Los Angeles Kings to play two preseason games in Quebec next October, as part of a strategic maneuver to keep pressing the NHL for the city’s own team.

Such a move would have perhaps led to at least a blip up in the polls in the past. But this time, it backfired. Roundly criticized, the announcement pushed Legault’s ratings further down, helping to make him the most unpopular of Canada’s 10 provincial leaders, according to polling by the Angus Reid Institute.

Was the criticism, and the missing bump in the polls, because of the timing of the announcement? It came around the same time that hundreds of thousands of the province’s public schoolteachers and health care workers went on strike, demanding better wages.

Or was it the cost of the deal, a lot of money spent on a long-shot gamble? Legault’s own finance minister, who has nicknamed himself the “minister of the Nordiques,” acknowledged candidly, if imprudently, that the odds of getting back a team were only 10%.

Maybe it was the ebbing of nationalist feelings among the French Québécois, especially the young. Or was it just the passing of time?

“If a couple has been separated because one of the members left some 25 years ago, it’s really time to move on,” Pâquet said.

Of course, the province of Quebec does still have an NHL team: For decades, the Montreal Canadiens have been one of the league’s most storied franchises.

But for many in Quebec, being a fan of the Canadiens was never an option — they had never been French Canadian enough. The Canadiens played in Montreal, the multicultural, diverse, bilingual metropolis that is the historical rival of the predominantly French-speaking Quebec City.

Outside the province, though, the Canadiens were famous for their French Canadian stars, like Guy Lafleur.

As Quebec’s independence movement emerged in the 1960s, so did hopes for an NHL team in Quebec City, in what was hoped would eventually become the capital of a new nation. The city got its team in 1979 after the Nordiques and others in a smaller league were absorbed into the NHL.

After people in Quebec voted against independence the following year, in the province’s first referendum, some channeled their frustrated nationalist sentiments into fierce support of the Nordiques. Games between the Nordiques and the Canadiens took on mythic proportions, acting as proxies for larger battles.

“We learned at a very young age to hate the Canadiens,” said Jocelyn Simard, 65, a French Québécois man who has lived all his life in Quebec City and grew up as a die-hard fan of the Chicago Blackhawks.

Once the Nordiques arrived, Simard felt he had found the team he was waiting for his whole life. While the Canadian anthem was sung in both French and English before games elsewhere, only French was heard in the Nordiques’ arena. Lafleur would

play his final two seasons in a long career for the Nordiques.

“In the end, many, many French Canadians identified more with the Nordiques than the Montreal Canadiens,” Simard said,

adding that he had not lost hope in a return of the Nordiques.

Simard spoke as he watched a game played by Quebec’s junior league team, the Remparts, at the Vidéotron Center — the pricey arena that provincial and city leaders built in 2015 with public funds to show the NHL how committed they were to getting a team.

But if fans of Simard’s generation tended to share his feelings toward the Nordiques, the team’s significance did not seem to resonate with younger hockey fans at the arena, many born after the team’s departure

“Me, I’m a fan of the Montreal Canadiens, whereas my father still has the Nordiques in his mind,” said Mathis Drolet, 17, a student who grew up in Quebec.

His friend, Justin Tremblay, 17, said he was aware of how the Nordiques were tied to previous generations’ aspirations — “Quebec wanting to become a nation and all that” — but those hopes felt distant to him.

“They’re things we learned at school,” Tremblay said.

Located in the league’s smallest market — the Quebec metropolitan area now has about 800,000 people — the Nordiques struggled financially for years and left for Denver in 1995. In the team’s first season in the United States, renamed the Colorado
Avalanche, it won the Stanley Cup — deepening a sense of betrayal in Quebec.

The Parti Québécois-led government at the time had refused the Nordiques’ owner’s request for a bailout — just months, it turned out, before the province’s second referendum on independence from Canada.

The referendum failed by a razor-thin margin — with some politicians and political experts eventually blaming the loss on the government’s refusal to bail out the Nordiques.

And so to this day, Quebec’s political leaders vow to bring back the Nordiques, and even the slightest development can generate significant attention in the local news media.

“In Quebec City, those stories are on the front page of newspapers,” said Frank Pons, a professor on sports management at the University of Laval.

But most hockey industry experts say the chances of a return are close to nonexistent.

In recent years, the NHL has chosen to expand in bigger markets, including Seattle and Las Vegas, and has given no indication of seriously entertaining Quebec as a candidate for expansion or relocation, Pons said. For the NHL, Quebec and its small television market just make little business sense.

“It’s an economic approach,” he said, “whereas in Quebec, it’s an emotional approach.”

Given the lingering emotions toward the Nordiques, few expect politicians to acknowledge the cold, hard truth about the chances of the Nordiques ever coming home.

“How many votes would that get you?” said Lisée, the former party leader. “If you don’t want to be in power, you can say that if you think that. Most politicians will say it would be such a great thing to have the Nordiques back".”

Works Cited: The Quebec Nordiques

"NHL Hockey in Quebec...it's the smart move". CBJ

 

[mcee_sharp]

My first NHL game was in QC and watched the Nords and Chicago play, in their second last year there. They had some amazing seasons in the 90's.

Catch the occasional Flames game in Calgary now, but it's a bloody expensive family activity.

 

[brucered]

I loved the Nordiques back in the days of Salic, Sundin, Nolan, Forsberg, Ricci and even Wendel Clark for part of a season.

The Jets came back to Winnipeg, so anything's possible...but I doubt it.

 

[mcee_sharp]

I loved the Nordiques back in the days of Salic, Sundin, Nolan, Forsberg, Ricci and even Wendel Clark for part of a season.

The Jets came back to Winnipeg, so anything's possible...but I doubt it.

I just don't envision the market being big enough today.