For months now, the notion of NHL expansion hasn’t been on the league’s front burner, but don’t take that to mean expansion won’t be happening in the next few years. Under commissioner Gary Bettman, the league has always been coy when it comes to the movement or creation of teams.

The NHL is very good at keeping high-end secrets, but Bettman’s comments Friday in Sunrise, Florida certainly did nothing to extinguish long-standing rumors that the league would soon-enough be growing, most likely, by two teams.

The favorite to be the first city to land a team remains Houston, but picking up steam of late is the prospect of the NHL returning to Atlanta for the third time in league history. And it’s safe to say the league is on track to eventually expand by two teams, one of which would be an Atlanta team. 

For proof, consider Bettman’s glowing appraisal of Atlanta Friday night.

“It’s a different place than when the Flames and the Thrashers left, in terms of how big the city is, how robust it is, the sporting interest,” Bettman said. “I don't think the prior two (Atlanta teams) have any bearing on whether or not we would go back – if all the other pieces that are referred to were put together.”

When the league looks at a potential expansion team, the pieces they’re looking for are (a) a market that can support another major-league team, (b) well-established and reliable business-people at the helm of ownership, and (c) either a deal in place to develop land into a new arena, or an arena already standing. That’s what gives Houston the edge right now, as they would likely play in the Toyota Center. 

Atlanta doesn’t have an NHL-caliber rink just yet, but Sportsnet spoke to Georgia businessman Vernon Krause, who is leading a group that intends to put a team in Forsyth County, Ga., which is part of metropolitan Atlanta. Krause revealed that his group is close to putting all its financial ducks in a row – including building a new arena – and presenting an expansion pitch to Bettman and the 32 team owners.

“The next step is for us to go up to (NHL headquarters in) New York and meet with the commissioner of the NHL and show them what we have in place with the county in hopes that they vote for expansion,” Krause said. “There’s certain criteria that we have to meet to even apply for an expansion franchise. And that was purchasing land, getting the zoning that we needed. Both of those have been accomplished. Once we got the (Forsyth) county vote, getting definitive documents done, which our lawyers are working on, that we can present to the NHL, talking with our investors that we’ve been talking with over the last couple of years, being able to present what I would call a completed package to the NHL.”

The NHL doesn’t have a firm timetable for expansion, but THN.com believes that when the league does expand again – and to be sure, we don’t have a doubt that expansion is coming – it will expand by two teams and not, say, by one team one year, and another team in a subsequent year. The competitive imbalance that would occur if only one expansion team materialized would give an advantage to the conference that stays at 16 teams while the other conference grows to 17 teams. And players and team owners won’t want to deal with that imbalance.

It makes much more sense, then, that the NHL will expand with its 33rd and 34th teams – Houston in the Western Conference and Atlanta in the Eastern Conference – at the same time. That would leave 17 teams in each conference, and while the league’s playoff process would probably have to be tweaked to guarantee a fair competitive balance, that won’t stop them from adding teams and putting a couple billion dollars per expansion franchise in the league’s coffers.

If expansion were not in the cards for the NHL, Bettman would’ve firmly shot down any and every rumor to the contrary. Instead, he only stoked the fire of expansion speculation with his comments Friday, and those breadcrumbs of information will almost assuredly lead to a path ending with the league growing to 34 teams. 

You may not like the prospects of expansion, but you should get used to it. Because, absent some unlikely development, expansion is on the horizon for the NHL, and it gets closer to reality with every passing day. And Houston and Atlanta are now firmly leading the pack in landing a new team.

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