Could recent snowfalls in New Orleans have created a newfound love for hockey in America’s deep south?
Could recent snowfalls in New Orleans have created a newfound love for hockey in America’s deep south?
The NHL recently met with a group in New York City that hopes to bring an expansion franchise to New Orleans, ESPN’s Kevin Weekes reported on Wednesday.
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly reportedly spoke him to about the meeting.
The NHL has expanded aggressively in recent years and is the only league in North America’s four major sports to add new franchises in the last decade, bringing in the Vegas Golden Knights in 2017 and the Seattle Kraken in 2021.
They also recently relocated the Arizona Coyotes to Salt Lake City to form the Utah Hockey Club ahead of the 2024-25 season.
However, commissioner Gary Bettman cooled talks of further expansion earlier this season at the annual Board of Governors meeting in October.
“We feel no compulsion to do it right now,” Bettman said over four months ago. “We just came off our most successful season in our history, we’ve got collective bargaining to deal with, we’ve got new media arrangements to do in Canada in the next couple of years. If something came in and checked all the boxes, and we felt that it might make sense, we might consider it. But we’re not there right now, and it seems like everybody is, on the one hand, pushing us with, ‘Why don’t you expand,’ and at the same time saying, ‘Why would you expand?’ So, it’s not a front-burner topic right now.”
As it stands, New Orleans is currently home to franchises in both the NFL and NBA, with the Saints and Pelicans, respectively.
The home of the Pelicans, the Smoothie King Center, opened in 1999 and has a capacity of 16,867 for basketball games and 17,971 for concerts.
