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NHL expansion talks emphatically shot down

Bill Daly and Gary Bettman

Last night, the Interweb was set aflame with news that the NHL was going to expand to Las Vegas.

Shortly thereafter, NHL expansion was trending -- in addition to Sin City, the likes of Seattle, Quebec City and a second team in Toronto were all bandied about, thanks partly to this tweet from Sports Business News:

NHL expansion – four teams added by 2017, Quebec City, Toronto, Seattle, and Las Vegas $1.4b in expansion fees

— Howard Bloom (@SportsBizNews) August 27, 2014


On Wednesday, a bucket of cold water was tossed on the whole thing. Make that buckets of cold water.

First, from NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly:

“We are in no different position today with respect to expansion than we were the last time we answered the same questions,” he wrote in an email to National Post on Wednesday. “There has been interest expressed, we have and will listen to the interest, but we haven’t defined a process and certainly no decisions have been made.”

Then, from outgoing MLSE CEO and president Tim Leiweke (per Toronto’s Fan 590):

“The commissioner and I had other business this morning, so we talked for a while and this came up. I asked him, ‘did I miss a meeting?’ And he laughed and said, ‘no.’

“What I can tell you, 100 percent, as of this morning, for sure? This isn’t on the agenda right now.”

Finally, there was a report from King 5’s Chris Daniels, who has been on the NHL/NBA-to-Seattle beat for quite some time:

Three different people involved with #NHL Expansion efforts in #Vegas and/or #Seattle tell me they were surprised by internet chatter...

— Chris Daniels (@ChrisDaniels5) August 27, 2014


...and as far as those people in #Vegas and #Seattle are concerned, there is nothing new, and the #NHL reports are inaccurate.

— Chris Daniels (@ChrisDaniels5) August 27, 2014

All of this, of course, won’t completely silence rumblings The Province’s Tony Gallagher made with his article on Tuesday, which claimed NHL expansion to Vegas was a “done deal.” The league’s imbalance -- 14 teams in the Western Conference, 16 in the Eastern -- and potential to score huge revenue with expansion fees are in plain view; the NHL also has some major history with Vegas, having hosted its annual awards show there (and the L.A. Kings have been playing an exhibition series at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for years.)