32 might not be limit for NHL
Assuming Seattle is in, additional teams aren’t out of the question
The NHL will soon have 32 teams if Seattle is approved as expected next week. An even balance between conferences. A cross-border rival for the Canucks in the Pacific Northwest.
Surely the league is done growing for a while?
Maybe not. Two and a half years after voting to add a team in Las Vegas — a rousing success — the NHL has plenty of options for what’s next. No North American professional sports league has stretched past 32 teams, but no one is ruling it out for the NHL to get there on this continent or beyond.
“The leagues adapt, they look around and they make judgments,” NHL Players’ Association executive director Don Fehr said. “Are there markets we would like to go into? Can they support the teams at the revenue levels that we need? If we expand too much too fast, do we dilute the talent such that the product suffers? And those are all judgment calls in the end. Some leagues and owners are more cautious than others. But sooner or later, I would like to believe that in the kind of economy we have, all potential avenues will be explored.”
Considering the success of the expansion Golden Knights, Seattle has seemed a no-brainer from the beginning, and no one expects anything but approval from the NHL Board of Governors on Tuesday. A Seattle team would begin play in either 2020 or 2021.
“Hockey needs to be and wants to be in those really fast-paced cities that are growing and setting the mark,” Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan said. “If we do well here, it’ll raise all the boats for all the teams.”
Las Vegas already raised the bar for Seattle, which will pay an expansion fee of $650 million — a 30 percent increase over the $500 million that cleared the way for the Golden Knights to begin play last season and far beyond the $45 million the Sharks paid to enter the league in 1991 to begin a new era of expansion.
As soon as the NHL went to 31 teams, getting to 32 was inevitable. As balanced as it might seem, it’s not the end.
“Not sure there is any magic about 32,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said. “Expansion is appropriate when a convincing case can be made that it will be beneficial and add value to the league as a whole.”
While Daly was reluctant to address what might be next with the Seattle vote pending, Houston, Quebec City and Toronto have all been touted as possible new homes for an NHL team. Communications company Quebecor applied for an expansion team for Quebec City at the same time as Las Vegas. Billionaire businessman and new Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta has already met with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.
“Houston’s a big city,” Fehr said. “It’s got a long history with professional sports in North America. You would like to think that sooner or later, the NHL will have a team there. When and under what circumstances, I’m not going to try and predict.”