NHL 2015 News, Latest Rumors: May Expand to Las Vegas
The NHL is looking to expand again. It has been the policy of the league for this generation to expand into non-traditional hockey markets, and even though that process has been met with very mixed results (the Atlanta Thrashers lasted 12 years before being relocated to Winnipeg) the league it set to once again expand into non-traditional markets.
There is a NFL style arena being built in Las Vegas, Nevada. Bill Foley is heading a group that wants to bring a NHL franchise to that city. They started a season ticket campaign in February, as part of the first hurdle to being approved by the league for a team. In a little less than two months they have deposits for 8,000 season tickets and are now focusing their efforts on corporate support. In Vegas, that means casinos and they will likely find a lot of support being the first major American sport league to potentially place a franchise there.
Part of what is driving the NHL's expansion it not the west instead of more traditional hockey markets in the east and in Canada is the unbalance of its league currently. The NHL reorganized its league a few years ago and that led to 16 teams in the eastern conference and just 14 in the western. It is the leagues goal to erase that imbalance.
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"To the extent our board makes a decision that expansion is something they'll consider or pursue, which they haven't yet, as an initial matter we have to look West first due to the geographic alignment of our teams," Deputy NHL commissioner Bill Daly said. "We have 14 teams in the Western Conference, 16 teams in the East. That's an imbalance that we'll want to remedy."
That means the NHL will look to the west to add teams before it pursues markets like Quebec that lost teams when the Canadian dollar created a competitive unbalance for the franchise north of the U.S. border.
