A market Bettman has watched for years finally gets its hearing
Texas hockey has been a talking point in NHL boardrooms for the better part of a decade, and this week it became a formal agenda item. The Board of Governors held its first real discussion on placing a franchise in Houston or Austin, three months after the league quietly opened an exploration process with Dan Friedkin’s ownership group, Pursuit Sports. Commissioner Gary Bettman kept expectations in check afterward. “Expansion is a multibillion-dollar transaction, which has an impact on all the other clubs,” he said, noting that any vote needs three-quarters of the board on side before it happens.
Friedkin’s group has already scouted arena sites in both cities, and the two options pull in different directions. Houston brings one of the biggest media markets left in North American sports without a team in the NHL. Austin offers something rarer still: a city with no franchise in any of the four major leagues, hockey included, a blank slate few expansion bidders ever get to work with.
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No firm date, but a number attached
Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly was direct about the pace. “I don’t think we’re putting time limits on things,” he said, even as Bettman suggested the league would likely settle on a preferred market by the end of the year. The board’s next meeting is set for December, and Bettman expects to know a lot more by then, though a vote itself carries no promised timeline. The price tag being discussed sits close to $3.5 billion once arena construction and the franchise fee to existing owners are combined. For comparison, Seattle paid roughly $650 million to join the league as its 32nd franchise back in 2021, a gap that says as much about league economics since then as it does about Texas real estate.
Texas is not the only market waiting in line
Bettman also flagged continued interest from Atlanta, which lost the Thrashers to Winnipeg in 2011 and has lobbied on and off for a return ever since, along with a less advanced push from the Phoenix area following the Coyotes’ relocation to Salt Lake City. New board chairman Ted Leonsis and incoming vice chairman Murray Edwards, the Calgary Flames owner, now oversee a governors’ room split on the question itself. “I think there are probably some owners who think expansion is the greatest thing ever,” Bettman said, “and I think there are some people who say, why do we need to expand?” Nothing was decided this week. Everything is still on the table.
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