When the final horn blew from the Jumbotron on April 17, 2024, the Arizona Coyotes skated off the ice with 5-2 win over the Edmonton Oilers. 

Less than three months later, the Oilers were headed to the Stanley Cup Finals, while the Coyotes packed their bags and headed to Utah. 

This game capped off a decade of disappointment in Arizona in which the Coyotes missed the playoffs in every non-Covid season since 2014.

As the teary-eyed fans watched the players salute them from center ice, they knew in their hearts that it would be the final National Hockey League game ever played in Arizona. Since the original Winnipeg Jets moved to the desert in 1996, they’ve played in three cities (Phoenix, Glendale and Tempe) and finished the 2024 season playing in a 4,600-seat college arena.

Yeah, yeah, so sad. The hockey team synonymous with bad management and straight-up incompetence for nearly 30 years, Arizona and its taxpayers refused to build a new arena for the franchise. 

While I do feel bad for Coyotes fans — and for every fan living in a city without an NHL team—the move to Utah was not guaranteed. For two tantalizing months, Houston was the frontrunner for an elusive NHL franchise.

In one of the most heartbreaking moments of my hockey fandom, the NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced that Coyotes would relocate to Utah. And so, Houston will continue without an NHL team while cities like Miami, Dallas and Denver can boast having a team in every major sports league. 

Unfortunately, the chances of another team relocating are slim. Both the San Jose Sharks and the Columbus Blue Jackets, the top two contenders, have already signed major arena leases, keeping them in their respective cities for at least the next three decades. 

My hope lies in the possibility of an expansion team coming to Houston. When and if the NHL decides to add another city, a wealthy buyer or ownership group will need to pay a mere $2 billion to the league for the rights to create a new franchise. 

Once this is approved, the league has an expansion draft, and congrats, you have a team.

Historically, expansion teams have struggled. During the 1992-93 season, the Ottawa Senators and San Jose Sharks each lost 70 out of 85 games—still the record for most losses in a single season. From 1990 to 2010, eight expansion teams entered the NHL, and every single one missed the playoffs in their inaugural season. 

Let’s be honest; life’s too short. I don’t want to watch a god-awful expansion team struggle for a decade, much like the current dumpster fires in San Jose and Columbus. Fans want results now. For the longest time, that was just a pipe dream, until the Vegas Golden Knights arrived in 2017 and made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals in their first season. 

The entire hockey world expected the Golden Knights to be absolutely horrible. Bringing back haunting memories of expansion teams past, making the finals, much less the playoffs, is unprecedented. 

The Stanley Cup is widely considered the hardest trophy to win in North American sports. It has taken some teams a half-century to win just once (I’m looking at you, St. Louis!). Some are still waiting. Shout out to Buffalo. 

And yet a group of so-called misfits nearly reached the pinnacle. And six years later, they would lift the Stanley Cup and become the fastest NHL expansion team to ever do it. 

The success of the Golden Knights has created a new standard for NHL expansion franchises. While it may be hard to replicate, fans, media and the higher-ups with deep pockets now know that an expansion team can find immediate success. 

Due to the success of the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Seattle Kraken (est. 2021), the NHL is fully ready and eager to expand and have been significantly more proactive in founding new franchises. No other major North American sports league has expanded faster since 2000. While the NHL boasts five new teams, while the NBA and NFL have added one each (Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets and Houston Texans, respectively). The MLB has not expanded since 1998. 

This is what is fueling my hope: The NHL has been proactive in founding new teams. And when you look at the Houston market, it’s perfect. 

Houston is the only top ten most populated metro area in the country that has never had an NHL team. The biggest challenge is the lack of a sufficient arena, the issue that inevitably led to the relocation of the Arizona Coyotes. We have the Toyota Center, which already houses the Houston Rockets. Yes, it is a basketball arena, but the majority of NHL teams share arenas with NBA teams.  

Houston also has one of the largest sports markets in not only the United States, but in North America. Which is important because of the abundance of Canadian cities looking for an NHL team. Houston would already have a built-in geographic rivalry with the Dallas Stars.

The last thing Houston needs is a willing buyer. With 18 billionaires in the Houston area including current ambassador to Italy, Tilman Fertitta. The real question is whether the interest is there. Luckily, this is in no short supply either. 

The prior talk of Arizona moving to Houston sparked significant interest from several potential buyers. Since then, Gary Bettman and the NHL Board of Governors have reportedly met with buyers interested in bringing a team to Houston. 

Besides Fertita, the other name that keeps coming up is Dan Friedkin, the owner of Gulf Coast Toyota and the Friedkin group. As the majority owner of English Premier League team Everton and Italian Serie A team AS Roma, Friedkin has vast experience in running professional teams. 

While those are both soccer teams—and soccer is vastly inferior to hockey—the main thing is that Friedkin and his people know how to run teams properly. The last thing any Houston hockey fan wants is an NHL team getting run right into the ground by a bad owner. Too often teams are bought by corporations that only are interested in turning a profit. What stands out to me is the genuine interest that Friedkin has in bringing a team to Houston. This is beyond money. He wants to see hockey thrive in Houston.

Hockey has proven that it can work in Houston. From 1972–1978, the Houston Aeros of the now-defunct World Hockey Association played at The Summit, which is now home of Lakewood Church. The Aeros would return from 1994–2013 as a part of the American Hockey League. The original incarnation of the Aeros experienced moderate success, mostly due to Gordie Howe, one of hockey’s all-time greatest players, who donned the Aeros sweater along with his sons, Mark and Marty, and won back-to-back WHA titles in 1974 and 1975.

Where Arizona failed was the ownership, Houston has all the pieces in place to be home to an NHL franchise. We just need a team.