Balsillie's bid for the Phoenix Coyotes

Hours away? Ottawa is 5 hours away, Montreal is at least twice that distance. It's not just a 2 hour drive up the highway. Buffalo is close, and they might be affected by a Hamilton team, but how many Canadians are Sabres fans? Honestly!

And Hamilton has a much larger population (ranked 9th in Canada) than Regina (24th) and Quebec City (10th). If the Quebec Nordiques existed, why not the Hamilton Coyotes?

i was joking about Regina.. lol
1- Hamilton cant even support their own AHL team the Bulldogs, they struggle to get 5,500 to any reg season game.
2- OLD ARENA.. even if the do refurbish it or up grade it , its still goin to need to be replaced with in 10 years, its just too old!
3- going back to support of the dogs and their own pro CFL team, they cant even support those two teams fully never mind NHL.. 2 or 3 loosing seasons in Hamilton and the NHL team would have to re locate anyways.

Oh, ok. I was kinda hoping you were.
1. AHL is different than NHL, a lot of people just don't pay attention to AHL. Look at Leafs vs. Marlies. The Leafs sell out every night, the Marlies are struggling to get people to come out.
2. Well, Copps was being renovated, and even then, you have new arenas going up all the time. Pittsburgh got a new arena for the Penguins
3. Not necessarily. The TiCats (CFL) were still popular in Hamilton even when they had something like 5 straight losing seasons.

ya know you can argue facts weather hamilton could support a team in the NHL long term until we are sick of typing, all i'm saying is hamilton in my opinion is NOT the best location right now in time to have one in Canada. And the city that could support one with probably few problems would be Winnipeg weather you think it or not. as Bettman said " If NHL expended into Canada again Hamilton would not be a city to get a team right now, if any city in Canada got one Winnipeg would be first"

We won't lose fans. Don't you think we would've lost fans when Ottawa and Buffalo got franchises? Buffalo is only a couple of hours away and has affordable tickets! But we only go there to see the Leafs play, which is what will happen with Hamilton. Remember, the Leafs have been sold out for 78 straight years!

What it WILL force the Leafs to do is lower prices, which I'm all for.

are u kidding me, u know how hard it is to get leafs tickets, and the amount of people that watch hockey here is like 1 our of every 3, and not just hamilton, there are cities like london, KW, and if there were a team in hamilton, and the leafs played there, copps would be filled with leaf jeseys

Yeah, Copps will be filled with Leafs jerseys... what's your point? Hamilton would lower prices on their tickets to attract fans, and to compete, the Leafs would have to lower their prices. Simple economics.