There’s been a lot of NHL expansion chatter in the last week, most of it focused on two possible options: Houston and Atlanta. If you know commissioner Gary Bettman’s playbook, you also know what happens next in terms of an official response. The league will carefully shrug off the initial reports, citing no immediate plans to expand. It will also acknowledge that there’ve been expressions of interest and the underlying message that you’re supposed to grasp is, “There are always expressions of interest in a thriving business such as ours!”
If you rewind what happened when the NHL admitted first the Vegas Golden Knights (in 2017) and then the Seattle Kraken (in 2021), that’s exactly how the script played out.
Remember, past expansions were mostly ill-planned money grabs. It meant many teams got off to rocky starts. Some that had promising beginnings did so because of the novelty factor. By the time they needed to produce on the ice — and couldn’t because the terms imposed on the newcomers were so punishing — interest soon flagged.
By contrast, Vegas and Seattle became instant success stories, on and off the ice. Vegas paid $500 million to get in, which seemed like an eye-popping number at the time. The NHL upped the ante to $650 million for Seattle. It isn’t hard to imagine the next round of expansion will cost a team a cool $1 billion.
A few years back, I wrote a story imagining where the NHL would choose to operate if it could simply start a 32-team league from scratch. It created something of a fuss.
Today’s exercise is a little different: Part pie-in-the-sky, part sober realism. utah hockey club jersey jazzjersey
Where should the NHL go next? Let’s consider six scenarios, beginning with No. 1, which is probably indisputable.
For a long time, many of us believed Houston would eventually be the relocated destination of the Arizona Coyotes that – if truth be told – have been the longest-running soap opera in league history. Owner after owner – and including for a while, Bettman himself, because the league ran the team during one of the interminable bankruptcies – couldn’t make a go of it.
And yet, here are the Coyotes, still operating on a shoestring, aiming for some future when a new arena in Tempe receives approval, gets financing, sees shovels in the ground and ultimately arises from the ashes, like a Phoenix, to become a viable contributing NHL organization. That’s Bettman’s vision and hope. Feel free to wade in on the comment selection below, if you have a different perspective.
But before you do that, consider this: Bettman is, first and foremost, a businessman. Growth drives every business, not just professional sports. With franchise values skyrocketing across all the major leagues in North America, it’s hard to imagine the NHL turning down the dollars that one and maybe even two or three future expansions could provide. The other factor when Bettman talks about expansion is it helps to fill in the gaps of geography. That’s what’s meant by footprint.
Houston’s footprint is tantalizing. The fourth-largest city in the U.S. by population, after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. It would be a natural rival for Dallas. It has an underrated hockey history – both in the WHA and in minor pro. Rich Preston, who played on the WHA Aeros with the Howes, told me last summer that if you asked anyone who played professional hockey for any length of time, what their favorite stop was, it would be Houston. If the NHL ever abandoned the Coyotes, Houston would be the perfect fallback plan. That doesn’t seem likely to happen – at which point, Houston rockets to the top of the charts, for a 33rd team. The only real question is, who gets to be No. 34?utah jazz purple jersey 2024
So, a brief history lesson for anyone that is a relative newcomer to hockey. If Atlanta were awarded an expansion team, it would be its third chance at making it work. The original Atlanta team, the Flames, were part of the 1972 expansion alongside the New York Islanders. After eight mostly uninspired seasons, they were sold and eventually relocated to Calgary. That happened in 1980.
As part of the four-team expansion phased in between 1998 and 2000, Atlanta secured a new franchise, the Thrashers, along with Columbus, Minnesota and Nashville. Second time, lucky right? Well, no. The Thrashers lasted a little longer – 11 seasons (12 if you count 2004-05, which was completely lost to the lockout). The Thrashers floundered on the ice and at the box office and had ownership issues. At the same time as Bettman was putting his considerable corporate muscle behind retaining the team in Arizona, he let the Thrashers move to Winnipeg without much of a fight, where they became the second iteration of the Jets.
Is there any rational reason why Atlanta should get a third try at getting it right? The arguments in favor of giving Atlanta another chance center mainly on demographics. By population, it has over six million people in the greater metropolitan area, which ranks eighth overall in the U.S., according to census data from 2020. The corporate clout vital to supporting professional sports these days remains strong. Atlanta is the headquarters to the third largest collection of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S., tied with Chicago. That includes heavyweights such as Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot. The city is also a broadcasting heavyweight, and the headquarters of TNT, one of the NHL’s new broadcasting partners. The main strike against Atlanta is that it has a limited hockey tradition in a crowded sports marketplace, which were contributing factors in Atlanta’s failure to sustain the Flames and Thrashers the first two times around. Some of us have the quaint notion that hockey tradition and operating in an actual hockey market should count for something. Which leads us to…
The greater New York area has three teams – the Rangers, Islanders and Devils. The greater Los Angeles area has two teams. The greater Toronto area has one team. People like to derisively refer to Toronto as the center of the hockey universe, but a closer look at the market suggests it is precisely that. Similar to Atlanta, if you factor in the population of the area known as The Golden Horseshoe, which circles around the western edge of Lake Ontario, the population is roughly 7.7 million in its core, according to 2021 census results. If you expand the numbers to the wider swath of land, the Greater Golden Horseshoe, it bumps up to 9.7 million – roughly 20 percent of Canada’s population. The Maple Leafs represent a bullet-proof brand. They are the New York Yankees of the NHL.
But not everybody is a Leafs’ fan and in the same way that major league baseball’s New York Mets gave baseball fans a second option, the same would likely occur in Toronto. If the primary reason for going into Atlanta is the deep corporate base, well, Toronto has that as well – along with one of the richest hockey traditions in the world. If the ability to generate revenue is the deciding factor – and often with the NHL it is – then there’s no reasonable case to be made for picking Atlanta over a second team in Toronto.
In a two-year span in the mid-1990s, Canada lost two NHL teams – the Jets to Arizona in 1996, and the year before, the Nordiques to Colorado. Ownership issues, outmoded arenas and the wide gap between the Canadian and U.S. dollars were all contributing factors. At one point, the exodus south almost claimed the teams in Edmonton and Calgary as well. As noted above, Winnipeg eventually got a team back.
Maybe that’s the best hope for a return to Quebec City as well – that Atlanta receives a franchise, discovers it really isn’t a hockey town after all, and needs to find a home elsewhere. Because the NHL has zero interest in returning to Quebec City, even though there are some parallels to Winnipeg, which is making a nice go of it. The downsides are obvious. They are small markets on every level – population, corporate support. The good news is the people who live there really care about hockey. They are passionate fans. They fill the building.
But remember this: In June 2015, when the NHL formally announced that it was accepting bids for the next round of expansion, only two groups applied: Vegas and Quebec City. Quebec’s bid was backed by Quebecor, a Canadian media giant. The NHL eventually took Seattle’s money but turned Quebec down. At the time, Bettman cited two reasons – the volatility of the Canadian dollar and the geographic imbalance of placing another team in the East. Neither argument holds much water today. If the league is seriously thinking about adding a team in Atlanta, then Quebec City is in the same time zone. If the league were seriously worried about the declining Canadian dollar, then it would have to introduce a new currency assistance plan. None, to the best of my knowledge, is even remotely on the radar. That was mainly just a cover.
Quebec City would be the NHL’s equivalent to the Green Bay Packers – a charming David in a league of Goliaths. If the NHL can prop up the Coyotes for two decades and carry all the teams that have been pulling money out of revenue sharing for that length of time, then they can carry Quebec City as well. They just don’t want to.
Kansas City was part of the NHL’s 1974-75 expansion alongside the Washington Capitals, but the Scouts lasted only two seasons before relocating to Denver, where they operated as the Colorado Rockies until the 1981-82 season and then shifted again to their current home in New Jersey. Kansas City has a venue in place – the AEG-operated arena, T-Mobile Center. In the same way that Houston would be a natural rival to Dallas, a team in Kansas City would be a natural rival to St. Louis. If the NHL isn’t going to hold Atlanta’s failed past against it, I can’t see it holding K.C.’s failed past against it either. It doesn’t seem as if a bid from Kansas City would trump one from either Houston or Atlanta. Things could change over time, but they’d be a long shot today. And speaking of longshots…
Over Christmas, and because of the fascination with the NHL’s next sensation, Connor Bedard, the eyes of the hockey world were on Halifax – and if you paid any attention, you had to be impressed. The hockey atmosphere was vibrant. Halifax is home to – among others – luminaries such as Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon and Brad Marchand. One of the most successful junior franchises in Canada, the Halifax Mooseheads, operates out of a building, the Scotiabank Center which – unhappily – would not meet the NHL’s standard for seating. It seats about 11,000 for hockey. So a new building would be required and corporate backing would be an issue. If Quebec City is a long shot, Halifax is probably a pipe dream – and it would probably require an expansion up to 40 teams before it would ever get to the point where you might make a reasonable case for a team. By then, it’s likelier the NHL will consider expansion to Europe before they ever consider the Canadian Maritimes. Still, the idea that sometime in the far-off future, Crosby, MacKinnon, Marchand and others from the area invest in a team in Halifax is a delicious scenario to ponder.
(Top photo: Scott Cunningham / NHLI via Getty Images)
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