{"id":843858,"date":"2026-08-05T01:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T01:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/843858\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T01:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T01:44:09","slug":"nhl-eyes-expansion-with-houston-austin-topping-list-as-potential-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/843858\/","title":{"rendered":"NHL eyes expansion with Houston, Austin topping list as potential cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NHL has held committed expansion talks with billionaire Dan Friedkin<\/a>, with the \u201ckey point yet to be determined (or revealed to the public)\u201d being whether the team will be in Houston or Austin, according to Kevin Dupont of the BOSTON GLOBE. Signaling from the league \u201cpoints emphatically\u201d to one of the two Texas cities as a site for expansion. NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly, in his recent appearance on the \u201cSick Podcast-The Eye Test,\u201d said that the league\u2019s aim is to \u201cfinalize talks with the Friedkin Group and have the league\u2019s Board of Governors sign off by the end of this year.\u201d Daly noted that the aim would be for the first game to be played in the new city by the 2029-30 season. Since the turn of the millennium, Houston has topped Bruins owner and NHL Board of Governors Chair Jeremy Jacobs\u2019 \u201clist of prospective expansion sites.\u201d If Jacobs \u201cstill has a hankering for Houston,\u201d his influence on the Lords of the Boards \u201ccould peg the needle that way.\u201d Houston\u2019s population of some 2.3 million is \u201cmore than double that of Austin (just below one million).\u201d But the state capital \u201cis on fire, attracting new industries, residential construction, and new families.\u201d Austin is absent of MLB, NBA, or NFL franchises. Much like when the Golden Knights opened the doors in Vegas in October 2017, moving to Austin \u201cwould be a pure play for the NHL, not having to compete with any other big league franchise\u201d (BOSTON GLOBE, 8\/1<\/a>).<\/p>\n

WHICH WILL IT BE: In Texas, Jason Cohen wrote Austin\u2019s \u201clast-minute emergence\u201d as a potential NHL market seems \u201cless driven by any particular passion, on the part of Friedkin or the NHL, to bring hockey to the city than it is by a strategy to pit Austin and Houston against each other — the better to negotiate for tax breaks and infrastructure, if not actual public funding.\u201d Houston is a \u201cmassive metropolitan area and an established, big-market sports hub,\u201d and Houston\u2019s hockey history \u201cmakes it the obvious choice.\u201d Yet Cohen\u2019s \u201chot take\u201d is that the team \u201cis going to be in Austin.\u201d The fact that Austin \u201cdoes seem like a longer shot doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a bluff.\u201d One has to think that Friedkin and the NHL \u201cwouldn\u2019t have added the much smaller city to the deal if they didn\u2019t have a pretty good idea of where and how to put a team there … and that they truly want to.\u201d Houston\u2019s hockey fans \u201cdeserve an NHL team more.\u201d But \u201cif deserve had been the only criterion, the Stars would\u2019ve remained in Minnesota.\u201d Austin\u2019s \u201cmonied, white, tech-bro ethos has a similar feel to Las Vegas and Nashville.\u201d Austin has no pro teams outside of MLS, so an NHL team \u201cwould have more relative value and clout than in Houston\u2019s crowded market.\u201d Houston, indeed, \u201cmight be the right choice for it.\u201d But Austin \u201cis the vibe choice\u201d (TEXAS MONTHLY, 7\/29<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NHL has held committed expansion talks with billionaire Dan Friedkin, with the \u201ckey point yet to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":843859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,3915,575,85],"class_list":["post-843858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-hockey","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}