The recent news that the Seattle ownership group has filed an application with the NHL for an official expansion bid and included a $10 million deposit has been at the top of the news surrounding hockey in the past week.
The group can now begin a season ticket sales drive (begins March 1st) in a similar process to how the NHL proceeded with the Las Vegas expansion bid a couple of years ago. The ticket sales results will then be submitted to the league office so they can more adequately gauge the level of interest in the sport in the Seattle market.
The major sports media outlets as well as the local Seattle media are all essentially positioning the Seattle NHL expansion bid as a “done deal”. In my research I found one article that acknowledges that the process has some hurdles that should potentially temper the expectations for a future hockey team in Seattle.
Conversely, the fact that the NHL has coveted the Seattle market is among the worst kept secrets in the sports business news for a couple of years now. The league would benefit greatly from the geographic location, TV market/media market size, the natural regional rivalry with the Vancouver Canucks, and the noted passion of the fans of that city for their sports teams.
In fact, there are some within the sports media and sports business experts that maintain that Seattle would have been awarded an expansion franchise with Las Vegas in that last expansion cycle. Seattle did not submit a bid because they did not have an agreement on an adequate arena that was up to NHL standards.
The lack of a modern sports arena has derailed the progress of Seattle gaining an NHL or NBA franchise to replace the departed and beloved Supersonics for several years. The arena issue was the reason why the NBA bolted the city about ten years ago and it has taken all of that time to get a comprehensive plan put into action.
My earlier piece on the Seattle arena renovation of the Key Arena at Seattle Center provides the context of the details of the deal that will provide the city with a state of the art arena by 2020 or 2021. That is the earliest we can expect a hockey team to start playing in the Emerald City.
The potential approval of Seattle’s bid fixes the West-East conference imbalance the NHL has been dealing with for several years. The league would have sixteen teams in each conference, and the scheduling would be much smoother, and travel would be improved for the players as well.
The successful bid for Seattle does present some questions regarding the other cities that have been in the mix for an expansion team such as Portland, Houston, and Quebec City. Those cities are now potentially on the outside looking in, with regard to an expansion team because it is unlikely that the league will expand again beyond the 32 member franchises it will have given Seattle is successful with their bid.
The most likely logistical solution for at least two of those three cities would be to gain a team via relocation. The current situations for two or three current NHL franchises are tenuous at best at this point and that could provide the ability for one or more of those hopeful cities to gain “a seat at the table”.
The Calgary Flames, the Arizona Coyotes, and some feel the Florida Panthers all have some instability in their current markets. The relocation of an NHL team is certainly a long shot because the league prefers to keep teams in their markets unless a move is absolutely the last resort left to pursue. In fact, there are some within the hockey media that maintain that having Houston and Quebec City out there as possible alternative markets is exactly what the league office wants because it provides them leverage with the current markets in getting a favorable deal.
The league could “strong arm” a city like Calgary or Phoenix into a real estate deal with a publicly subsidy for a new hockey arena in terms that blatantly benefit the NHL because they can threaten the relocation of the team to Houston or Quebec. Those two markets, Calgary and Arizona, have been a total debacle for a while. It is becoming a major problem for the league that those cities are in limbo, and the exertion of pressure with regard to relocation is one of the few cards that the respective ownership groups of the Flames and Coyotes have left to play.
In the end, it looks like Seattle will be the next city to be awarded expansion into the NHL, and if it is anything close to the success that hockey has seen already in Las Vegas it is going to further continue the emergence of the league in new markets in the years ahead.