NHL in Seattle: New hope for arena plans?

Art Thiel has a theory.

The veteran Seattle sports columnist, writing for Sportspress Northwest, sees it this way: Chris Hansen wants the NBA to return to Seattle. He wants to build an arena in the Sodo area of the city, and there’s opposition against it. He also has the clock ticking on a Memorandum of Understanding with the city that expires in Nov. 2017.

Meanwhile, the Port of Seattle needs about $40 million for a project that would alleviate concerns that a new arena would hinder transportation around the port area, a.k.a. freight mobility.

So Thiel’s theory is that Hansen funds that project in an agreement where the port’s opposition to the arena is quelled, and then gets an extension on his MOU to build an arena for a Seattle NBA team, which isn’t coming any time soon.

Seems reasonable, right?

Oh, wait, one caveat: Hansen also needs to drop the pretense and get down with bringing an NHL team to Seattle first.

From Thiel:

If he’s going to go to the trouble of re-submitting a proposal for Sodo that helps pay for the Lander Street Bridge and includes a deadline extension, the rewrite of the MOU should also include the NHL, for which expansion/relocation are not at all far-fetched.

To build for NHL first, Hansen made it clear he needs a partner group emotionally invested in hockey and financially capable of investing in his arena plan. As far as is known, no such entity has reached out, at least in part because Hansen has no NHL deal with Seattle.

If Hansen can help the city build one bridge, the city should be open to him building another bridge to a sport that would embrace Seattle, not exploit it.

The NHL’s dance with Seattle has been one of the most mysterious ones during the expansion process, which ended with Las Vegas getting a franchise last month. There’s always been speculation that the League wanted a team there more than anything, and the fact that the Western Conference is only getting one expansion franchise didn’t exactly temper that speculation.

But the fact is that none of the three groups angling to bring hockey to Seattle stepped up with a formal bid for expansion: Victor Coleman, who wanted to “finalize an arena site” before doing so; a group that wanted the team in Bellevue; and Ray Bartoszek, an investor who also wanted to build an arena just outside of the city.

What Thiel is saying, however, is that without a formal agreement with the city in place to fund the arena for an NHL tenant first – something the NHL itself has cited in talking about the market’s challenges for possible expansion – no one that wants to bring the NHL to Seattle will formally step up and help with the funding.

I firmly believe that had the MOU covered an NHL-first scenario to begin with, and these hockey bidders weren’t just making noise and had the resources, that Seattle would have joined Las Vegas in this round of expansion.

Now, it all comes back to Hansen, who has no desire to own an NHL team but is open to working with a group in an NHL-first scenario. If it’s an arena in Sodo, he still holds the cards. And, as Thiel notes, he’s in a position to extend the game.
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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.