If Ever There Is an NHL Again, Where Should It Expand?

If ever there is an NHL again, where would you like to see it expand? If you were in charge, where would you put an expansion franchise? That was the whole of the post: one question, put to the readers in the middle of a lockout.

The timing explains the phrasing

The entry went up on 15 November 2012, with the season already cancelled in chunks and no agreement in sight. Hence the if ever there is an NHL again, which was less a rhetorical flourish than a fairly bleak description of the moment.

Why hand the question to readers

For months the project had been making this argument on its own, week after week, moving franchises around a map and defending each decision in the comments. A poll reversed the direction: instead of the author proposing a city and readers objecting, readers got to propose and the results did the arguing.

The comments thread kept a running note of the write-in candidates arriving through the other option, with Des Moines eventually joining the list. That is the kind of detail a poll produces and a map cannot.

What the vote ended up saying

The result fed directly back into the scenarios. When week 50 built a 32-team league around Seattle and Quebec City, the author noted that the idea was reinforced by the poll then running, which showed those two cities with the highest support for NHL expansion.

He was also careful about what the number meant, describing the vote as not scientific and himself as no Nate Silver. A blog poll is a straw poll, and it was treated as one.

Why it still reads well

The question has aged better than the answer. Expansion did eventually arrive, the arguments about which cities deserve a team have not gone away, and the case for asking readers instead of telling them remains sound. Four comments, one question, no article: this is the shortest kind of post the archive holds, and one of the most useful.