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Subscribe today<\/a> for unlimited access to Texas\u00a0Monthly. Already a subscriber? Log in<\/a>. <\/p>\n Houston, we have a hockey team.\u00a0<\/p>\n Or do we?\u00a0<\/p>\n When the hotel, restaurant, and casino mogul Tilman Fertitta<\/a> bought the Houston Rockets in 2017, the media almost immediately wondered if he might bring the National Hockey League to the city next. Fertitta had reportedly met<\/a> with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman about doing so, and around that time, the Vegas Golden Knights had begun playing as the NHL\u2019s newest expansion team, with the Seattle Kraken joining them a few years later. Giving Texas a second pro hockey club seemed overdue; Houston is the fourth-largest city in America, and the Dallas Stars<\/a> have always lacked an instate, or even nearby, rival.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt could happen in a year,\u201d Fertitta had said<\/a> of the speculation. \u201cIt might not happen for five years. But I think it will happen one day.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Now that day might be here. Just not for Fertitta. And maybe not for Houston either. On June 23, the National Hockey League entered into an agreement<\/a> to explore expansion feasibility with a different local billionaire, Dan Friedkin, who\u2019d publicly expressed<\/a> interest in NHL ownership in March of 2025. The deal gives Friedkin\u2019s family company\u2014which owns, among other things, Gulf States Toyota, Auberge Collection hotels, and three European soccer teams\u2014six months to lay the ice, figuratively speaking. But with the NHL\u2019s announcement came another twist: The Friedkin Group is exploring expansion opportunities not just in its home city, but also in a certain formerly sleepy college town and state capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been in discussion for the better part of two years with the Friedkin family . . . about Houston as an expansion opportunity,\u201d said Bettman in the announcement. \u201cBut as we continued to focus with them\u2014particularly on the need for a new arena in Houston\u2014the discussions morphed into, also, a discussion about Austin, which would also need a new building.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, if Houston or Austin\u2014or, perhaps more likely, a booming \u2019burb in either\u2014builds it, the NHL will come.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, Houston doesn\u2019t need a new arena; it already has the publicly owned, Fertitta-controlled Toyota Center. But these days, pro teams prefer to have their own exclusive, shiny sports palace and the extra revenue and real estate development that come with one. (See the Dallas Mavericks and Stars, who plan to ditch their shared downtown American Airlines Center for suburban spots in Valley View and Plano, respectively.) Austin\u2019s Moody Center is also perfectly fine and very new, but neither its 15,000-seat capacity nor its University of Texas landlord would suit the NHL. The term sheet between Friedkin and the NHL reportedly calls for a $3.5 billion investment, with $2 billion of that as the expansion fee\u2014the simple right to join the league\u2014and the rest to pay for the new venue.<\/p>\n On the surface, Austin\u2019s last-minute emergence as a potential NHL market seems less 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\u2014the better to negotiate for tax breaks and infrastructure, if not actual public funding. Discussing the deal, Bettman didn\u2019t even seem to know that the two cities aren\u2019t in the same region of Texas, conflating the two options as \u201cSouth Texas.\u201d Twice.<\/p>\n Not that it matters. At some unknown future date, hockey fans in Texas will have a second NHL team to watch. That\u2019s not just my view as an instate homer\u2014it\u2019s also the conclusion of analysts like longtime NHL reporter Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic, who covered the Las Vegas and Seattle expansion agreements. \u201cHistory suggests there\u2019s very likely a second NHL team coming to Texas,\u201d he wrote<\/a> last month. \u201cFor me, the question is not whether the league is expanding with a thirty-third team. It\u2019s simply to which Texas city.\u201d<\/p>\n Which, indeed. That\u2019s the main question. But first a related one: Hockey in Texas?<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t follow the Dallas Stars, it\u2019s forgivable to ask. And even if you do, you might not know how deep the game\u2019s roots actually are in Texas\u2014in Houston, Austin, and all sorts of sunny, dusty corners of the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Stars, which relocated from Minnesota in 1993, were the hottest team in Dallas between the Cowboys\u2019 last Super Bowl appearance in 1996 and the start of Dirk Nowitzki\u2019s prime a decade later. They won the Stanley Cup in 1999, fell just short in 2000, and had a statue-worthy Hall of Famer in team captain Mike Modano<\/a>. But the history of hockey in the state precedes that era. Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston all had minor league teams in the forties, including the Houston Huskies, the 1948 United States Hockey League champions. Both Dallas and Fort Worth had beloved Central Hockey League farm teams from 1967\u20131982; in 1980, the Fort Worth Texans infamously beat the U.S. national team twice, shortly before the Miracle on Ice game at the Olympics. Even the Panhandle is in the pantheon: The junior hockey Amarillo Wranglers won the Southwest Hockey League in 1976.<\/p>\n Concurrent with the Stars\u2019 arrival, the state experienced another minor league boom, during which Austin debuted its first team. When I wrote about the Austin Ice Bats<\/a> of the Western Professional Hockey League for this magazine in 1997, and a few years later in the book Zamboni Rodeo, Texas had more professional hockey teams at all levels than any other state. Back then, Amarillo had the Rattlers, Waco had the Wizards, and Belton had the Central Texas Stampede; in other leagues and at several different times, San Antonio had the Dragons, the Iguanas, and the Rampage. Others that are no more: the Abilene Aviators, the Lubbock Cotton Kings, the Laredo Bucks, and the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees<\/a>.<\/p>\n Many such Texas hockey markets\u2014Amarillo, El Paso, Odessa, Corpus Christi, Fort Worth\u2014have since pivoted to junior hockey, where teenage players develop and move on to a higher-tier junior team, college team, or both. Junior or not, the number of these teams (and the fandoms behind them) proves that Texans are ready for a new NHL club should it come. The Jackalopes have dedicated supporters in Odessa, as do the Wranglers in Amarillo and the Rhinos in El Paso. Even the Austin Ice Bats revived as a junior team in 2021. Cedar Park\u2019s H-E-B Center is home to the Texas Stars, the Dallas Stars\u2019 top farm team, which has featured such current Stars as Jason Robertson and Jake Oettinger, plus the recently traded Mavrik Bourque.\u00a0<\/p>\n But before the Stars showed up, Houston was the best (not-so-little) hockey town in Texas. The Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association\u2014a plucky rival to the NHL\u2014won championships in both 1974 and 1975; those teams featured NHL legend Gordie Howe<\/a>, \u201cMr. Hockey,\u201d playing alongside his sons, Mark and Marty, at the age of 45. After the WHA ceased operations in 1979, another version of the Aeros existed and largely thrived as a minor league team, first in the International Hockey League (1994\u20132001) and then in the American Hockey League (2001\u20132013). During those years, Aeros owner Chuck Watson and Rockets owner Leslie Alexander were said to be competing for an NHL expansion team, but after the opening of the Toyota Center in 2003, Watson sold the Aeros to the parent company of its NHL affiliate, the Minnesota Wild. (In 2013, the Aeros moved to Iowa.)<\/p>\n Getting the casual Houston sports fan to care about a farm team for a distant, Midwestern NHL club was a tough sell. But Houston\u2019s hockey community\u2014of fans, recreational leagues, former youth players and their parents\u2014never went away. Two days before this year\u2019s NHL trade deadline, the Stars acquired defenseman Tyler Myers from Vancouver, making him the first Texas native to play for the team; he\u2019d developed as a player in Calgary but was born in Houston and grew up an Aeros fan. In the past few years, fans in the city have created a Houston Hockey Hall of Fame and an annual \u201cHockey Day in Houston.\u201d A Facebook Group called Help Bring the NHL to Houston, TX has existed since the Aeros left.\u00a0<\/p>\n So Texas is hockey country\u2014but of all its cities, Houston has the most dormant fans. It\u2019s a massive metropolitan area and an established, big-market sports hub, with teams in the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer. Houston\u2019s hockey history\u2014the Aeros, the Watson-Alexander expansion interest, and now Fertitta\u2019s and Friedkin\u2019s\u2014makes it the obvious choice. The betting apps would tell you: They\u2019re getting an NHL team.<\/p>\n And yet, here\u2019s my hot take\u2014potentially a freezing-cold take. The team is going to be in Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n The fact that Austin does seem like a longer shot doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a bluff. One has to think that Friedkin and the NHL wouldn\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.\u00a0The reported Texas expansion fee of $2 billion is four times the $500 million the Vegas Golden Knights paid in 2016. Everything\u2019s bigger in Texas.<\/p>\n Houston\u2019s hockey fans, having supported three versions of the bygone Aeros, deserve an NHL team more. But if deserve had been the only criterion, the Stars would\u2019ve remained in Minnesota\u2014the \u201cState of Hockey\u201d\u2014rather than been moved to Dallas. If deserve were the only criterion, the NHL would\u2019ve already put another team in Quebec City, which lost its Nordiques to Denver in 1995.\u00a0<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not. The NHL has skewed away from traditional, cold-weather, deserving markets for a while. One of former ESPN anchor Keith Olbermann\u2019s favorite hockey catchphrases was \u201che puts the biscuit in the basket,\u201d biscuit meaning the puck; these days, it might as well refer to actual biscuits. The current Stanley Cup champion is the Carolina Hurricanes, and for the past decade-plus the league has been dominated by Southern and Western teams. Players also prefer the lack of state income tax and the calmer media environment found in many such warm-weather locales\u2014they\u2019ve started engineering their way to cities like Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Las Vegas via free agency or trade requests. The best hockey player in Austin can still live in anonymity relative to, say, Arch Manning<\/a>. What matters more than deserve is allure, and Austin has the latter.<\/p>\n This is not your slacker uncle\u2019s Austin. It\u2019s the city of Joe Lonsdale and Joe Rogan. Its monied, white, tech-bro ethos has a similar feel to Las Vegas and Nashville, cities whose NHL teams are also tourist attractions and celebrity magnets and stopovers for bachelorette parties. Austin has no pro teams outside of MLS<\/a>, so an NHL team would have more relative value and clout than in Houston\u2019s crowded market. Players would line up to live in Austin (or somewhere in the suburbs, near a golf course), and just as the Golden Knights make every game a spectacle of celebrity and dazzle, an Austin NHL team would reflect the city\u2019s culture. Willie Nelson wore a Yeti-sponsored Austin FC shirt at his most recent July 4 picnic at the Circuit of the Americas; it\u2019s not hard to imagine Matthew McConaughey, Gary Clark Jr., or Glenn Powell dropping ceremonial first pucks for the Austin Armadillos\u2014Salamanders? Yellow Roses? Definitely not Ice Bats\u2014at a SpaceX Arena.<\/p>\n Texas is ready for a new hockey team, and they\u2019re almost certainly going to get one. Houston, indeed, might be the right choice for it. But Austin is the vibe choice. And if Austin\u2019s twenty-first-century boom\u2014love it or hate it\u2014has taught us anything, it\u2019s this: Never underestimate vibe.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Digital subscribers can listen to this article. Subscribe today for unlimited access to Texas\u00a0Monthly. Already a subscriber? 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