Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

Yesterday it was revealed that an application of site plans for an NHL-quality arena in Markham, Ontario, will likely be submitted today and could lead to permits to begin building by the fall.

This news was reported on Twitter by The Hockey News editor in chief Jason Kay, and soon followed with more beefed-up details from TSN: In short, GTA Sports and Entertainment, the company submitting the plans, is going to spend $325 million to build a rink in the greater Toronto area (thus, GTA; Markham is about 19 miles from the Air Canada Centre) for reasons that are not, currently, entirely clear.

The TSN report says the hope is that the rink could be completed in time to host the World Junior Championships in 2015, but if you're either GTASE or the city of Markham - which is footing half the arena bill for some bizarre reason - you don't spend $162.5 million to host World Juniors once, and then a handful of other events.

Clearly, the hope is that this leads to an NHL team. And it very well should.

Not that there aren't more than a few suitable sites that already exist or might soon — among others, Kansas City's still-vacant 17,000-seat Sprint Center falls into the former group, and plans in Seattle and Quebec City fall into the latter. But of all the prospective ideas for either expansion or relocation, either of which one assumes the league is loath to undertake, one just a short drive from downtown Toronto has and always will make the most sense for all involved.

Oh, the Maple Leafs, which earn more revenues than any other team in the NHL by a good 20 percent, would like it about as much as they'd like to continue this run of futility, and certainly that gives them a certain amount of heft to throw around. The same could likely be said of the Buffalo Sabres, though to a far lesser extent.

But with so many teams very visibly struggling to draw crowds and generate revenues across the league — the Coyotes, Devils, and Islanders, for instance — relocation, though unappetizing, seems on the horizon in at least one case. The Islanders could very well move to Brooklyn, and who knows what happens with Phoenix or New Jersey, whose ownership situations seem unstable to put it mildly.

The question with regard to a team in Markham is: Would people show up? And the answer is yes. Particularly if a team like Phoenix, which is well-managed and well-coached, moved there instead of being an expansion franchise. This team would rake in money in ways that Winnipeg could only dream of, if only because of the population base.

Of course, this is all quite a ways off. If the plan is for the rink to be open by 2015, which is the same projected opening date for the potential Quebec arena, that means at least three more seasons of a team not moving there, and the situation across the league is, shall we say, more than a little liquid right now. We don't know what's going on with the Devils at all, except to say things are looking a little grim. Jeff Vanderbeek owes his lenders a lot of money and doesn't have nearly enough to meet obligations with less than a week remaining. Meanwhile, in the desert, we haven't heard a word out of Greg Jamison or the league about how they're trying to bridge their own $20 million gap between the funds to buy the team and the league's $170 million asking price.

All of this makes the league look awful. It's stuck around in a no-win situation in Phoenix forever, and New Jersey could be a real disaster in the making if the report about Vanderbeek not being able to meet his debt payment obligations is true.

Not that the league is doing badly or anything overall (see: everything written by non-ownership shills about the impending potential work stoppage) but if we're really that concerned about slumping revenues from teams with terrible ownership or arena situations, then boy oh boy, doesn't a Toronto-area rink just solve every conceivable problem immediately?

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