Houston is now firmly in the running to add an NHL team, with the Bayou City in a battle with Austin to be the home of the league’s next expansion franchise. But professional hockey will still come to Houston regardless of the expansion team’s home.

Michel Petit, a former NHL player and the founder and CEO of Blueline SlapShot LLC, said Tuesday his group has confirmed the arrival of an ECHL team in Houston in the next “two-to-three” years. Petit declined to say which current ECHL club will move south to Houston, though whichever minor-league team arrives, it will play in a new, state-of-the-art, minor-league hockey stadium. 

Petit said his group is set to buy land north of I-45 and just south of The Woodlands, with a purchase agreement expected by the end of 2026. An 8,000-seat arena with club suites will then be constructed, with an ECHL club set to arrive as early as 2028-29. The final price tag on the new arena will likely settle around $200 million, per Petit.

“The commitment from the ECHL is already made,” Petit told Chron. “The contract for the team that will be here ends right at the same time we’re going to be done with our arena, which turns out to be perfect.

“Hopefully things speed up with the land purchase, because we’re pretty darn committed to building this facility.”

An ECHL club is effectively guaranteed to come to Houston, per Petit. As for the NHL, there is now officially a two-way race for the league’s next expansion franchise, one Petit expects Houston to win.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told reporters Tuesday the NHL has yet commit to adding an expansion team, though if it does, the team in question will be owned by Dan Friedkin, a Houston billionaire who is also the owner of European soccer clubs Everton and A.S. Roma. Friedkin and the NHL have agreed to a $3.5 billion term sheet, which would cover a roughly $2 billion expansion fee and the roughly $1.5 billion needed to build a new arena in either Houston or Austin (building a new arena is a condition of a potential sale, per Bettman).

“We have been in discussions for the better part of two years with the Friedkin family, principally for the last two years about Houston as an expansion opportunity,” Bettman said Tuesday following a meeting of the NHL’s Board of Governors in New York. “But as we continued to focus with them, particularly on the need for a new arena in Houston, the discussions morphed into also a discussion about Austin, which would also need a new building.

“We are going to work together under the terms, a term sheet that we were able to agree upon, in terms of a framework to consider what makes the most sense moving forward.”

Petit said Tuesday he’s spoken with both Friedkin in “recent weeks,” in which Friedkin confirmed his interest in bringing an NHL franchise to Houston. Like the incoming ECHL building, a new arena built by Friedkin’s group would be a multi-year project, which Petit expects to be completed for the 2028-29 season at the earliest.

Houston is currently a hockey desert, with few rinks and no professional team in the city since the Houston Aeros of the American Hockey League—one tier above the ECHL—moved to Des Moines in 2013. The barren landscape could soon change drastically. The Houston Bulls, a junior-league franchise, will begin play in the North American Hockey League in a facility in Richmond this fall. An ECHL club will follow in the coming years, and after Tuesday’s announcement from Bettman, an NHL franchise very possibly will, too.