Not true. When we move up to middle school, we upgrade our birthday parties from the roller rink to the ice rink. Incidentally, you look up the bottom of NHL attendance the last few years, and the teams you see over and over again are Winnepeg, NY Rangers, Phoenix, Columbus, Colorado, Anaheim, and NJ. They shuffle around, but a safe bet your bottom 5 is coming from that list.
A) It's the Islanders that have terrible attendance. It remains to be seen, however, if Brooklyn will be a better move for them (I think it will, but for the Isles, anything is better than being stuck out on Long Island with a local population that doesn't really appear to want you there; they turned down a new arena that was going to be practically self-financed out of the owner's bank account).
B) Winnipeg's low attendance is misleading, because it's also "full attendance". That is, they're not struggling to sell tickets.
I would imagine this has absolutely no ties to UConn athletics. If NHL came back to CT, which it should, a new stadium would probably be built in Southern/Southwestern CT not Hartford or Eastern CT.
From New Haven to Greenwich is the most concentrated population of CT. There is also shoreline east and Metro North that would enable more potential fans to attend games.You can also get some NYC people who could potential travel to games via train which would also make Rangers and Islanders games more easily accessible to to those visiting fans.
A fourth team in the NYC metro (including the Devils in Newark) would be literally the definition of an oversaturated market, considering the attendance and revenue struggles of the teams in the area not nicknamed "Rangers".
Nobody would come out of the city to come see the Probably-Not-The-Whalers-But-Maybe-Yes-The-Whalers, especially not to go to Stamford or New Haven. The Islanders can barely get people to go out of the city to see them, and they're *NAMED NEW YORK*.
Not to mention, as others have above, the Rangers would never let that happen.
If NHL truly wants to survive without problems they need to get rid of the southern teams, for the most part, and relocate those teams to Canada, Great Lakes and Northeast. Those are the areas that care about hockey. In Canada some junior league games average more fans than NHL teams. Not enough of the population in the south can connect with hockey because most have never even seen ice rinks in their lives.
Well, on the junior league thing: no, not really. Quebec has great attendance, cracking 10K on average, but that's still a few K below even the worst attended NHL teams. A few other teams hover in the 8-9K range, but for the most part we're looking at attendance not much higher than, say, the Whale.
I do feel like the NHL wants to "pull back" from the Southern teams a bit, and I think there's a lot of great markets that have been underserved. Problem is, at least two of them (Milwaukee and Seattle) are far too close to existing NHL franchises (Chicago and Vancouver). Still, I think within the next ten years, we'll see a team move to Quebec, and someone in Kansas City or Portland.
