The rich teams already have those advantages as you mentioned. It's also an ownership situation. The Panthers aren't a rich team by any means, yet their owner is willing to spend money when necessary.
I do also think the NHL's strategy of going into non-hockey markets and trying to grow the game of hockey is a crap shoot.
If you want to test out a potential market, get an AHL team there first and work with USA Hockey to get a junior program going, but don't just drop one of your franchises with the hopes that you can grow the game.
Oh, it's 100% ownership. Tampa is a very strong hockey business NOW because their owner built it into a strong one when before him, it wasn't strong at all. Florida is getting that going now, too.
And don't get me started on the whole "put an AHL team there first!" How the minor league system works (in both hockey and baseball) has been something that has annoyed me since the mid-80s (when I read a book by Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog).
-- It's even worse in baseball, where the lower levels should be like "baseball college" with dorms, classes on baseball, English, Spanish, mental health, diet & nutrition, personal finance, social and media training, personal branding, and just how to avoid screwing up your life.
It's absolutely insane that teams don't invest like $10m a year in THAT, when not doing it leads to $75m mistakes -- like signing Pablo Sandoval and getting nothing out of him because he pretty much had an eating disorder which the "baseball college" could have dealt with. We'll just turn a 19-year old kid loose on road trips and then lose our franchise pitcher to drugs and alcohol! But I digress --
Every single level of the minors should be owned and operated by the NHL & MLB. If the NHL was going to have 64 teams, where would they be? The second 32 is the AHL. Find people to RUN the business side of the AHL teams in a community-first way with funding from the league so that you are creating hockey fans in those markets so dropping an NHL team there becomes EASY. And an NHL expansion team is looking to hire... the people in the city who've been bringing fans in the whole time!
It's just that these "non-systems" grew from "I don't have to pay for that, someone else will just do it for me." But the lack of control makes it just a clusterfudge instead of coordinated corporate synergy.