Gary Bettman was right (about this one thing at least)
The NHL commissioner spent decades encouraging the league to expand in the American south. It's finally paying off.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re sharpening our skates in the sand.
I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve been truly shocked while watching a movie. The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Memento, and Promised Land are all on the list. But the most surreal by far came thanks to a hockey documentary released back in 2019.
I’d settled into my couch to watch Valiant, a recap of the Vegas Golden Knights’ inaugural season, and just three minutes in, my face appeared on the screen. As the directors were establishing the chorus of people who thought hockey in the desert would fail, they showed a clip of me on Bloomberg television criticizing the NHL’s southern expansion1. Here it is 👇
The clip was selectively edited (I swear!), but at the time it wouldn’t have seemed out of place. That TV hit probably happened some time in 2015, and that season the three lowest-attended teams in the league were the Arizona Coyotes (#28), the Carolina Hurricanes (#29) and the Florida Panthers (#30). The Nashville Predators (#21) and Dallas Stars (#19) were also in the bottom half.
The NHL spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s trying very hard to make hockey take root across the Sun Belt. It was a passion project of Gary Bettman, the longest tenured commissioner in major U.S. sports, and he was often panned for it. By 2015, the Coyotes, who moved from Winnipeg in 1996, had already gone bankrupt once. The Thrashers, the league’s second attempt in Atlanta, lasted 11 rough seasons before backfilling the Winnipeg market.
Most commissioners are controversial—just ask Cathy Engelbert 😬—but Bettman has drawn more hate than most. And for good reason. Under his tenure the league has somehow been more dismissive than even the NFL on the dangers of concussions and CTE. There have been multiple lockouts, one of which erased an entire season; some league-wide TV deals stifled the NHL’s visibility2; Bettman and team owners have refused to send players to multiple Winter Olympics; and the escrow system has alienated a generation of players.
But while all of those have endured, the league’s southern teams have taken off in the last ten years.3
The Panthers, dead-last in attendance in 2014-15, have been to three straight Stanley Cup finals, and ranked fifth last season. The nearby Tampa Bay Lightning, another recent mini dynasty, were fourth. The Hurricanes and Stars were both in the Top 12.
That success has shown in the franchise valuations. Sportico did its first NHL list in 2021 and published its most recent this week. In those five years, the Panthers have grown from a $520 million franchise to a $1.89 billion franchise. That 3.6x multiple is by far the largest in the league. The Hurricanes’ valuation has grown 3.5x to $1.92 billion. The Lightning have jumped 2.4x to $1.9 billion.
Fans don’t care about valuations, I know, but those teams are also some of the most exciting in the league. Las Vegas, by most accounts, has one of pro sports’ most exciting in-game experiences—complete with celebrity musical acts, a parade down the strip before games, and a pretty epic pregame show 👇
The Nashville Predators also lean on their local musicians for entertainment. The Lightning had a boat parade after their 2021 Stanley Cup win. The Hurricanes’ Storm Surge is one of the sport’s more fun modern traditions 👇
Not only have the Panthers been the best team in the league over the past three seasons, they’ve also been the coolest. My partner is an Edmonton Oilers fans, but at one point while we watched the Amazon docuseries about the team’s loss to the Panthers in the 2024 Stanley Cup, she turned to me and said, “The Panthers just look like they’re having more fun.”4
The conversation about southern NHL markets has completely flipped. If you were handicapping the likeliest cities for the league’s next round of expansion, Atlanta and Houston would be the two frontrunners. And I’d bet the league is back in Arizona within the decade. Don’t take that from me, take it from my colleague Kurt Badenhausen.
When it comes time to award the Stanley Cup next summer, Gary Bettman will be roundly booed by the home fans. It happens every year, and he deserves it. But maybe he’ll take some solace in the fact that those fans will likely be in Florida, Texas, Carolina or Las Vegas.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
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With one glaring exception of course. The Arizona Coyotes moved last year to Utah after numerous owners and numerous failed attempts at a sustainable franchise.
Another shameless plug here for The Novy-Williams Rule™️: If your athletes are having fun, your fans will too.