This matters because the NHL is an attendance business; the name of the game is putting bums in seats. NHL teams earn almost all of their revenues in their home arena. Unlike the NBA, Major League Baseball and the NFL, the NHL does not have a giant U.S. national television contract. In the NFL, roughly half of the average team’s revenue comes from its share of the national TV pot. Teams in weak markets -Green Bay and Jacksonville, for example -can survive and even prosper.

In the NHL, in contrast, the average team earns about 10 cents of every dollar from national TV. It has to earn the other 90 cents itself, mostly by selling tickets. NHL teams ultimately prosper or fail depending on the level of fan interest in their home market. And throughout the U.S., and especially in the Sunbelt, the level of interest in hockey is low. Really, really low.

This past season’s local TV broadcasts of Thrashers games were watched by an average of just 6,000 households. The Phoenix Coyotes pulled in 9,000 households. Columbus? Just 10,000. Florida Panthers games were seen by a mere 3,000 households, or fewer than 10,000 people. The average Toronto Maple Leafs local game on Rogers Sportsnet, in contrast, had an audience of 656,000 people. The Ottawa Senators drew 153,000. The Edmonton Oilers, 177,000. And those are mid-week games; weekend audiences for Hockey Night in Canada are even higher. That’s why, despite the fact that Winnipeg is a market one-seventh the size of Atlanta, and despite the fact that the MTS Centre would be the smallest arena in the NHL, the Canadian city is a much better location for a team.

In my study for the Mowat Centre, “The New Economics of the NHL: Why Canada Can Support 12 Teams,” I found that southern Ontario is by far the best location for a new NHL team, because of its enormous population. Southern Ontario can support two teams, and Montreal and Vancouver can each support a second NHL team. These are all better locations than Winnipeg, which is why RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie on three occasions tried to buy a failing American team and move it to Hamilton. But even though Winnipeg is not the best Canadian NHL location, it is a bigger, better hockey market than almost any city in the U.S. Sunbelt.

A team in Winnipeg is going to sell more tickets, and at higher prices, than the Thrashers did in Atlanta. We know this by looking at Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton, the three smallest markets in the NHL, and yet all profitable and all generating ticket revenues well in excess of the U.S. average. In fact, the Edmonton Oilers, despite playing in the NHL’s smallest market, and the second smallest arena, last year recorded higher gate revenues than 21 out of 24 U.S. teams, according to Forbes.

Don’t take my word for it: The True North group, backstopped by David Thomson, Canada’s wealthiest man, is by all accounts going to pay $170 million for a team that in Atlanta has lost nearly that much over the last six years. What’s the team worth in Atlanta? Approximately zero.

The group that owns the NBA Hawks and operates Philips Arena has been trying to unload the team for months, with no local interest. With taxpayers uninterested in opening their wallets and pulling a Glendale, it’s not hard to understand why. Atlanta is not the only American NHL team on the bubble. More failing U.S. teams are going to look north. They suffer from lack of fans, but also from the success of Canadian teams.

Thanks to the 2005 CBA, Canadian success makes the situation of failing U.S. teams even worse. Under the CBA, players are currently entitled to 57 per cent of league revenues. That was supposed to be the owners’ great victory: player salaries cannot rise faster than league revenues. The problem for most American teams is that their revenues are stagnating, even as leaguewide revenues explode. The salary cap is up by nearly 60 per cent over the last six years. Money-losing American teams with small fan bases and limited ability to raise ticket prices have been forced to raise their player payrolls, year after year.

Why are league revenues rising so fast? Blame Canada. The strength of the Canadian economy, the devotion of Canadian fans, and the rise of the Canadian dollar -up nearly 70 per cent since the lows of 2002 -are great news for Canadian NHL teams. They earn their money in ever more valuable loonies and pay salaries in ever less valuable U.S. currency; the combination means they’ve never been more profitable. For the weakest American teams, it’s the exact opposite story.

How is the NHL going to fix this? There are three possibilities.

The easy answer, and the one I propose, is to let more no-hope American teams migrate to Canada. Send more of the supply of hockey to where the demand is. A second response is to order more revenue sharing: essentially force the six Canadian NHL teams, plus the small number of successful American NHL teams, to send a much larger share of their own revenues to Phoenix, Miami, Tampa, etc. It’s hard to see why the NHL’s money-makers would be interested in this approach: the Toronto Maple Leafs will not sell fewer tickets if the Phoenix Coyotes go out of business. And the third option? The NHL could try to renegotiate the CBA -and cut costs by imposing a much lower salary cap on the players. The CBA comes up for renewal in a little over a year.

Did you enjoy the lost season of 2004-’05? We could be in for a rematch in 2012-’13.