Kansas City not entirely off radar for future NHL expansion

The NHL hasn't closed the book on returning to Kansas City.

Since opening its doors in 2007, the downtown Sprint Center, which seats more than 17,500 for hockey, has hosted five NHL exhibition games, and will do so again this preseason in a neutral-site contest between the Minnesota Wild and St. Louis Blues.

The Sprint Center is a rare new facility with no pro team as an anchor tenant, but the arena has been a proposed landing spot for a relocation, including the Nashville Predators and Pittsburgh Penguins in 2007 and the New York Islanders in 2011.

Preseason contests, particularly those involving the cross-state Blues, allow the NHL to gauge hockey interest in Kansas City. But a team in the City of Fountains wouldn't be a first for the NHL. Kansas City was home to the expansion Scouts, who joined the league in 1974. The team lasted just two seasons before uprooting for Denver, then moving again in 1982 to become the New Jersey Devils.

While the Scouts are no longer, hockey interests in the city have continued to be served at the minor-pro level. For 11 seasons, the Blades skated in the International Hockey League, prior to the league dissolving in 2001, and most recently, the ECHL's Missouri Mavericks have carried local support.

"Kansas City has never been entirely off our radar screen," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told Dave Caldwell of ESPN.com. "We have talked to potentially interested stakeholders in the past, and it's certainly a market that in the right circumstances (including a desire by our board to entertain further expansion) our league would fairly evaluate and consider.

"We have never studied whether the market demographics of Kansas City are likely to be suitable for an NHL franchise long-term because there has not yet been a need to do so."

Should the NHL eventually return to Kansas City, Mavericks owner and Kansas City Chiefs part-owner, Lamar Hunt Jr., has long been rumored as a potential franchise owner.

While Hunt did not submit a proposal as part of the NHL's most recent expansion process - he balked at the $500-million expansion fee, calling it "ridiculously big" in a July 2015 interview with The Kansas City Star - it does not mean the market is no longer a possibility for the NHL.

Before the NHL becomes a focus for Hunt, who still sees an NHL entry and an expansion bid as a challenge for the Kansas City market, the goal is to grow hockey interests at the grassroots level.

"Our analysis is that we really have to grow the youth programs here. We have to have more sheets of ice," said Hunt, who also serves on the executive board of the Kansas City Youth Hockey Association.

This season, the Mavericks, who drew more than 5,000 fans at the Silverstein Eye Centers Arena in nearby Independence, Mo., will rebrand as the Kansas City Mavericks in an effort to drive the local hockey market.

"When you think of hockey in the state of Missouri, you think of one spot on the other side of the state," Mavericks general manager Brent Thiessen told Caldwell. "It's putting Kansas City on the hockey map, if you will."

Further growth of the city's budding hockey interests could be the key to the NHL's return to Kansas City.

"In evaluating potential locations for NHL teams, we typically look at three things," Daly said. "One, whether the market has or is building a suitable arena facility; two, the demographics of the market and whether they suggest an ability to support an NHL franchise; and, three, whether there is qualified and interested ownership to own and operate the franchise.

"While the Sprint Center certainly checks off the first of those boxes, the other two issues remain a work in progress."

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