SI/Weekes: Houston, Atlanta leading NHL expansion list

[StreetHawk]

If he doesn’t, they won’t be getting a team.

Correct. And that means no Houston as an nhl market even if it’s one that the nhl desires to have a team.

 

[dj4aces]

A Houston team should be called the Aeros but the NHL likely wouldn’t allow it due to it’s association with the WHA. But Aeros has a clearly defined connection to Houston and even had Gordie freaking Howe win a couple of championships for them. If the NHL was smart they would honour this when they eventually go to Houston.

If the Aeros name is desired, I'm pretty sure the league itself wouldn't care. The Wild would have to relinquish the name though, as they currently hold the trademark.

 

[GreenHornet]

If the Aeros name is desired, I'm pretty sure the league itself wouldn't care. The Wild would have to relinquish the name though, as they currently hold the trademark.

That answers my question from above. Makes sense, given that Iowa is Minnesota's AHL affiliate.

 

[Big Z Man 1990]

A Dallas-Houston rivalry would be good for the NHL.

The only league where Dallas and Houston don't share a division is the NFL. For TV reasons, the NFL can't do a purely geographical alignment like the NBA and NHL. That's why there's the AFC (in which Houston plays) and the NFC (in which Dallas plays). As such, only 2 Cowboys-Texans regular season games are guaranteed to occur in an 8-year period, in which they always meet in years divisible evenly by 2 but not by 4. They could meet in years divisible by 4 if they finish in the same position within their divisions the year before (as they did in 2024).

There has never been a Dallas-Houston rivalry in top-level professional hockey. WHA only ever had Houston, and the NHL has only ever had Dallas.

Dallas and Houston (and for that matter, Fort Worth) did co-exist in the first version of the Central Hockey League, starting in 1967-68 and ending in 1968-69, and again starting in 1979-80 and ending in 1981-82.

 

[voyageur]

I say take the money and run if you can, and don't expand again for another 10 years. I'm in favour of expansion if it changes the divisional format to something like the NFL, with smaller rivalry divisions, and greater wild card battles. It's logical that the NHL is looking at top 10 metropolises with a significant corporate investment potential to expand to.

Both markets started professional hockey in 1972. I still find it interesting that the NHL wouldn't let Houston's WHA ownership buy the Cleveland Barons at a time when the NHL was struggling in the U.S to succeed professionally, and at the risk of folding a franchise. Only a few years later Atlanta moved to Calgary, as Canada added 4 teams to the NHL in 3 years over the dead body of Harold Ballard.

Since then the landscape has changed. The growth of hockey hinges on the Southern markets.

 

[TheLegend]

Clickbait. Any one of us could have written that article. We all know the NHL isn't going to budge on its price and we know Fertitta has a number in mind that he won't go above. If he had been willing to pay $1.2 billion he would have gotten the Coyotes (it would have been smoother than Utah since the arena is pretty much ready).

Ironically I saw a Facebook post about Fertitta recently looking to building a hotel/casino on the Vegas Strip, and that the project was dead.

But Facebook's fact checking was bad enough before they dumped that department so I did a quick Google and discovered his Feritta Entertainment group took over the Golden Nugget not long ago and is currently remodeling...... and upped his stake in Wynn Resorts to almost 10% last fall.

This strip project as far as I can see is still moving forward. Hopefully not at Fontainebleau pace for his sake, but it's looking more and more (to me) like he could pull the trigger on an NHL expansion at anytime if he wanted.

It's all about the price.