Don Cherry made a lot of fans in Quebec City on Thursday night. The bombastic hockey icon urged Gary Bettman to put a new team in Quebec City during CBC’s telecast of Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final from Vegas.
Don Cherry try's to convince Bettman to bring the @NHL to Quebec… ?
What a segment… #StanleyCup pic.twitter.com/vdPP9jPKVa
— David Nestico (@davidnestico200) May 31, 2018
“There’s never been a rivalry in hockey like Quebec and Montreal,” Cherry said. “They had 18,000 people, they have a brand new building, they’re ready to go.”
Meanwhile, Gary Bettman was standing there awkwardly as Cherry talked about how great of a market Quebec City is for hockey. Ron MacLean then invites the NHL’s commissioner on to the set to talk with the hockey icon about the issue.
Cherry says to Bettman that he thinks the city deserves it. Bettman responds that there are a lot of logistical issues with Quebec expansion and that they aren’t currently in a process that would see a new team moved to the city. He then went on to say that Jeremy Jacobs, the owner of the Boston Bruins who expressed skepticism about Quebec City, only has one vote.
For context, Jacobs had an end-of-season press conference on Wednesday in which he was asked about expansion. Specifically, he was asked about the future of Quebec City.
“Quebec is challenged, OK, I’m going to put it nicely. They’re challenged,” Jacobs said. “Look at the income base and the population base and there probably isn’t a smaller market, so they’re going to really have to distinguish themselves in some other way, I would think. You look at Houston and you look at (Quebec) … fifth largest in North America versus, you know, 105th, let’s say,” Jacobs continued. “So they have a different situation. Economically they’re challenged and numerically they’re challenged. They just don’t have the numbers.”
While Jacobs is correct that Quebec is a small city, the Jets have proved in Winnipeg that hockey can exist in a small, passionate market. Quebec opened a new stadium, Videotron Centre, in 2015 with an 18,000 seat capacity. Back in 2016, Bettman tabled expansion into Quebec due to a weak Canadian dollar. But with struggling teams in Arizona and Carolina, how much longer can the league ignore Quebec City?
Quebec has been without an NHL team since the Nordiques moved to Colorado to become the Avalanche back in 1995. How much longer will they have to wait for the NHL to return?
