Twelve days after Radim Vrbata was told he was unwanted back with the Lightning, he and his agent have found a new home back in Phoenix where he enjoyed a breakthrough 27-goal season under coach Wayne Gretzky in 2007-08.

Vrbata, who has a $3-million cap hit this coming season and next, was traded to the Coyotes today for enforcer Todd Fedoruk and defenceman David Hale, who will make a combined $1.76-million this season. The move gets the Lightning out from under Vrbata's salary somewhat this season and more so a year later, when Hale is an unrestricted free agent.

"We spent a lot of time putting this deal together after we got permission from Brian (Lawton) to speak with other teams," said Vrbata's agent Rich Evans. "Phoenix was our target and we're really excited Radim ended up going back.

"They're a younger team ... bringing Radim back, a veteran guy who's had success with their younger guys previously, especially when he was playing with Hanzal, it's just a good fit for everybody. He's looking forward to getting back there."

The Lightning appear to be approaching this as a bit of a 'something for nothing' deal.

"We are pleased to make a trade today that makes good sense for both teams," Lawton said in a statement. "Lightning fans will be pleased to see we have added some size and toughness up front with Todd, while David helps us continue to add depth to our blue line. At the same time, Radim moves back to Phoenix where he has experienced some success in the past."

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More photos » by Carlos Osorio - AP

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The best posts always start with a question or questions that I don't know the answer to, and this one began with a few doozies: How many players win the Stanley Cup anyway? Has that number changed, on a percentage basis, over time? And what are the chances that a player like Marian Hossa, 30 years old and in the prime of his career, gets shut out?

It took me a couple days to cobble this together, with some major assistance for the raw data from stats maestro Gabe Desjardins, but I've finally got an answer: Of the 6,400-some players to have played in the NHL in the league's 90-plus year history, 14 per cent won at least one Stanley Cup championship in their career.

It adds up to 917 players, with Mr. Hossa and a few others potentially joining the club later tonight.

Those are the big picture numbers, and they tell us only a little of the story. Part of the problem is that they include about 200 players who were born before World War I, in an era when close to 40 per cent of the players in the league would, at some point, win a Cup.

What I started with was a look at all NHL players by birth year, along with a figure indicating how many players born in that particular year won a championship at some point in their career. Breaking these birthdates down into five-year segments, beginning with players born between 1900 and 1904, here's a graphical representation of the percentage of players per segment that won a Cup in their career:

Keep in mind that these dates are based on birth years, meaning that if you're looking for landmark years, start with 1950, which would have been about the first generation of players to play exclusively in a post-Original Six league. Prior to that point, with only six teams, a ton of NHLers were able to at some point win a championship in large part due to just how small the league was.

As you can see, the percentage of players who won Cups in the era immediately after expansion did dip to a low point (1950-59 birthdates), but there's a big-time recovery in the early '60s generation that included the likes of Wayne Gretzky (1961), Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman (both 1965) and other similarly aged players who have all since left the league (except Chris Chelios).

Here's a close up, year-by-year breakdown of the percentages from 1950 onwards:

The first thing to note is that we can pretty much ignore players from 1979 onward, as they are all 30 or under and may still be able to win a Cup. It's very tough to project exactly where the 30-team generation of players will fall in at this point.

Going back on the chart to its peak, however, in 1964, we see that an incredible 23 per cent of players born in that year wound up winning a championship in their career — despite the fact the league ballooned from 12 to 21 teams between 1970 and 1979.

Why the Cup boom around '64?

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We've heard rumours and rumblings about paid versus announced attendance in the NHL forever – or at least as long as I can remember – but what we've rarely had is an unfiltered look at how many people are going through the turnstiles in some of the league's more troubled markets.

With the Coyotes and Jim Balsillie's latest court filing, related to the Canadian billionaire's request for relocation, the numbers are spelled out in black and white (with yellow highlights):

The key figures of note from this past season? For one, the announced gate figure is an incredible 3,923 higher than the number of people who actually went through the turnstiles for each game, a total pegged at just under 11,000.

The good news? A lot of those tickets that weren't used were at least paid for (this season anyway). Paid attendance figures are actually up significantly from where they were in the first season after the lockout, when the team apparently sold just 11,340 per game and yet announced attendance of 15,570.

The chart shows just how phantom announced figures can be, as there are massive differences between the tickets "distributed" and those "announced." Where those differences come from, however, I'm not quite sure, but there were reports last month that Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes was buying tickets in order to hit revenue sharing targets for much of the year.

The relocation filing, compiled by former CFL commissioner Tom Wright, essentially trumpets the benefits of an NHL team in the "Hamilton Area" and points out the shortcomings of having a hockey team in Phoenix, and there's some interesting polling data in there from each market. A lot of it's not all that surprising (the NFL is popular in Arizona!), but if there's interest (and it's not reported elsewhere), I may get into it next week prior to the relocation hearing June 9.

More photos » by Ross D. Franklin - AP

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As we're all well aware by now, the Phoenix Coyotes have been losing a ton of money for quite some time under owner Jerry Moyes. But what hasn't been widely reported is what sort of revenues the team needs in order to avoid dying in the desert.

Would concessions on the lease potentially alleviate the cash drain? And, given the current situation, is it possible to make the losses more respectable than the figures we've heard leak out the past few weeks?

Because, as it turns out, this is an expensive team to run.

There's an incredible mass of data coming out of the court filings since the Coyotes declared bankruptcy on May 5, and a few of the documents have gone into some detail when it comes to the team's revenues and expenditures. One set of figures I came across that are particularly interesting come from former team CEO Jeff Shumway's projected revenues for this past season (about $70-million) and the team's "potential" revenues (about $103-million).

Graphically, here's where the team's cash comes from in the actual budget figure:

As you can see, the team fits the NHL's mould of being a gate-driven franchise. Although perhaps not as much as it should be...

The Coyotes were projecting to receive about $14-million in revenue sharing this season, approximately 20 per cent of the team's income, and even with that would fall some $30-million short of covering their costs. Given figures I've heard from NHL executives (most notably former Columbus GM Doug MacLean, who is now a member of the media in Toronto and talking about this story a lot these days), revenues of $85- to $90-million should be sufficient to sustain an NHL team.

Phoenix, however, appears as though it would be losing cash even if it generated nearly $100-million a season, a figure that would likely make the team one of the top 10 to 12 revenue-generating teams in the league.

Here are the team's potential revenues, as laid out by Shumway (think of this as the 'dream' scenario):

The big gains here come in ticket revenues, which have nearly doubled, and sponsorships, which have jumped $12-million. To hit those ticket revenue figures, prices would have to increase significantly from the average $37 current average price, however. My rough math tells me that, even if the team sold an extra 3,000 seats a game at current rates, they'd be $12-million shy of the "potential" ticket revenue figure here, meaning tickets would have to cost roughly $15 to $17 more on average to hit that mark. 

Tough.

Even if we grant that this dream scenario would be possible had the team gone on a run and made the playoffs (postseason revenue was wisely not included in projections), the one major issue with the "potential" scenario is that the team is still receiving its $14-million in revenue sharing even while its other revenues neared $90-million.

And that's impossible.

Even if the Coyotes could generate that money, thereby potentially generating a profit (at around $100-million in revenue and somewhere in the mid-$90s in expenses), they would be cut off of revenue sharing entirely as a middle of the pack revenue-generating team.

Even the "dream" scenario, then, would see Phoenix max out just shy of $90-million in terms of regular-season revenues. Here's a breakdown of what that would look like (essentially the "potential" chart without the revenue sharing):

In conclusion? From the looks of these figures, it's all but impossible for Phoenix to turn a profit, even under ideal conditions. The team's expenses are too high and its potential for generating revenues too low barring a long playoff run and a massive price hike.

I'm not surprised Shumway declared the situation hopeless. Even if the team's expenses get more inline with some of the NHL's frugal franchises (let's say $85-million a season, the bulk of which is player costs), the franchise is only generating $70-million in revenue when you include $14-million in revenue sharing.

Minus those dollars and other league revenues, the Coyotes were only expected to make about $45-million this season – a far, far cry from a team like the Maple Leafs, which generates about $2-million for every home date on the schedule. Even teams more in the middle of the revenue-generating scale like Edmonton and Ottawa pull in more than $1-million per game during the season, which would easily bring them past the Coyotes.

It's ugly stuff, and I can't see how the NHL's going to find a way to take them out of the red.

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Gary Bettman has been relatively silent the past week or so, choosing instead to have his deputy in Bill Daly — and the NHL's lawyers — do much of the league's talking as the legal process begins in the desert. 

At the moment, we're all simply waiting for Tuesday and the first shoe to drop in the mess that is the team's bankruptcy case.

Back in February, before this whole fiasco with the Coyotes had blown right open and onto front pages across this country, the commissioner had a lengthy sitdown with Hockey Night in Canada's Jeff Marek to talk about, among other things, the future of the NHL in Phoenix. It was a candid discussion, and in hindsight, incredibly interesting given where things have gone since.

Bettman even brought up two relocations that have been talked about a lot lately by Canadians — Quebec and Winnipeg — and his thoughts on why those teams failed:

Marek: How do you know when a franchise has actualized? At what point does Gary Bettman say, you know what, we’ve hit critical mass here?

Bettman: Well the two times that come most vividly to mind are what happened in Quebec and in Winnipeg and I think we’re better at dealing with these problems now than we were at the time. But at the time, you had two franchises playing in somewhat smaller markets in older buildings, there was no prospect of a new arena coming in either place, the owners then of the franchises said "we don’t want to own this team any more." They couldn’t find anybody else to invest in the team or buy it — which may be the critical mass point — and therefore there was no future for the team there because nobody wanted to own the team there.

The fact is, the biggest litmus test ultimately was nobody wanted to own a team there. And when the marketplace decides that it doesn’t want to own a team there, it has no future.

The biggest litmus test hasn't changed, 14 years later, and more than the quality of the fans (or the market) and the location of the arena, the most pertinent factor when it comes to the Coyotes surviving in Phoenix is if the league can find someone to cover the team's losses.

On that front, it appears we're down to one potential saviour.

Given all of the attention and all of the leaks to this point, I'd be very surprised if there are legitimate bids for the team other than the much-talked about Jerry Reinsdorf offer. Yesterday, the Toronto Star reported that bid to be approximately $130-million — about $80-million shy of Jim Balsillie's — and that it would be conditional on the City of Glendale providing concessions "worth an estimated $15-20 million per season."

There are also reports that Reinsdorf will have an out clause after one or two years of serving as a caretaker for the team – a walkaway that would likely come if the losses continued to mount.

As has been widely reported, Balsillie's ownership comes with its own big condition in the form of a move to Hamilton, meaning, in effect, neither of the two bidders to date have any interest in footing the bills Jerry Moyes has been stuck with the past four-plus years.

And it's no wonder given the current economic climes.

There are two options left for the league: (a) make the team more palatable to own by renegotiating the lease and then find a buyer, or (b) relocate.

People can dump on the fan base in Phoenix or point to the team's lack of on-ice success all they want, but those two outcomes are the bottom line – and they're not particularly pretty for most of the parties involved.

Glendale will get squeezed either way. Coyotes fans will either lose their team or attempt to keep the faith under Reinsdorf with few assurances the team is staying put long-term. And the NHL is set to take a major hit in the PR department should this sorry saga end up with the team finding a home in Kansas City — or some other locale — after a lame-duck season under league ownership. Moyes, well, he's already lost his shirt (and pants) on this team, and Balsillie won't get a sniff of owning a team under Bettman's watch should these shenanigans fall short.

The Coyotes desperately need a white knight, and I just can't see where they're about to find one. Not in this economy, not in a market hammered by the recession and not with that franchise's track record.

Without a new owner signing on for the long haul, it's only a matter of time before the team formerly known as the Winnipeg Jets finds its third home. In Gary Bettman's own words, "it has no future."

Only places to go.

Apologies for the brief hiatus in the series. Blame junior hockey.

Nashville's been written off as a hockey market by an awful lot of people, but one of the things I wanted to get a handle on first hand when I visited Tennessee a few weeks ago was just what exactly are the major challenges to the NHL's survival there.

Here's what I came up with:

1. A relatively small market

One thing that's rarely mentioned when Nashville's discussed as a hockey market is just how small its population is (about 620,000 in the actual city and 1.5 million in the metro area). The Preds have far fewer potential fans than massive warm-weather cities like Atlanta and Phoenix and have drawn remarkably well given Nashville is the third smallest U.S. city with an NHL team. 

They're the Buffalo of the South.

2. Making inroads in football culture

I'd expected that the Thursday night game against Phoenix would be a good example of low attendance in Nashville, but they filled the Sommet Center pretty well even for that one — mainly because it was late February. The real lows in attendance for the team come in the first half of the season, when the Tennessee Titans are playing in a massive stadium a stone's throw away across the Cumberland River and drawing the majority of the corporate support.

There's no question that, if the Predators were the only major professional team in the market, they'd be far better off. As it is, they compete with football in the NFL, NCAA and even local high schools.

3. Keeping ownership local

Even with David Freeman and company at the helm right now, ownership concerns lead the way in terms of challenges in the market. Nashville doesn't really appear to have a huge corporate community to draw from or any local billionaires looking to buy into a hockey team that's potentially going to, at best, break even and at worst lose money more often than not.

If Freeman ever decides to sell, it's likely outside investors would have to step in, and that's always a dicey situation in terms of solidifying a team in a market I'm not sure the NHL's hell bent on staying in.

4. Low ticket prices

For a Saturday night game against the Red Wings, a contest billed as one of the most in-demand games of the season, we were able to buy great tickets in the lower bowl for $67 apiece a few days before the game on Ticketmaster. For the Phoenix game, tickets were widely available in the upper deck for about $20.

At that rate, it's probably going to be impossible for Nashville to generate $80- or $90-million a season, which is the kind of revenue the top 15 to 20 teams in the NHL pull in. Barring a deep, deep playoff run, I can't see the Preds ever being anything more than one of the lowest 10 revenue-generating teams in the league and that's with a very favourable agreement with the city.

5. The need for full revenue sharing

That last point is exactly why revenue sharing is so vital to the team. There is a fan base in Nashville, it is growing, and there's potential for Tennessee to become much more of a hockey market 15 or 20 years down the line if the league's bigger markets can continue to bail them out. It'll be tough sledding for this team even with that extra $10- to 12-million, but looking at the numbers, they frankly don't have a chance otherwise. Minus revenue sharing, Nashville would not have out earned a single other team last season according to Forbes figures.

Now, almost every market in every sport faces some challenges. The Predators have more than most, even in the NHL, but are they too much to overcome? Does professional hockey belong in Nashville and will it survive there long term?

Stay tuned for Part 4.

It's really not that far out of line to say the Predators have had issues with attendance since the beginning. 

In fact, you might even say they've had them since before the beginning even took place. 

What is now known as the Sommet Center was originally built in 1996, well before the city had a major league tenant to move in. And by that point, the relationship between Nashville, Tennessee, and the NHL was already in full bloom. 

A year earlier, you see, the New Jersey Devils, recent Stanley Cup champs, played a little bit of relocation poker with the fine folks of Nashville, and took a long, hard look at selling to a group that would take advantage of the city's offer of millions up front and low, low annual rent for any team that would fill what was then called Nashville Arena. 

That move, obviously, never ended up happening. But the city's hard sell intrigued the NHL enough that, when it came time to look at expansion in 1997, Nashville was front and centre among the eleven bids and nine cities in play — groups that were looking to bring teams to Hamilton, Houston, St. Paul, Atlanta, Columbus, Raleigh, Hampton Roads (!) and Oklahoma City. 

Many had larger populations or a richer history of supporting hockey than Music City, USA, but Nashville had two things in its back pocket that no other bid could match: 

(a) A brand new NHL-calibre building ready for a tenant, and 
(b) A city prepared to pay more than $20-million of the $80-million expansion fee

As Kramer would say, giddy up. 

So, 12 years ago, the NHL granted franchises to Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville and Minnesota, creating what we now know as the 30-team NHL. And not only were the Predators part of the party, they were the first ones in the pool, beginning play a year later in order for owner Craig Leipold to get a jump on the NFL's Tennessee Titans (who were coming to town a year later in 1999).

One of the stipulations with getting an NHL franchise was the fact that teams had to sell 12,000 season's tickets by late March of their first season, and that was a deadline the Predators very nearly missed. There were even rumours the team would relocate to Houston before their inaugural season got started. 

Ultimately, they crawled over the line during a fan rally on March 28, 1998, to finish with 12,139 season's ticket holders in Year 1.

A few years later, that number had fallen to about 6,000.

So that's the history. Here's what's happened since, a quick snapshot of the Predators' average announced attendance throughout their 10-season history: 

Now, some of that's due to team performance, definitely. The Predators didn't make the postseason until 2003-04, and this is a franchise that has never won a playoff round in its existence. Nashville was the third-best team in the NHL in 2006-07 and obviously had some momentum at the gate there, but then Leipold decided to sell, gut the roster and as a result sink a lot of the fandom being developed in what was still a fragile market. 

But there's also a bigger trend to attendance in Nashville, one that I pretty much had to go to town and talk to those there to pick up on. And it's really quite dramatic if you crunch the numbers. 

First up, here's the team's game-by-game attendance so far this season: 

Lots of peaks and valleys. But if you distill the trend a little bit, and break Nashville's attendance down into a month-by-month basis over the past few years, you can see when they're selling their tickets (and when they're not): 

From March on, the Predators pretty well sell out their building. One thing that doesn't get a whole lot of publicity is just how small the Sommet Center is for hockey with just 17,113 seats, and the one game I was at against the Coyotes, with 15,000 fans, felt pretty nearly full. 

An average attendance of 16,000 fans would rank just 23rd in the NHL, but in Nashville, it means the building is about 94 per cent full. 

Leipold wanted to start a year before the Titans got to town for a reason. Football is king in Tennessee, and it's really not until the NFL season ends in January that ticket sales for the hockey team pick up. That's the reality they live with, and that's the fight Predators ownership is going to have every single season of its existence. 

It's a minnow up against a behemoth, a team in a non-traditional sport that earns four times less revenue per season and plays in a largely overlapping season. And that's not even taking into consideration the NCAA and high school seasons that draw all kinds of fan support.

It's quite a mountain to climb. 

Despite what you've heard, this is not just a two parter, and I'll have more this week on the Predators. If you missed it, Part 1 is here. 

That's the main drag in downtown Nashville, Fourth and Broadway, home to countless country bars, cowboy hat stores and, up there on the left with a giant antenna stretching into the sky, the home of the Predators. 

It's a hockey locale unlike any other, and a pretty surreal experience for someone who grew up typically Canadian, playing shinny on the pond and watching junior hockey at the local rink.

Me, I loved it. And I can see why so many NHLers enjoy playing in Nashville.

For one thing, Music City, USA, didn't strike me as all that different from a lot of small Canadian towns — including the one I grew up in. There's great BBQ, friendly people, lots of Nickelback and all the cowboy paraphernalia you could want. The Predators' players and staff also have the advantage of being able to pretty much come and go as they please, showing up in local haunts after games — although they're far from anonymous.  There are plenty of superfans who recognize the players, but they're treated for the most part as minor celebs in a town used to having famous acts come through.

The fans themselves, for the two games I saw, were terrific. Unique, sure, especially given all of their various chants (I've never seen a fan base get so excited when their team goes on the power play, for example, or thank the PA announcer for telling them there was one minute remaining in the period), but a lot of fun. Preds fans have built up their own traditions separate from those you see in arenas in Canada and the Northeastern U.S., and even have a band nestled above the zamboni entrance that plays during intermissions. They're also proud of the fact that the Preds were the first NHL team to employ cheerleaders.

This is football country, after all.

In a lot of ways, it's been a very difficult couple of seasons for the franchise, but I never got the sense of mass discontent that was out in full force in Columbus last season when I was in Ohio. Preds fans almost universally said they'd be happy just to make the playoffs this season for the fifth time in a row, something that looked incredibly unlikely a few weeks ago before the team's recent run up the standings. (Including two wins during my visit, Nashville's gone 12-5-1.)

Two years ago, the Predators were one of the top teams in hockey, challenging the Red Wings for the Central Division title and boasting some of the top young talent in the NHL. It was then, though, with attendance proving a major issue, that former owner Craig Leipold opted to sell, a decision followed by an edict to GM David Poile to drastically slash payroll and gut the team. After Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie made a well-publicized bid for the team and a few months of "save our team" type rallies, Nashville ended up with a hodgepodge of local businessmen paired with the NHL-endorsed Boots Del Biaggio, whose financial house of cards came down not long after he got his grubby hands on 27 per cent of the team for a bargain-basement price.

Then, in a development that I think set the Preds back more than anything in the past year, Alexander Radulov opted to break his contract this fall and play in the KHL, depriving Nashville of its top up-and-coming scorer and a player on the verge of breaking out (while playing on an entry level deal, no less).

All that'd be tough for any fan base to absorb, never mind one still in its infancy.

A lot of the fans I talked to had never been to a hockey game prior to the Preds coming to town in 1998, and many said they were simply curious to see their city's first major pro team in the beginning.

They've come a long way since that point — so much so that I'd argue the general level of fan knowledge at the Sommet Center during my time there was perfectly normal. (That said, during the Saturday game against the Red Wings, there was a USA Hockey official handing out Hockey 101 pamphlets with basic hockey terms and rules. I didn't get the sense the cheat sheets were needed by most, but they were there.)

Our host for the game against the Coyotes was Mark (who has started blogging recently at The View From 111), a 50-something professional who has four season's tickets right behind one of the nets. He's been a Preds season ticket holder for seven seasons now, but said that he was hooked on hockey much earlier than that, having gone to Nashville Dixie Flyers games back in the late '60s when the old EHL was still in town. Professional hockey doesn't have much in the way of roots in the city, but the Dixie Flyers' 10-year stint came with a couple interesting characters, including former coach John McLellan, who moved onto coach the Maple Leafs before dying tragically at age 51 in 1979.

Mark is about as big a hockey fan as you'll find in Nashville, and he's a local (as opposed to all of the Michigan transplants — like well-known blogger Dirk Hoag — who root for the team). Mark knows absolutely everything about the Preds, goes to every game and even travels with the team sometimes with a small group of Pred-heads. They've made two Canadian road trips to this point — one to the East and one to the West — and know everyone from broadcaster Terry Crisp (who Mark introduced me and my pal Alasdair to prior to the game) to the coaches and even director of hockey ops Mike Santos.

When you're that big of a superfan in Nashville, you know the waterboy on up. And Mark was a great guide for a writer looking to get a handle on the local hockey culture.

The people that follow the hockey team that closely obviously aren't that numerous, but their ranks are growing. Nashville's still definitely a football town during the NFL and NCAA seasons, but we bumped into Predators fans everywhere, including one waitress at a local brewery who brought out her extensive portfolio of iPhone pictures of opposition players in the penalty box (all of whom she heckled mercilessly).

People like Mark are far, far from what we're often told is the stereotypical hockey fan in Nashville. He's definitely not a "hick," he knows and loves the game, and would be absolutely devastated if the team ever left. And, for the most part, that categorizes a lot of the team's admittedly undersized fanbase.

That's not to say there aren't some gaps in their hockey knowledge. At one point, when I was told assistant coach Brent Peterson was on his way to join us after a 4-1 win over the Coyotes, I misheard his name and wondered aloud if he was the player the Canucks acquired for Cam Neely in a trade that's still bemoaned in Vancouver. (Silly me, that's Barry Pederson.) No one knew about the trade — or even who Neely was — and when Peterson arrived, there was a bit of an embarrassing moment when they immediately brought up the deal.

"Well I didn't make the trade!" Peterson quipped.

Whoops.

As for the Predators' impact in the area, Mark pointed out that there are now an incredible 1,800 minor hockey players in the city, a group that was all but nonexistent a decade ago. The team and the NHL have made efforts to grow the game in the area, including starting a G.O.A.L. program (Get Out And Learn!) that offers "youngsters the opportunity to experience the excitement of hockey without the cost of purchasing equipment." Kids aged four to nine with no prior skating experience are given a free four-week program in March and April designed to help develop youth hockey in the area. (One of the major challenges is the fact there are only the two rinks, both of which locals said are always at capacity.)

Mark argued during the game that what Nashville really needs is time for the current generation of young fans, the ones that grew up with the NHL as a part of the community, to become hockey players and, eventually, season's ticket holders. Seeing the level of support firsthand, I don't think there's any question that, over time, that will happen, and we'll start to see prospects from Tennessee drafted into the league and fans' appreciation of the game continue to grow.

I do wonder, however, if the NHL's well moneyed teams see such a long-term strategy as something worth working toward.

I'll have more on hockey in Nashville over the next few days, including a look at the issues and challenges facing the NHL there. I'm also open to taking questions via email about my trip, so fire away.

>> All photos: Alasdair McKie