Here’s a fun piece of speculation going around today: It’s possible that the Arizona Coyotes may be moving to the Pacific Northwest, and Portland may be an option for the National Hockey League team.
According to officials in Seattle and Portland, members of the Arizona Coyotes have toured arenas in both locations in the past three months. The destinations appear to have been the KeyArena in Seattle and the Moda Center in Portland, Ore.
The Moda Center is the home of the National Basketball Association’s Portland Trailblazers and has been long rumored to want a National Hockey League team.
Trailblazers owner, Paul Allen, has said he would like to own a percentage of any team that may play at Moda Center. Portland has long been one of the many rumored landing spots of the Coyotes, as well as Seattle.
The Coyotes spokesperson said, naturally, “that is false,” the paper reported. But a spokesperson for the KeyArena in Seattle said a representative from the Coyotes was a part of a tour there “for potential developers and potential ownership groups.”
You should take news that the Coyotes are looking to move and that Portland is a potential landing spot with a very large grain of salt: It’s pretty common for professional sports franchises to threaten to leave its current city in order to secure better arenas and financial incentives from the local government. But, still, it would be pretty damn exciting.
Put this thought out of your head forever. I’m a huge hockey fan — Toronto born, Chicago raised — and it’s plain to see that Portland can’t support an NHL team. Moda Center isn’t big enough (18,280 with the ice and boards in place), so ticket prices will necessarily be crazy-high for a team owner to break even, and the city doesn’t have the local hockey infrastructure (local amateur leagues, high school and college teams) whose families make up a large portion of any NHL team’s fan base. The league knows all of this, and it will never approve a franchise here. So while it makes for a good click-bait headline, it’s never going to happen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_…
It would be larger than about 30% of other current NHL arenas.
It’d be great if Portland got an NHL team –but if they start demanding public money, then fuck the hell no.
hockey is a racist misogynistic sport based on toxic male privilege. i cant believe portland would even consider this. this is what happens when you elect a neo nazi into power