By Tony Edwards – San Jose, CA (Apr 21, 2015) US Soccer Players – In the middle of Sunday’s game against Ft Lauderdale, NASL team FC Edmonton sent out a tweet.

.@EdmontonOilers Who needs #MCDavid when you have #Nyassi. What a game he is having today. — FC Edmonton (@FCEdmontonNow) April 19, 2015

If you don’t follow hockey, this tweet means nothing to you. And if you don’t follow the NASL, your first thought might have been “I thought Nyassi played for San Jose.”

The backstory is that the Oilers again received the luck of the NHL draft lottery on Saturday. They get the first pick in the upcoming NHL draft. This draft contains two young players touted as “generational”. That includes consensus number one pick Connor McDavid, a Canadian who plays for the Ontario Hockey League’s Erie Otters. The second is American Jack Eichel, who is a freshman at Boston University. These prospects are considered to be so good that teams such as Buffalo, Arizona, and Toronto were widely considered to have tanked their seasons to be in position to draft them, which is another story.

The Nyassi referred to is Sainey Nyassi, who is the twin brother of the Earthquakes’ Sanna Nyassi. He would go onto win the NASL Player of the Week award for Week 3. The bigger picture for the NASL, however, is not a tweet jumping on a bandwagon, but Edmonton itself.

Sunday, FC Edmonton had their home opener, winning 3-2 over Ft Lauderdale, before an announced crowd of 2,350. Edmonton hasn’t lost at home now in nine games and in a bunched Spring season, this win pulls them to sixth place.

Before Sunday’s game in Edmonton, the NASL averaged a healthy 6,800 this past weekend, led by the Cosmos drawing more than 12,000 to Raul’s home debut. Edmonton’s announced attendance on Sunday brought that number down to 5,900.

Does it help knowing Edmonton’s stadium, Clarke Field, seats around 5,000 (up from 1,200, yes, 1,200). Or, that if you click ‘Fort McMurray’ on the franchise’s website, it takes you to drawings of a proposed stadium to replace their current home. Does it help finding out that the Edmonton Drillers and other professional soccer franchises in Edmonton have moved from 56,000 capacity home of the Edmonton Eskimos, Commonwealth Stadium (right next store) to Clarke. By the way, the Eskimos averaged just under 33,500 for the 2014 season. The gridiron team hasn’t averaged more than 40,000 since 2005.

Edmonton itself has a population of approaching 900,000 in the 2014 Census (1.1 million in the metropolitan area). That’s almost twice the size of Atlanta, as a city, but pales in metropolitan area population comparisons.

We can point out that Sacramento in the USL drew 11,242 or that Oklahoma City drew more than 6,700 to their game against the Sounders USL team. We can, but that’s cherry picking and doesn’t address the issue itself of what a franchise in Edmonton means for the NASL, other than travel for the rest of the teams in that league.

What about the travel? The driving distance between Ottawa and Edmonton is more than 2,000 miles. Its 1,100 miles between Minneapolis and Edmonton. Oh, but Minnesota is leaving the league in a few years and there’s no announced plans for a team in, say Winnipeg or Calgary.

With a new stadium and some success, it may be that Edmonton can become exactly what the NASL wants. A success story in a vibrant, multicultural city. The other way of looking at it is that the teams are using their travel budget to get from Ft Lauderdale to Edmonton to play in front of crowds of less than three thousand. That’s not the story the NASL wants to tell right now.

Tony Edwards is a soccer writer from the Bay Area.

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