Great expectations

Hockey Digest, Dec, 2000 by Tom Worgo

As Doug MacLean's Blue Jackets and Doug Risebrough's Wild introduce themselves to the NHL, here is our introduction to the league's two newest teams

THE EXPANSION ERA IS OVER. Finally. The NHL will add its 29th and 30th teams--and seventh and eight since 1991--when the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild begin play this season.

Columbus and Minnesota have each sold more than the required 13,000 season tickets, so two things seem certain: Both will fill their arenas with large crowds, and those fans will witness some really bad hockey.

"Both teams realize they are beginning a long, drawn-out process," says Nashville Predators general manager David Poile. "There is not a quick fix."

Poile ought to know. His Predators are entering only their third year in the NHL--although Nashville enjoyed a better-than-expected inaugural season in 1998-1999, finishing 28-47-7.

By comparison, the Atlanta Thrashers, last year's expansion club, recorded a dreadful 14-61-7 mark. The Wild will probably finish with a similar record. In some ways they resemble another recent expansion team, the Ottawa Senators, who relied on young-players to form the core of the team and gambled that those players would develop into stars. For Ottawa the gamble paid off; they are now one of the league's top dubs. For Minnesota, the dice is just beginning to be rolled.

The Columbus Blue Jackets have taken a different approach, acquiring established, veteran players, with an emphasis on talent, character, and goaltending. Columbus fans would love for general manager Doug MacLean to produce the same magic he worked with the Panthers, where he guided expansion Florida to the Stanley Cup Finals in only their second year of existence. He is building the team along the same lines as the Panthers, but he is not promising any miracles.

"I would like to be competitive," MacLean says. "Fifty-five to 65 points is a realistic goal. Nashville sort of set a new precedent when they came in to the league two years ago--if you get 70 points in an expansion year, you are doing very, very well."

MacLean has more on his plate than just putting together a hockey team, however. He claims that selling the game to Ohioans has been his toughest task. Columbus is the first NHL team to require the purchase of a Personal Seat License, which supporters must obtain before they can buy a season ticket. Prices range from $750 to $9,375, which buys the right to purchase a seat in Columbus' Center Ice Lounge. PSLs for seats along the glass cost $7,300. Those for club seats go for $6,655 and $5,225.

MacLean worked hard to sell them, but he is not a big fan of PSLs, which are more common in the National Football League. "I don't think selling the team has been very difficult," MacLean says. "What has been tough to do is [market] our Personal Seat License program. Essentially our tickets are twice as expensive as those of Atlanta, Nashville, or Minnesota."

Columbus may at first glance seem like an unlikely place for the NHL, It is known best as the home of Ohio State University, but it has also had a long association with hockey, as had the rest of the Buckeye State.

The NHL briefly had a franchise in Cleveland in the mid-1970s--and Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus have all had successful minor league teams. Plus, Cleveland and Cincinnati each hosted WHA franchises. "Columbus' minor-league team set a professional record for number of sellouts," MacLean says. "It's a little-known city, but in the business world, it is very well-known. There are a lot of corporate headquarters here. It is a prosperous city."

The NHL is also returning to Minnesota, which had a franchise from 1970 to 1993. That team, the Minnesota North Stars, played in Bloomington, a Minneapolis suburb. The Wild will play in St. Paul.

Nobody with the Wild seems worried that the NHL has previously faltered in Minnesota. "The perception that the North Stars were lost due to a lack of support is false," says Tom Thompson, the Wild's chief amateur scout. The last two ownership groups did a very poor job. The club was supported when it had a decent club in 1991, and the team left for numerous reasons, not purely a lack of fan support. Now things are stable and this team is going to be run in the same manner as the North Stars were in the first 20 years of its existence, when it was, in many ways, a model franchise."

Through mid-August, Minnesota sold about 15,000 season tickets, including all of the most expensive seats and luxury boxes at the 18,600-seat Excel Energy Center. The 64 luxury suites sold out in April 1999. The 2,800 club seats were gone by early January, after only five weeks on the market. "The most surprising thing about the club so far has been the tremendous amount of support we have received," Thompson says. "I would have never predicted that."

Unlike Atlanta and Nashville, which hired minor league coaches, Columbus and Minnesota went with former NHL bench bosses: Dave King (Blue Jackets) and Jacques Lemaire (Wild).

Lemaire should be able to show his players exactly what it takes to win a Stanley Cup. The former Montreal Canadiens star has won 11 championships as a player, coach, and front office executive. Out of the NHL for the past two seasons, Lemaire was attracted to the Minnesota job by the prospect of working with general manager Doug Risebrough, a teammate of Lemaire's with Montreal from 1976-79. "I love to be very close to the general manager," Lemaire says. "I needed someone that I knew, someone that I know will be around me all the time."