I don’t know much about the traditional hockey market from personal experience. In fact I’ve only seen live hockey games in three arenas (and only two of which being NHL arenas).

I’ve been to a handful of games in my hometown of San Jose, California to watch the team I follow, the San Jose Sharks. Also I have made the eight-hour trek up to North Texas with my dad to see them play twice on the road in Dallas.

Most of the hockey games I watch in person however are tier-II junior games in the town I live. The capacity of this arena is 5,500, which is proportional for the community it serves.

The capacity for concerts expands to 6,800 and will usually sell out for country music stars like George Strait. As for hockey? I don’t think I’ve seen more than 1,000 people watching a game in this Mexico-Texas border town.

So when considering where I’m originally from, the team I root for and the local team I see most frequently I have not ever experienced a true hockey market.

One thing I can say is that for a majority of my life I have followed hockey closely and from a distance I have seen the passion of the sport in North America. North America is not strictly restricted to Canada, not by any means. In fact (sorry Canadians) no team from north of the border has hoisted the Stanley Cup since 1993. Which has allowed franchises out of locations like Tampa Bay, Anaheim, Dallas and Raleigh to reach the sport of hockey’s ultimate prize.

Even though there are pockets of American market success there are also some markets that are having obvious trouble creating fan interest, and drawing crowds on a nightly basis.

The team that has become a hot button topic and that has come under intense scrutiny since the beginning of this 2014-15 NHL season has been the Florida Panthers. They play outside of Fort Lauderdale, in the city of Sunrise, Florida. They are one of two professional hockey teams in Southern Florida. The major difference between them and their geographic rivals, the Tampa Bay Lightning are about 10,000 fans in the seats per night.

Through six games in the 2014-15 campaign the Panthers have averaged a dismal 8,916 fans.

The Panthers faced the Sharks Tuesday night and in keeping my tradition of watching as many Sharks regular season games as I possible, I tuned in. This was the crowd for the Tuesday night game, announced at 8,075. At the BB&T center this is only about 42 percent of the maximum capacity.

(via: @emptyseatpics)

A season ago in Sunrise this many empty seats was a common sight but somehow they did not finish the season in dead last in attendance ranking, instead they were in 29th. Last year the team’s average attendance per game was 14,177. Now we are starting to understand that these numbers were skewed because of large groups of tickets that were distributed as giveaway, but not as many butts were actually in the seats.

At the beginning of this season Panthers owner Doug Cifu told team beat writers that the club planned on eliminating mass ticket giveaways and large price discounts. He was aware of the effects that this would have on box score attendance numbers.

“We are 100 percent ready for the reality that we’ll have smaller attendance this season.” Cifu said.

The nosedive in Panthers attendance that Cifu predicted did come, and so has ridicule from hockey enthusiasts everywhere. The Panthers have been in the hockey news for all the wrong reasons since their home opener, a game that 11,439 fans watched.

The Panthers being bottom-dwellers in the Eastern Conference and the entire National Hockey League is nothing new. It has been 18 years since the Panthers 7-game Eastern Conference Final win, the last time the team won a playoff series. They played in a completely different arena then, and I was only 18 months old when they reached the 1996 Stanley Cup final.

An entire generation of hockey fans has never seen sustained success out of the Panthers organization. It is evident that a youth movement is taking place with the current team, with high draft picks moving quickly through the pipeline. Florida also made a trade deadline (re)-acquisition of elite level goaltender Roberto Luongo last season.

Despite the effort by the front office to pave the way to a Panthers return to respectability, the Miami area has shown at the box office that they really do not care if the team is on the rise or last place in the league.

Is it time to put Florida’s second team out of its misery?

Québec City, who lost their professional club the season before Florida’s Cup run have been without a team for nearly 20 years. While league commissioner Gary Bettman has spoke in recent months downplaying the prospect of NHL expansion it is hard to imagine a better destination for Eastern Conference relocation.

Even without guarantee that they will get the nod on expansion, or relocation the city of Québec in conjunction with Quebecor, a Montréal based telecommunications company have began work on an 18,000 seat arena. Executives of both the city and Quebecor understand the risk that they are taking in building a state-of-the-art arena without confirmation that a pro hockey team will play games there 40+ games a season.

The Québec City group also realizes that having an arena in place is a large step ahead of any other city in North America interested in landing a pro hockey team. In the Northwest, Seattle is advocating for a team but questions about venue have become a roadblock in their quest to join the league.

Québec City will have eliminated any question about where a relocated Panthers team would play when the Quebecor Arena is scheduled to opened in Sept. 2015, just in time for the 2015-16 NHL season.

The stars could be aligning for Québec to again have a team that will have fans from 20 years ago, as well as a new generation that is ready to challenge their geographic rivals from Montréal.

Fans in Québec and Sunrise/Miami alike will have reason to pay special interest in Bettman’s every word when it comes to relocation of the Panthers. The landscape of the NHL could have a very different look sooner than we anticipate.

Nathaniel Mata.