the problem with the nhl basically d-riding china while totally ignoring south korea is that the nhl genuinely believes that beijing is a good hockey market.
while china itself isn't a bad market, there's several places in china where hockey has much more presence than in beijing, and would have actually been decent fits to host a winter olympic games. (if you're going to say that beijing deserves more it for being a massive city, literally nobody knew what pyeongchang was until the 2018 olympics were announced and many people confused it with pyongyang which is in north korea. not to mention you should look at some other winter olympic hosts from the past.)
let's look at the china dragon of asia league ice hockey for example, and red star kunlun of the KHL.
red star kunlun played their games in beijing/shanghai and averaged an attendance of 2952 fans, although that number is significantly dragged down by their shanghai games. in beijing's games the average attendance, according to the iihf, was 5137.
now let's look at the china dragon. they're one of the worst teams in the asia league which is basically a home for AHL rejects at best. like many teams in the asia league, they play homestands in various locations around the country in which they're based. their first series was in a city called jilin, and the average attendance of the series was 4429. there were three games in that series, and had it not been for the significantly lower attendance at the second game (which still came VERY close to red star kunlun's overall average) the series would have beat out red star kunlun's beijing average in attendance.
a garbage team in a garbage league, playing three games in a city that almost nobody outside of china knows, nearly beat a team in the world's #2 league, based in a world-class major city, in average attendance numbers.
that's not even getting into the fact that the team finished the season with a six-game homestand in beijing. the highest attendance they got was in the first game of that homestand, and it was 417 people. once again, the only city that had worse attendance for this team than beijing was shanghai, where they never reached even 100 spectators, and only had 22 for one of the games. the team's games in qiqihar, another relatively unknown city, averaged approximately 1700 fans per game which is actually a drop of around 1000 from the 2015-16 season. |