Call it the second-biggest move in Stars history, geographically speaking.
Nearly four decades after relocating from Minnesota to Dallas in 1993, the Stars are aiming to leave Dallas for Plano in 2031, announcing plans to build a mixed-use arena and entertainment district on the site of The Shops at Willow Bend, pending City Council approval. It’s a $1 billion proposed project, with $700 million coming from Plano to make the deal happen.
It’s a jarring move, albeit not a surprising one given the recent developments between the Stars, the city of Dallas, and the Mavericks. As a refresher, the Stars and Mavericks have long been on a path toward divorce, partly because NBA and NHL teams are increasingly moving out of shared arenas and partly because this particular NBA team sued that particular NHL team in October seeking control of the American Airlines Center. The Stars countersued, and the city of Dallas chose sides, picking the Mavericks. (A court eventually ruled in the Mavericks’ favor, although the Stars are appealing.)
Given all that, it felt inevitable that the Stars would move out of Dallas. But the foundation for a move north was laid long before any legal wrangling got underway.
A significant part of the Stars’ success in North Texas, and by extension, hockey’s success in North Texas, lies in the team building and maintaining of local rinks. The Stars own and operate eight StarCenters within North Texas; none of those rinks are in Dallas, and six of the eight are north of 635. If you draw a map connecting those northern StarCenters—Valley Ranch, Farmers Branch, Richardson, Frisco, McKinney, and Plano—the proposed arena project falls right in the middle.
It’s one of the uncomfortable, unavoidable realities about hockey’s growth in Texas. This is one of the most expensive youth sports around, so economically speaking, it makes sense to build where the wealth is going. But because the Stars effectively built a huge amount of the hockey culture we see today in North Texas, the trickledown effect is while the team always played its games in Dallas, so much of its fanbase resided outside the city. According to multiple sources, the Stars’ season-ticketholder base has already largely shifted to the northern suburbs. While there will be some churn leaving Dallas, the Stars are confident internally that they’ll pick up more season-ticket holders from the move.
Another, more obvious reality is the move will put the Stars on much better financial footing. The team isn’t hurting in Dallas; as of November, the Stars ranked 11th in NHL revenue according to CNBC, and were the league’s 14th most valuable franchise at $2.05 billion. But the NHL has made a push in recent years for NHL franchises to act less like hockey teams than corporate entities with a hockey team involved. It matters quite a bit, then, that neither they nor the Mavericks own the land around the American Airlines Center. Plano’s proposal remedies that, and that’s before considering how Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, a hotelier by trade, might add to his portfolio alongside the new rink.
“It’s going to be a business dream, honestly,” another NHL team president tells D. “You get to control the venue, you get to control the surrounding area, and you get to make money 365 days a year on that space. Between that and some of the corporate entities based in that area, the Stars could easily be a top-10 revenue team.”
In a hockey sense, the low-hanging fruit would be to compare this move to that of the Arizona Coyotes, who moved from Phoenix to suburban Glendale in 2003 before relocating to Arizona State’s campus in 2022. It was a disaster that put the team on course to eventually relocate to Utah. But the Coyotes moved to the less-affluent suburbs and away from the region’s larger hockey community, which was located in the East Valley. The Stars are doing the opposite, purposely centering their new arena in an area that’s been North Texas’ hockey hotbed, as well as a more affluent business space than downtown.
As for what’s in the arena, there will be a heavy emphasis on “premium” treatments and club sections, which the NHL on a whole has been pushing for its teams in new arena developments. A team based in a top-four media market constructing such an arena would increase money going into the league’s revenue-sharing program and could nudge other franchises to build similarly.
“From a league perspective, this is a huge win for all of us,” a league source tells D.
However they got here, and whatever it means for the city they’ll leave behind, the Stars are following the money and shifting geographically to better fit their present and future day-to-day footprint. As one former NHL team president put it in text this week, “It’s kind of a business-versus-optics thing here, right? Do you need to be in Dallas to be the Dallas Stars?
“From a business side, you don’t.”
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Sean Shapiro View Profile
Sean Shapiro covers the Stars for StrongSide. He is a national NHL reporter and writer who previously covered the Dallas Stars organization as a beat writer for various publications between 2012 and 2020.