In the spirit of the commencement of the National Hockey League season, SFU Business professor Lindsay Meredith recently discussed the economics of the sport with Maclean’s magazine and the Vancouver Province.

According to the Province, one operation riding the coattails of the Vancouver Canucks hockey franchise is Vancouver’s city hall. SFU’s Meredith pointed out that “with the mania for hockey in Vancouver, you get city hotel business up, you get better sales in restaurants, pay parking — all of that stuff is spinoffs the city can get their hands on through property tax.”

Still, the city incurs costs with traffic-flow problems and policing, Meredith noted.

For example, a Vancouver police-board report estimates the minimum cost of policing a Stanley Cup final in Vancouver would be about $1 million, and crowd-control costs can be expected to rise in the “post-Olympic” downtown celebration era.

At the end of the day, Meredith says, the true cash kings in this game are the Canucks owners and Rogers (which owns Rogers Arena where the Canucks play).

According to the Province’s Sam Cooper, the Canucks’ total value is far below that of North American sporting giants like the New York Yankees or even the Toronto Maple Leafs. But Meredith maintained that “if the underachieving team can go deep in the playoffs and finally grasp Lord Stanley’s Cup, the franchise is well positioned to join the big boys, increasing its footprint across Canada and south into Washington state, with buckets of broadcasting cash rolling in.”

In fact, as the team packs home games to capacity year after year, “they can lose games and still dominate the local sports marketplace,” Meredith noted. But that could change, with the price of attending a Canuck game now far beyond the means of the average family of four, he said.

Meanwhile, Maclean’s magazine, in a recent feature on the National Hockey League’s experimentation with rules, discussed with Meredith the role of research and development in the hockey industry.

According to writer Colby Cash, “marketing experts praise the league’s attention to game R & D—though a few express the wish that even more energy was devoted to safety, as opposed to the attractiveness of the product. The unusual nature of some items tested at the camp reminded SFU Business professor Lindsay Meredith of the freewheeling “skunk works” divisions that tech companies create to investigate advanced projects.”

“Any major corporation should have some kind of skunk works—a bank, a university, whatever,” Meredith said. “An enterprise of that size and sophistication would be foolish not to.”

The Province and Maclean’s articles can be read in their entirety at:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/16/ice-capades/

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Scoring+huge+goal+economy/3546241/story.html