What the heck is the scale on the x-axis. I know there weren’t a lot of sales between ’54 and 94 but still one year should be one unit. If you scale to year what stands out other than the leap in number of transactions (expansion, I assume) is a leap in price in ’94. No wonder the owners love Bettman. The post-lockout effect is still there although it looks more like even noise

I’m a little leery of this graph. The purchase price needs to be controlled for the revenue, or even better, the revenue potential, of the specific team. Yes, there’s a dip right before the lockout, but look at the teams involved: Ottawa, Buffalo, Atlanta. That’s the smallest Canadian market, and two teams that are still being kicked around as possible disasters. Of course they’re selling for less than the trend line.

That big spike right before that dip is produced by the sales of the following teams: San Jose, Montreal, Florida, Phoenix, Colorado, and the Islanders. That’s two weak teams (Florida, Phoenix), one in the middle of a huge run of success (Colorado), one in an extremely wealthy and populous location (San Jose), a chronically underperforming team in the largest market in North America (Islanders), and the second largest guaranteed cash cow in the league (Montreal). Of course they’re selling for a lot more, because these are, on average, much more desirable teams to own.

On average, the teams bought since the lockout have been better, too. Plus, you have two really goofy situations in Nashville and Tampa. One was a league directed sale by an owner just switching teams, and the other a case of clueless people buying something with no regard to whether they really had the money to pay for it.

I’m not sure exactly how to perform the control here. It’d take some thought that I don’t have the energy for right now. As is, though, the graph doesn’t mean much.