While Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in China to strengthen the economic relationship with one of Canada’s chief trading partners, reps from the Maple Leafs will arrive in China on a similar mission.

This weekend, MLSE chief commercial officer Dave Hopkinson and Hu Bo, the executive in charge of the company’s Chinese partnerships, will appear on national broadcaster CCTV, being interviewed as part of a Leaf-centric campaign to grow hockey’s popularity in the world’s most populous country.

Chinese sport officials hope increasing hockey’s fan base will help China’s bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, but the biggest beneficiaries of the game’s growth in China might be the Maple Leafs, who are deeply invested in promoting the game there.

With CCTV in the second year of a three-season broadcast deal with the NHL, the Leafs are slated to appear on Chinese TV 13 times this season. In August, the club hosted youth hockey camps in Beijing, where 2,300 kids are registered to play.

And the club will also help CCTV produce a 10-part TV series educating new viewers on hockey’s nuances.

But as much as Leafs enjoy seeing hockey take hold in a new country, their motivation isn’t altruistic.

It’s monetary.

As sports leagues court overseas audiences, the Leafs have identified China as the market most able to boost brand equity and merchandise sales. So instead of waiting a league-wide Chinese marketing initiative the Leafs have launched their own, investing in the sport and figuring the payoff will come in fan engagement.

“It’s a very rapidly growing part of our business,” Hopkinson says. “Hockey is blowing up in the communities and on television . . . There’s a wonderful business climate that exists (between Canada and China), and being a Canadian franchise is an advantage for us.”

Three decades ago NBA commissioner David Stern travelled to China with playoff games on VHS cassettes, brokering a meeting with CCTV officials and using the recorded games to sell them on his league.

The NFL, meanwhile, has been playing games outside the U.S. since the late 1980s, and recently made moving a “home” game to London a pre-requisite to hosting the Super Bowl, according to Miami Herald columnist Armando Salguero.

The NHL doesn’t similarly coerce its clubs into hosting events in China, leaving the Leafs free to take the lead.

“It’s like the NBA was 30 years ago in China and we’re David Stern,” Hu says.

The goal, Hopkinson says, is to turn the Leafs into hockey’s version of Manchester United or the New York Yankees — a global force that becomes synonymous with the sport in every new market.

The difference, of course, is that Manchester United and the Yankees have won titles in the recent past, while the Leafs missed the playoffs last season and haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967.

Hopkinson insists the club’s focus on building corporate partnerships in China aren’t a signal that the Leafs prioritize marketing above winning.

“We’re not taking the hockey team over there. These are sales and marketing guys looking to find new revenue streams,” he says. “(They’re) looking at new markets in order to grow the business so that we can maintain the financial advantage we have in the NHL.”

A Toronto-based sports sponsorship consultant says the Leafs’ lacklustre on-ice results won’t stop lucrative partnerships from forming.

“I don’t think it has an effect,” says Brian Cooper, president of S&E Sponsorship group, a Toronto-based sports sponsorship consultancy. “This is more about getting (Chinese) sponsorship dollars back into this marketplace. When you get brands that have a huge base across the country, like the Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys or the Maple Leafs, there will be one or two companies willing to do that.”

Still, a market exists.

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For one game late last season, the rink board ads at the Air Canada Centre targeted CCTV viewers with messages written in Chinese.

Hopkinson says MLSE’s other big-league team, the Raptors, have more followers on the Chinese social media site Weibo than they have on Twitter. And even though China has only one full-time pro hockey team, NHL games appear on CCTV four times weekly. Those broadcasts often involve the Leafs and they average 800,000 viewers a night, even though the puck drops shortly after dawn Beijing time.

“The scale is hard for Canadians to get our heads around,” Hopkinson says. “The audiences are larger in China than that same game being aired in Canada. The scale is just tremendous . . . We really feel like trailblazers on this.”

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