- Bill Daly pumped the brakes on a 33rd NHL team in Houston or Austin at the Vegas media tour
- Some clubs raised concerns about passing 32 teams at the June Board of Governors meeting
- Read below for what Daly said about the $3.5 billion Friedkin bid and the Sept. 22 board meeting
The NHL is not ready to hand Texas a team.
Bill Daly met with reporters Wednesday at the NHL Player Media Tour in Las Vegas and would not call a Texas team a done deal. The deputy commissioner was asked whether Houston or Austin is close to locked in, and he went the other way:
“I don’t want to get ahead of the board. I don’t want to treat it like a done deal, because it’s not,” Daly said. “It’s not a done deal on the Friedkin side, and it’s not a done deal on our side. And that’s why it’s kind of a nonbinding term sheet. We’re both going to work hard to achieve that goal. But, at the end of the day, it might not happen.”
The league signed that nonbinding term sheet with Dan Friedkin’s family earlier this summer, starting a six-month review of both Texas markets. Gary Bettman unveiled the agreement at the June board meeting in New York.
Friedkin’s group would be in for roughly $3.5 billion once the expansion fee and a new arena are covered. Daly said the Friedkins have known about the building requirement from day one.
The board is where this gets complicated. Daly was asked whether all 32 clubs want to grow the league, and he did not pretend they do.
“In recent weeks and as recently as the June board meeting, we actually did have some clubs that expressed some concern,” Daly told Daily Faceoff.
Two things bother the skeptics: a thinner talent pool and longer Stanley Cup odds. Daly called both relevant factors, though he only really conceded the second one. He said hockey development has come a long way since the late ’90s expansion wave and the league has enough players to stock “at least two teams moving forward.”
We posted a Nashville forward group last week that made the dilution case better than any quote could. Filip Forsberg, Ryan O’Reilly, Jonathan Marchessault and Steven Stamkos sit near the top of the chart. Below them, the jerseys mostly stop having names on the back:
Players around the league are not worried about it. Brady Tkachuk was asked about adding markets and pointed straight at the job count.
“Yeah, 100 percent, whenever you can grow a game to another city and it creates another 20 jobs for guys in the NHL,” Tkachuk said.
Daly said last week that Atlanta is nowhere near this stage, which leaves the two Texas cities as the only live options.
The governors meet again Sept. 22 in New York, and Daly plans to ask them directly where they stand on a 33rd team.
