The Graeme Roustan Show: Chris O'Reilly

The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 hockey business annual is available at THN.com/free, featuring the annual 100 people of power and influence list.

W. Graeme Roustan, owner and publisher of The Hockey News, sat down with special guests for peer-to-peer conversations also featured in the issue, including the partner at BBB Architects, Chris O'Reilly.

Here's their full conversation in The Graeme Roustan Show:

Read along with an excerpt from their discussion:

W. GRAEME ROUSTAN: You guys have been doing a lot of NHL buildings going back decades. Can you talk a little bit about the history of BBB in relation to arenas with the NHL?

CHRIS O’REILLY: It’s been an amazing ride. It’s been almost 40 years for our firm. We got into hockey pretty quickly with working for the Canucks out in Vancouver. That was a brand-new building that we did, Rogers Arena. Then we moved on to Scotiabank Arena, originally the Air Canada Centre. We’ve done both new buildings and, lately, we’ve been doing a lot of big renovations, updating buildings that are in the 20- to 25-year-old range.

WGR: Wasn’t there a burst of new buildings back 20, 30 years ago? Suddenly, everybody was going out and getting hockey-specific arenas built?

CO: Yes, that’s correct. There were. Unfortunately for the arena industry, they were older-generation buildings that were built in an age that had very limited programming in them. There was a capacity of seats there that you’d be able to buy a seat and enjoy the event, but there wasn’t much more in terms of fan experience beyond that. The whole live sports-and-entertainment industry exploded after a great majority of those buildings were built already. That’s why we’ve enjoyed quite a good business now, renovating these big buildings, making it more of a fan experience with more focus on food and beverage, different types of hospitality seating, private suites, clubs, things like that. It’s a lot more fun for fans and corporations and all the customers.

WGR: Let’s say 30 years ago, when somebody decided they wanted to build an arena, did they think of it as a place where hockey and basketball would be played? Or was it really a one-sport arena?

CO: From a business point of view, a lot of the NHL and NBA arenas, you need a couple of teams, basketball and hockey, in your building to survive, along with a good calendar of live music events. Most buildings are designed with the larger ice surface in mind, and then the basketball court’s about half the length of a hockey arena. It’s about a quarter of the surface area. It’s a little easier to accommodate basketball after hockey. There’s been a few that have designed their buildings with basketball first in mind. Then you run into sightline issues and trying to properly accommodate the hockey fans, especially in the end zones.

WGR: You’ve got these old buildings that have been around for 20, 30 or 40 years. They’re sleepy, not just in need of a facelift, they need a complete makeover right down to the concrete pillars, don’t they?

CO: Yeah, it’s fundamental programming that just didn’t exist in that era in the ’90s. It was all about a seat. The food and beverage focus was not great. You could go get a sandwich or a hot dog and a beer, maybe, if you were lucky. The washroom facilities were not great, sometimes they were on a different floor and overcrowded.

One of the projects that we were involved with early was the SkyDome here (in Toronto), now the Rogers Centre. That was a real game-changer in terms of programming facilities.

WGR: When these buildings get to be 30 years old, the cost of new construction is unheard of. It’s just through the roof nowadays. When you have a big, older arena, do owners today think about bulldozing it and starting from scratch, or do they focus on, “Let’s renovate this thing?”

CO: I think every building, especially the older-generation buildings, and every market is unique. We were hired by the owners of Madison Square Garden. We had designed the Rangers’ and the Knicks’ training facility in Westchester and had a good relationship with the client. They were talking about maybe a new building or a renovation. They asked us to look at it and help them decide which made more sense.

We cut some cross-sections through MSG, taking about half a dozen of the newest buildings around the NHL and NBA and virtually fit them inside the building envelope. We were able to do this because MSG was such a big building, about a million square feet. We said, “Look, you can virtually build a new design inside your building envelope.” That was the light bulb for them, and they went, “Wow,” and it saved them a lot of money. It was still an expensive reno, as it was almost a billion dollars.

WGR: But you think about the cost of closing down.

CO: Yeah, that was the big thing for them because they have more events than there are days of the year, right? Like, 425 events a year. That’s another thing that we helped them look at, was a development schedule for how long it would take to renovate their building, as it was about a five- or six-year process. There were three summer shutdowns as well as trying to work around during the seasons, putting up hoarding and things like that. It was a very complicated process, but that was another milestone project for us that showed a lot of other NHL and NBA owners that we were a good firm, that we were reliable and could really deliver.

WGR: You talked a little bit ago about how if you had a building that was a program for hockey, you could always fit a basketball program inside of that. But going the other way is much more difficult, which is what you’re dealing with right now at the Delta Center in Utah.

CO: Yeah, it’s in reverse. We had done quite a substantial renovation for the owners of the Jazz back from 2015 to 2017. Probably considered a small renovation in terms of cost, it was about $110 million. That was updating the building, as we just spoke about, from something that didn’t have a lot of amenities in it. It was about 25 years old at the time. There were not a lot of clubs and restaurants. It was outdated. We did quite a nice job on that for them.

Then when the ownership changed hands, they came calling again, which we appreciate very much. They asked us if we could take a look at how we could fit the hockey program in there. We did the fundamental spaces that the team needed to start playing this past fall. It was a whirlwind. We had about three months of designing. We were still designing and producing renderings and showing the client. Then, the next day, we’d see photographs from the site with the studs, the electrical and everything was being built on site. That was death-defying but exciting at the same time. That turned out really well. We got them all settled into their new home.

Phase 2 was the bigger building renovation. How do we get hockey in there? Their published capacity for hockey is probably about 16,500, but, in actuality, seats that have viable sightlines are probably only 10,300 to 10,500. We’ve promised them 17,000 good-sight-line tickets. That’s what is in the works right now. And, as you mentioned, the seating bowl was designed for basketball.

Our first concept was to do a big gut on the end zones, but that involved taking out some pretty serious columns that hold the roof up. That was serious money, serious time. The first thing that struck me when I met Ryan Smith of the SEG Group was he loves his basketball and his basketball fans. One of the first things he said was, “I do not want to sacrifice the basketball experience in my building.” So, we have to, more or less, keep basketball the same. We’re dropping basketball capacity, maybe, by a couple hundred seats. We’re looking at some really cool adjustable variable-rise seating systems that can stay in place and go between basketball and hockey sightlines without moving around like you might do in a traditional building. It’s a challenging project, and we’re getting to use some cool technology. It’s very exciting.

WGR: There’s something unique about this building, though, when it comes to the sightlines that you guys have figured out. Is this something that you want to talk about or can talk about today?

CO: A big thing I forgot to mention that is part of the whole sightline solution is to raise the event floor. The court and the ice surface have to be raised two feet, which is fairly monumental. That’s all planned for the first phase. It’s a three-phase project over the next three summers, 2025 through 2027. We should be done in the fall of ’27. But the first heavy lift is redoing the entire lower bowl, both ends, and raising the event level by two feet. You can imagine looking at a basketball court when you put the wider and longer ice rink on there, you’d lose all the sightlines for that first quarter of the rink. By raising the rink and the court up, you’re going to improve basketball sight lines, too. That’s another cool facet of this project.

For this and more interviews with a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 issue, available at THN.com/free.