Thanks for the bit of history!
Another thing explaining the differences may be the size of the country. There are only so many weekends to a season, so the number of teams in a league can't be higher than 30 (leaving out NCAA with its multiple conferences, and also endless discussion about the difficulty of ranking the teams that only play a tiny fraction of the other contenders). And this doesn't scale linearly with the size of the country. So in Europe large countries (England, Germany) have 20+ teams in the top tier leagues, smaller ones may be only 12 teams. In the US the number is close to 30. But still that is only one team per 10 million people or so. That is enough to support a pro team (after all, the money comes from the fans - one way or another). In comparison, Finland's population of 5 million cannot really support a pro hockey league of 14 teams, so the salaries pale in comparison to the NHL. Even Canada, ardent fans that they are, would struggle to support the high end salaries of 10+ NHL teams.
Of course, in the country the size of US logistics of the league become more of a problem than it would be in a country, where you can get anhywhere else by sitting, say, six hours on a bus. When geography forces the teams to go on tours lasting a couple of weeks, the players can't really hang on to regular jobs on the side, right?
Edit: Rats, I really just ended up stating the obvious. The point I was trying to get at was that the size of the country may lead to there being no pro team in your vicinity. I find that a downer. TV is an adequate substitute for many but not all.