Atlanta and Phoenix are markets of interest.
The National Hockey League’s product is games and the games will be resuming as training camps are opening. The NHL will be staging games in Munich, Germany and in Prague, The Czech Republic. There will be two games in Québec City, Québec which is a small market in Canada that once had an NHL team between 1979 and 1995 and has been a contender for an NHL expansion team. The National Hockey League has 32 franchises and is establishing itself in the Salt Lake City market this year after transferring the Phoenix franchise to Utah last spring. The NHL gave the former Phoenix franchise owner five years to build a new arena to reinstate the franchise but Alex Meruelo decided to walk away with a one-billion-dollar parting gift after he could not get a venue built in North Phoenix.
What does the NHL’s future look like? The NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said, “It’s not just NHL commissioner Gary Bettman or I making that decision, it’s also our ownership group that makes the decision. With the last two expansions in particular, the thought process was a lot different. Everybody was just interested in adding clubs, there was an $80M expansion fee, right? “It’s much more business-oriented now in terms of how clubs look at it. They don’t want to add franchises just to add franchises, they want to add franchises that will grow the value of the league. ‘Does this market make sense for the National Hockey League? Does it make my franchise more valuable?’ Understanding that I might get a nice check in the short term, but this is a longer-term look at asset value and whether they are making the league better.” Two groups in the Atlanta area are interested in getting a franchise, the league still believes in the Phoenix market. Eventually the NHL will expand.
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Bill Daly
