My Best Guess at the Where and When for NHL's Next Round of Expansion

If Toronto got a second team, it'd be guaranteed to win a cup before the Leafs. Do it for the lolz Gary. Please do

I think they should consider Cleveland, and then ultimately decide against it, because it's been a while since they've done that.

Wake up babe, THG uploaded another expansion video

AHL Houston drew over 10k per game. They only left because the former Rockets owner forced them out. If not, they wouldn't have moved to Iowa.

One alternative is moving Nashville to the Eastern Conference if NHL finds itself with too many Western Conference teams.

Milwaukee is the dark horse candidate I’d like to see get an NHL team. Even better if they can keep the awesome Admirals brand/name!

The Quebec Bouledogues

Argument here in Kansas City has been that the arena is massively profitable as a concert venue, and an NHL team would take 41 dates off the calendar.

If the NHL does return to Arizona, the one connection they should retain with the Coyotes is retiring Shane Doan's number.

Texas can definitely support 2 NHL teams. I used to live in Houston, and went to my fair share of Aeros games. The last few years they were in the AHL the Toyota center had a lot of people. I think part of that is they were in the playoffs consistently, and the other part is that Houston is very much a transplant city. I would love to see the Aeros in the NHL. The Houston/Dallas rivalry games would be something to watch.

Bulldogs in french is "Bouledogues." Honestly? I could see it working as a name, but lets not kid ourselves, it would NEVER happen with the attachment folks have to the Nordiques name

I have a problem with the "we can fill a building" argument and it's that since covid, the NHL has deliberately moved away from ticket sales as their main income stream. Selling merchandise, tv rights and advertising rights favor a big metro area.

Pittsburgh Penguins were almost sold to Portland.

San Diego and Portland come to mind. Both were strong franchises in the old WHL back in the '60s where the Vancouver Canucks came up from. I figure southern California can support two teams if metro Toronto can, and nobody talks much about Portland despite it's perfect geographic location for a completely West Coast division and associated rivalries.

Hey Shannon, Omaha resident here. We have a pretty strong hockey fanbase here but I'm not sure that we would be able to support an NHL franchise. We have 967,604 in the metro population (including neighboring Council Bluffs IA), and I don't think that would be the issue. However, we already have a D1 NCAA team in the UNO Mavericks and the Lancers in the USHL. Both of these teams can struggle to bring attendance when they aren't winning. We also failed to support an AHL team from 05-07 when we had Calgary's affiliate. It's hard to justify even though the owners of a large outlet mall may be interested in building an arena and making a pitch to the NHL.

I could see Omaha trying to revive the Ak-Sar-Ben Knights name that was used in the AHL. The NHL had 1/3 of its teams in Canada in the Original Six era (2/6), from 1980 until San Jose (7/21), and when Ottawa joined (8/24). I never expected the ratio to go below 1/4 again, but here we are. I do think if the NHL had absorbed the six WHA teams and added Houston and Cincinnati in 1977 to go to 24 teams (as that would be before Cleveland folded), even if the Barons and Stingers both wind up not being successful, it would have been less likely that the Blue Jackets would have come into existence, and we might be talking about the Hampton Roads Rhinos again.

The Atlanta Flames had good goaltending.

Can Texas support two hockey teams? Yes, absolutely. I've been living in Houston a while now and I've never seen a single piece of Stars merch being worn, never heard them mentioned, etc. They wouldn't be stealing support from each other. But that's because Houston's basically a 100% hockey-free market. An expansion team would be building a new fanbase from scratch. Is that doable here? Yeah, absolutely. Hockey's culture would do really well here, there's money here to buy seats, and a brand new major sports team would attract a lot of local attention. If the GM is smart and brings in players with personality and grit, hockey could catch on quickly. Houston would go CRAZY for something like that penalty shot exchange between Kochetkov and Brady Tkachuk, for example.

Bless you for even writing Saskatoon on the board. Saskatchewan would absolutely love our own hockey team and to even be continued to be brought up in the conversation is half the battle.

The Quebec Bouledogue