Category: Seattle NHL team

Seattle was finally awarded its long-awaited NHL franchise yesterday, which means as soon as today work can begin on Seattle’s long-awaited reconstruction of the Key Arena. Curbed Seattle has some renderings, none of which show much that’s super-interesting about the redesigned arena, except that it will feature roof-suspended video boards in geometric shapes that aren’t easily described, and hockey fans who for some reason wave banners and bring replica Stanley Cups to the game, while wearing a startling number of fedoras and wildly cheering no action on the ice at all:

It’s been a long, strange trip for Seattle sports, starting with the Sonics moving to Oklahoma City in 2008 in a hissy fit over not getting public arena cash, then a years-long debate over a new arena in the SoDo district that would-be basketball owner Chris Hansen wanted to build, then ultimately the abandonment of that plan mostly thanks to the opposition of port unions and the turn to the Key remodel instead, with hockey arriving first and maybe basketball later. While there is plenty to argue about the merits of the two sites — I anticipate a full comments section for this one — the one common thread was that the city steadfastly refused to throw public money at either deal, helped out by a voter initiative passed in 2006 that put in place the principle that taxpayers should get a positive return on any public investment in sports venues. As sports subsidy shakedowns go — and this absolutely started as a subsidy shakedown on the part of billionaire former Sonics owner (and former Starbucks CEO) Howard Schultz’s part — it’s about as happy an ending as you’re likely to see.

The as-yet-unnamed Seattle NHL team will begin play in 2021, notwithstanding that the above image prominently features “2020 season” on the arena video boards. Maybe Seattle sports fans are so excited about the return of winter pro sports that they’ll show up an entire year early just to cheer them on? There’s no accounting for people in fedoras.

The Seattle city council finally cast its final vote to approve the privately funded reconstruction of KeyArena yesterday — notwithstanding that it had already voted to approve the plan last December — which means we can all rejoice in an arena deal that doesn’t suck too badly, thanks to a combination of citizen activism and relatively forward-thinking elected officials. (Those are the city officials; county officials are still wackadoodle, as the recent Mariners lease extension made clear.)

And it also means that now we can freely speculate about an NHL expansion team in Seattle, since part of the deal is that renovations won’t start until a franchise is in place:

Local investors will present to the NHL’s executive committee on October 2. Then, the full NHL Board of Governors will vote in December on whether to approve an expansion franchise for Seattle for the 2020-2021 season. A Seattle NHL team would be owned by billionaire David Bonderman, movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer and a handful of local owners.

Sports leagues are in a weird place right now with regard to expansion, with some looking to cash as many expansion fee checks as possible (MLS), while others are sitting on their hands and figuring that a one-time windfall isn’t worth the tradeoff of having to share the revenue pie with more owners (the NBA and NFL, pretty much). Baseball has been kicking the tires on expansion without making much of a commitment — my gut sense is that they’ll only do so if bowled over by expansion fees of around $1 billion per team, which may not be feasible for the size of the cities involved, something that I told Matthew Kory of the Athletic for this article (paywalled), though Twitter somehow turned it into me hating Montreal.

The NHL has been somewhere in between MLS and MLB, eager to expand if someone wants to throw money at them, but not so eager as to approve more than one team at a time. Seattle seems like as sure a bet for the league as possible — moderately big media market, more of an existing hockey fan base than some of the cities from Gary Bettman’s famed Sunbelt Strategy that didn’t work out so well — so if Bruckheimer and friends are willing to pay $650 million for a team in league where only 10 out of 31 existing teams are worth that much, hell yeah, grab the cash.

The calculus of expansion really comes down to whether you think the future revenues you’re giving up (by slicing the pie into smaller pieces) are worth more or less than the expansion fee check, and that’s going to vary based on everything from what you expect the future holds in terms of league revenues (is the cable bubble bursting yet?) to how your league’s revenue-sharing determines the size of your existing slice. None of which has much to do with whether a city “deserves” a team, whether in terms of Nielsen demographics or of how rabid their fan base is, so it’s nice when they all line up and a city like Seattle lands a team that should fit in well with existing NHL cities. And not having to put in public arena subsidies is the cherry on the top. Wow, I really have nothing overly cynical or pessimistic to say about this news item — mark this day down, because you shan’t see its like again.