Seattle is getting the green light from the Board of Governors within the NHL to become the 32nd NHL franchise and will begin season play in 2021-2022. This great news for league that just added the 31st franchise in the Las Vegas Golden Knights to play their inaugural season just last year. This shows that professional hockey is growing in popularity and is now being demanded in markets that don’t currently have a team or franchise within the state that they can cheer for and support. The team will be owned by a group consisting of three members: David Bonderman, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Tod Leiweke. Billionaire businessman Bonderman and movie producer Bruckheimer will act as the majority owners for the team while Leiweke will act as the team President and CEO having worked in upper management of professional teams for over two decades. They are playing at the old SuperSonic’s home court KeyArena; however, it has been granted a $700 million renovation for the arena (will gut the whole thing but leave the roof) and will have a capacity to seat 17,400 for hockey and 18,600 for basketball. Seattle already has a great number of professional sports teams that encompass many of the different sports and professional levels within them. The lack of hockey, in an area that would make perfect sense to play hockey in, shows that this could become an even more successful expansion than the Golden Knights who drew record fans almost every game and made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Playoffs their first year.
Best Goals
These are some of the best goals from the 2017-18 season and some of these give me chills. I can’t wait to see some of these guys back out in action!
Coaches on the hot seat
As we may have been seeing recently, there has been a slew of coaches and GM’s getting canned and it is not as uncommon as we may think. Often when teams are hitting mid-season and are seeing a decline in their progress towards their team goals,
the coaches are the ones that get a finger pointed at them and are often given short amounts of time to turn things around. This is the case for coach Guy Boucher (Ottawa Senator’s HC) who nearly led his team to the Cup in 2017 and then was at the helm when the team fell off the earth and took a 30th-place finish in Spring of 2018. The dud duo of Peter Chiarelli and Todd McLellan, GM and Head Coach of the Edmonton Oiler’s respectively, have gold in their young superstars like Connor McDavid, a nominee for sweetest hands in the league, and have not been able to tighten up the gaping holes that they have in their roster because of limited salary cap space. If these guys don’t turn it around soon, it could be the axe for them too.