By: Adamo Marinelli
Wednesday, December 5th, 2018
It is official. Seattle has become the NHL’s 32nd franchise after the league unanimously approves the expansion bid.
Their inaugural season will be in 2021-2022. This means the next expansion draft will be June of 2021. That expansion draft will have the same rules as the Las Vegas one.
The Seattle organization will play in KeyArena, the old home of the NBA’s Seattle Supersonics who moved to Oklahoma and became the Thunder.
The arena hasn’t been used in a while, so many renovations will have to be made. The NHL hopes that the $800 million renovations will be done by 2020, but with a huge task at hand and an unclear completion date, the parties involved decided a later date would be ideal, probably the start of 2021.
Seattle’s team is unnamed and they will receive a name at a later date. However, it is likely that the Seattle Metropolitans, their 1917 Stanley Cup winning name won’t be coming back considering there is a division with that name.
There is a poll on Twitter where fans can vote for the name of the team. The NHL wants to involve the fans as much as they can and having them choose from a select group of names is a great way to do so.
It is astonishing how Seattle has already secured more than 30,000 deposits for season tickets since submitting its expansion application this past February.
“The league’s expansion decision was only made possible because Seattle will possess the three pillars essential to the success of any franchise: terrific committed ownership, a thriving market, and a state-of-the-art venue”, said Gary Bettman, in a press conference.
Those three reasons are why Seattle was chosen over Quebec. Undoubtedly, there is a great market, arena and ownership in Quebec but it is better in Seattle, and by picking Seattle over Quebec, it avoids adding another Canadian team who has to pay their players in American dollars which gets very expensive and can drive up ticket prices and affect the salary cap.
Besides, with the addition of Seattle, both the Eastern and Western conferences now have 16 teams. Arizona will be moved to the central division and Seattle will be in the Pacific division. This is better than having 17 East teams and 15 West teams if Quebec was added.
The NHL and Gary Bettman, the commissioner, are thrilled that NHL hockey will exist in Seattle, a city with a proud hockey history and the first American city to ever win the Stanley Cup, the Seattle Metropolitans. He is excited to experience NHL hockey in one of North America’s most innovative, beautiful and fastest growing cities.
This was an excellent move for the NHL, but maybe Quebec can rejoin the NHL again sometime soon also. That would be fun!
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