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If the Carolina Hurricanes were throwing tarps over 1,500 seats in the upper bowl, if the Arizona Coyotes were trying to goose capacity figures by lowering capacity, if the Florida Panthers were tweaking ticket demand by reducing the supply, it is fair to say that we in the Canadian sports media would be raising a good stink about it.

I can say that because I would be one of the stink-raisers. We’d be having another good chuckle about the over-expansion of the National Hockey League in the southern U.S., and we’d be giving Gary Bettman a metaphorical boop on the snoot about the folly of keeping teams in failed markets and asking, again, why the league is adding a 31st franchise when it clearly has problems with some of the existing 30.

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But it is the Ottawa Senators that are removing 1,500 seats from the ticket pool, and so we don’t know quite what to think. Haven’t we been saying for years that the NHL’s Canadian markets are unassailable? Don’t we take as a given that the NHL should be in Quebec and it should put another team in the Toronto area and maybe somewhere in Saskatchewan while it’s at it? The whole idea is that hockey is our game and only we care deeply enough about it to support teams through lean years, outside U.S. cities that are either big or cold, or both.