A HOCKEY MARKET WAITING TO HAPPEN
Although football rules in Seattle, the city should easily support NHL’s 32nd franchise
It’s a Tuesday evening at the Angry Beaver and the place is packed with sports fans. Hockey fans, to be exact. There are half a dozen TVs hanging in the downtown Seattle sports bar, and each one is tuned to a different NHL game. Variety is a necessity. On this night, there is a fan wearing a Connor Hellebuyck jersey and another in a now-dated Niklas Hjalmarsson jersey, while the guy at the bar has a logo of the San Jose Sharks tattooed on his hand.
All fans are welcome, just as long as they’re hockey fans. But that’s about to change. When Tim Pipes opened the NHL-themed bar seven years ago, the Toronto native wasn’t thinking customers would one day come in and cheer for an NHL franchise out of Seattle. He just wanted to provide fans with an alternative to watching football.
“It wasn’t even on the radar,” Pipes said.
Now, with the NHL coming to Seattle as early as two years from now, he’s got some redecorating to do. The only piece of memorabilia hanging on the wall bearing the Seattle name is an old framed Metropolitans jersey. Rumour has it some 20-year-old kid from Seattle purchased the naming rights to the logo years back in hopes of cashing in if the NHL ever relocated to Seattle.
But before we start talking about potential team names and colours, expansion drafts or who the coach and general manager will be, the old Key Arena has to be gutted and reconstructed in time for the 2020-21 season.
And before any of that happens, the league has to ratify Seattle as the 32nd franchise at the NHL board of governors meeting in Georgia on Tuesday.
Of course, it’s considered more of a rubber stamp than referendum. The league’s executive committee already voted 9-0 in favour of approval in October. Spend a few days in the city and you will quickly see why.
This is a hockey market waiting to happen.
It might not be a sure thing like Quebec might have been, had the league been willing to forgo geographical balance and added another team to the Eastern Conference. But Seattle is hardly a gamble the way Las Vegas was considered to be a couple of years ago.
After all, it took only 12 minutes to sell 10,000 deposits during a season-ticket drive in March. Vegas needed a month to reach the same goal.
“I used to tell people what a great market this would be,” said John Barr, who founded the website NHLtoSeattle.com in 2008, “because I had come from the Bay Area before the Sharks were there. And this is 10 times the market. It’s busting at the seams.”
The night before, Barr had been playing shinny at a 3-on3 rink in the Seattle suburb of Renton. There were about a dozen players on the ice. Only one of them was born and raised in Seattle. The rest hailed from Whitby, Ont., Texas, North Dakota, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and the Czech Republic, a byproduct of Seattle having a large tech sector that has attracted out-of-towners.
“You’d have a hard time finding someone who didn’t at one time work for Google, Amazon or Microsoft,” said minor hockey coach Clayton Rogers, who moved to Seattle from Surrey, B.C., in 2001. “Until basketball comes back, there’s a shortage of winter sports. And there’s a lot of Canadians down here, too. There’s a lot more interest down here than people probably expect.”
Beyond the US$650-million expansion fee, Seattle is a chance for the NHL to add balance to the league by having a 16th team in the Western Conference. It’s also a chance to expand to a growing area — it’s the fastest growing city in America over the past decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — that, ever since the SuperSonics relocated in 2008, is in need of a winter sport.
“Seattle is an incredible market,” said Brian Robinson, a real estate investor on the mayor’s commission on civic arenas. “Our economy is booming. We’ve got Fortune 500 companies and an audience that has money to spend.”
Still, in the days leading up to the ticket drive, no one was really sure if people would spend that hard-earned money on hockey tickets.
“I was losing sleep the night before, because I don’t know 10,000 people and that was the target,” said Barr. “I literally took out Facebook advertising money to raise awareness. What if nobody shows up?”
Dave Tippett — who was hired by Tim Leiweke, the CEO of Seattle’s Oak View Group, as a senior hockey adviser — was just as concerned.
“The night before I had texted Tim and said, ‘Good luck.’ He
texted back, ‘I have a good feeling about this.’ We sold 33,000 season tickets in two days, and there’s probably another eight or 10,000 on the waiting list,” said Tippett. “It’s crazy. Everyone knows their number. Some guy came up to me and said I’m 7,204.”
Seattle, a border city, is about a two-hour drive from Vancouver. But although each city has a junior team in the Western Hockey League, the sporting landscape is quite different.
“This is the last place in the United States that’s turned on to hockey,” said Seattle Thunderbirds GM Russ Farwell. “When I came back here 22 years ago, there were three rinks. There’s only six rinks now.”
None of those rinks are located in downtown Seattle. The closest is about 40 kilometres away in the suburb of Renton. Driving out to Sno-King Arena, you cannot help but notice the blue banners hanging from houses and the side of buildings all bearing the number 12. It’s a reference to the “12th Man” jersey the Seattle Seahawks retired in 1984 in honour of their fans.
In other words, this is football country. And the love of that sport is followed not so closely by baseball, basketball and various NCAA sports. Hockey is considered a niche sport, slightly ahead of soccer.
“(Hockey in Seattle is) expensive,” said Doug Kirton, an Elmvale, Ont., native who runs hockey programs at Sno-King. “The base fees are around $1,000 to start. A travel peewee team would be $2,200. And that doesn’t include the travel.”
Creston, B.C. native Jamie Huscroft, a former NHL defenceman who runs the Sno-King Arena, said “Hockey is not our No. 1 sport here and it probably won’t be. When I came here 15 years ago, we were almost bankrupt. It’s a pipe dream to think you’re going to knock off football or baseball. If you see a playoff run like Vegas had, you’ll see some momentum. But you’ll still be nipping at the heels of the Seahawks and Mariners. You can’t compete.”
What Seattle can do is steal away some of the pie. And with Amazon, Microsoft, and several other tech companies in the area, there are plenty of people with disposable incomes looking to pay for a bite.
“The wealth in this city, the business opportunities of people who want to be a part of it has been incredible,” said Tippett. “Just getting to know the people here, there’s a lot of money.”
Tippett is sitting in a Starbucks a block away from where Key Arena is under construction. He’s also down the street from an area that has already undergone a dramatic change since the SuperSonics played here.
Amazon opened its new headquarters in January with a massive campus that features 33 buildings and takes an hour and a half to cover by foot. “Make sure to wear comfortable shoes,” advises a tour guide.
More than 40,000 people are employed by the Fortune 500 company, which boasts that total compensation for its employees is $25.7 million.
And with 15 per cent of the workforce reportedly living in the same zip code as the office, it’s becoming clear who will be attending NHL games. It’s not necessarily going to be the junior hockey fan who is used to paying junior hockey prices.
That is, not unless he has a friend who works for Amazon.
“I probably know more people outside of Seattle than who are actually from here,” said Barr. “It’s growing like crazy. Try to notice all the cranes. It’s making it unaffordable for a lot of people. There’s just a huge Amazon influence. Half my beer league team, that’s what they do.
“The old mayor always used to describe Seattle as San Jose on steroids.”