The case for forty

Vegas and Seattle both worked, and Utah stabilized what had become a mess in Arizona with real ownership and a real building. That should close the debate over whether the NHL can still place teams in new markets and make them stick. The real question now is whether expansion stops at 34, or whether the league treats 40 as the destination and builds backward from there.

Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix are large U.S. metros with obvious hockey cases that remain unfilled. Quebec City has a rink and a fanbase that never moved on. Saskatchewan holds the prairie slot in the west, Baltimore and Cleveland fit the Northeast corridor, and New Orleans fills the gap on the Gulf. Eight franchises get you to 40, split evenly between east and west, with Detroit staying where it is. Hartford stays off this list; the Whalers belong with the former brands, not in this expansion.

The common thread in all of this is media. An arena holds about 18,000 seats, and on most good nights the majority of those seats are already sold. You can add buildings, but ticket revenue stays local and it stays capped. Media revenue doesn't cap the same way. The NHL's current U.S. rights deal pays on the order of $600 million a year across ESPN and Turner and runs out after 2027–28, while the NBA's new packages are an order of magnitude higher. That gap has very little to do with the quality of the hockey on the ice. It comes down to inventory, packaging, and whether the league can sell a national product instead of thirty-two fractured regional deals that keep bleeding subscribers as the RSN model collapses.

Thirty-two teams produce 1,312 regular-season games. Forty teams produce 1,640, which is roughly twenty-five percent more live inventory on a nightly basis for Amazon, ESPN, Apple, or a league-owned app to sell against. Streamers are not buying one marquee game a week; they are buying hockey every night for six months. The gate still matters, especially in the Canadian markets, but the long-term valuation play looks like what MLB is trying to get to: more games, streaming rights the league controls, and national buyers competing for packages.

Tradition Isn't the Only Strategy

The macro trajectory of NHL expansion in the United States is increasingly shaped by a combination of media leverage, regional population shifts, and the league's evolving strategic priorities. Over the last two decades, the NHL has emphasized its long-term value in embedding itself deeper into major U.S. markets, particularly in the South and West, where population growth and TV market size outpace traditional hockey interest.

Expansion focuses less on hockey culture and more on media footprint, controlling valuable real estate, and owning a share of major metro economies. The NHL has shown it's willing to play the long game in large markets, betting that ownership stability and arena control will eventually turn things around. From a league standpoint, being in those cities is more valuable than not, even if it means beginning with weak attendance.

In the U.S., trying to find "hockey cities" usually ends up just circling the same handful of cold-weather regions. That's not scalable. What is scalable is broader sports culture, especially in metro areas with disposable income, an appetite for live entertainment, and an identity vacuum that a team can help fill. So it's less about choosing "hockey towns" and more about planting roots in cities that can absorb and grow a team brand as part of their identity. At this point, the real game for the league is owning distribution channels in America's most commercially valuable cities, regardless of whether the locals grew up skating on ponds.

To this end, arena location and accessibility are everything. Downtown presence not only boosts attendance and corporate involvement, but it also reinforces a team's cultural relevance. NHL-only development projects are a hard sell in most U.S. cities; that's why leveraging existing NBA infrastructure is smart, it gives them instant access to prime real estate without the uphill battle of building solo. A shared arena also creates economic viability right out the gate and minimizes municipal friction.

Every pro team is a node in the city's cultural and economic network. Having a franchise means the NHL is visible in that city's advertising landscape, news cycles, merchandise economy, and civic psyche. That presence becomes its own form of equity. The long-term play isn't about winning fans; it's about becoming part of a city's ecosystem. When the NHL isn't in a top-15 market, they're forfeiting the largest opportunities.

The league should absolutely prioritize Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix; those three metros are simply too significant to ignore, and the upside far outweighs the history of past failure. It's not about fitting hockey into a market, but nurturing it and providing a strong on-ice product, where the team becomes a pillar of the city's identity.

The raw numbers will always favor the U.S. The population, corporations, and TV money are unmatched. But what Canada brings to the table is pure, guaranteed passion. In Canada, you can place a team into a market a fraction the size of Atlanta, and you'll get season ticket waitlists, local sponsors lining up, and full houses every night. It's less about "if it'll work," and more about how to leverage its inevitable success.

You don't invest in Canada for growth curves or expansion fees; you invest for certainty, culture, and legacy. These are markets where the game is already a religion, where you just need to build them a cathedral.

40 Teams Is Not a Fantasy

The real Canadian vision isn't just about where the teams will be, but where the league itself is going. The idea of a 40-team NHL, which would've sounded ridiculous even 15 years ago, now feels not only plausible but strategically inevitable, if you're thinking like a commissioner who wants to maximize reach, revenue, and valuation over the next few decades.

But it's not just about expansion fees. The real shift is in how the league will make money. The more teams you have, the more inventory you create. More games, more localized content, more city-based branding opportunities, more micro-transactions on digital platforms. The trajectory points toward a layered system of national rights, regional streaming packages, and even team-level subscription content. When you have 40 teams, suddenly you can create dynamic scheduling blocks, regional mini-conferences, and daily hockey content that spans coast-to-coast, creating the consistency that advertisers and streamers love.

There's also the real estate angle, which is arguably the most underappreciated. The owners aren't just trying to own a team; they're trying to control the arena, the entertainment district, the parking lots, the hotels, the naming rights, the development zones. The more teams the NHL adds, the more they can replicate this "team as an anchor tenant" model. The real challenge will be scheduling and playoff format. With 40 teams, you can't run the same 82-game calendar forever.

40 teams could work, but more importantly, so could the platform underneath those teams that will define the NHL's future. A digital-first, globally-minded, property-leveraging, content-producing ecosystem that's much more than who plays where, because if they get it right, the NHL could quietly become one of the smartest long-term growth assets in all of sports.