The NHL in Atlanta: Why Chapter 3 could be completely different

When the Atlanta Hawks made the 2011 NBA playoffs, their ownership group held a company pep rally outside Philips Arena, the downtown home they shared with the local hockey team.

Players were there. Cheerleaders, too. The sun was shining, even as the latest set of storm clouds gathered around the Hawks’ NHL siblings. Owned by the same chaos-prone consortium, the Atlanta Thrashers were once again the subject of relocation rumors. It was, at the time, their natural state.

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Longtime NHL executive Don Waddell, in his role as GM of the Thrashers and an executive vice president for Atlanta Spirit LLC, told gathered employees that, though their bosses — his bosses — were looking to add investors, they were committed to keeping an NHL team in one of the United States’ largest metropolitan areas.

That commitment lasted about a month. By June 21, the NHL Board of Governors made it official: hockey, for the second time, was leaving Atlanta. In 11 seasons, the Thrashers made the playoffs once, in 2007. They were swept.

In the years since, the dialogue surrounding the Thrashers — and the idea of hockey in the deep South — has seemed to undergo a shift. As one NHL team teeters on the brink of relocation, existing franchise price tags approach $1 billion and the league’s owners bask in the glory of expansion fees paid by well-capitalized owners with well-placed arenas, that dialogue has taken the form of a question: Could the NHL succeed in the area, after all?

In March, well-connected media members like John Buccigross and Kevin Weekes started dropping unsubtle, unambiguous tweets that made a third Georgia-based franchise seem a matter of “when,” rather than “if.”

NHL team coming to Atlanta again…stay tuned. Alpharetta. #wafflehouse #thirdtimeisacharm #like

— BucciOT.Com (@Buccigross) March 3, 2023

“As I look back on it with the bird’s eye, 20-year view of it, it didn’t have a chance,” former Thrashers captain Ray Ferraro told The Athletic.

Ferraro knows of which he speaks. He was there for the start of it all, when incoming players guessed where to buy homes, ownership couldn’t quite suss out how to stock an NHL workout room and the team won 14 games.

“That’s not to say it doesn’t have a chance. Those are two different things,” Ferraro said.

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He isn’t alone in that sentiment. In conversations with people closely associated with Atlanta hockey, two standard positions emerged: That the Thrashers failed because of bad rosters, poor ownership and a misplaced arena rather than a fundamental rejection of the sport. The team won exactly zero playoff games in 11 seasons. Arenas in Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh have emptied over much less.

Through it all, a majority of the fans lived at least 45 minutes away.

If those issues are addressed and accounted for, team-seekers believe Chapter 3 in the story of Atlanta hockey could be completely different.

“I think the game has changed,” deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic. “I think demographics of the various markets have changed over time. So the fact that they tried and failed twice wouldn’t necessarily preclude a third time.”

Step 1: A good team on the ice

The most recent expansion teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, from the jump, had something going for them that the Thrashers lacked: A commitment by the NHL, by virtue of the expansion draft rules, to ice a competitive Day 1 roster.

The circumstances have been covered in the past, but they’re worth restating: In the 1999 expansion draft, 26 teams were permitted to protect either 15 players (five defensemen, nine forwards, one goalie) or 11 (three defensemen, seven forwards, two goalies).

In the Vegas and Seattle drafts, those numbers shrank to either 11 (seven forwards, three defensemen, one goalie) or nine (one goalie, eight skaters regardless of position).

The added flexibility there is obvious; the rules led directly to Vegas adding Marc-Andre Fleury in a trade with the Penguins, raiding the Panthers and stocking up on NHL-caliber defensemen. Seattle built a roster good enough to make the playoffs in its second year.

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The Thrashers? They added five goalies in the draft process. The best save percentage in the group in the ensuing season was Norm Maracle’s .890. Of the skaters selected, defenseman Yannick Tremblay had the most points in 1999-2000 with 31. Two drafted forwards (Dean Sylvester and Mike Stapleton) had more than five goals.

The highest-profile Thrashers in the first year were No. 1 overall pick Patrik Stefan, who wound up as one of the biggest busts in NHL history, and a pair of forwards in their 30s with several productive seasons between them but zero All-Star Games.

“Nelson Emerson and I were flying down to Orlando for training camp and USA Today had a blurb on each team,” Ferraro said, “and it went, ‘The Thrashers will be led in offense by Nelson Emerson and Ray Ferraro.’

“Nelly looked at me and said, ‘Damn, are we in trouble.’”

In their inaugural season, the Thrashers drew an average of more than 17,200 fans, 11th in the league. With 60-, 54, and 74-point rosters on the ice, that number declined year-over-year to about 13,400 in 2002-03.

Those seasons were dotted with some solid individual performances. Dany Heatley scored 41 goals in 2002-03 before a tragic, career-altering car accident with him at the wheel that killed teammate Dan Snyder. In 2003-04, Ilya Kovalchuk had 87 points as a 20-year-old. The following offseason, Heatley was traded to Ottawa for Marian Hossa, setting the table for a 2006-07 playoff run that lasted all of six days.

Relative success aside, the long-term damage had been done; the 2006-07 season was the second played under the ownership of the Atlanta Spirit.

Step 2: Dedicated owners

The Spirit were the last, most problematic owners of an Atlanta NHL team. They weren’t the first. The original Atlanta Flames left for Calgary in 1980 due in part to mediocre results, stagnant attendance and the real estate collapse of the late 1970s. That’s where owner Tom Cousins made his money — and where his money was tied up.

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“That wasn’t a management issue,” Richard Adler, a longtime sports executive and former owner of the IHL’s Atlanta Knights, told The Athletic. “That was just pure money. He needed to save his business.”

Beyond that, as Daly said, “the world has changed a lot since 1972.”

By the mid-1990s, Ted Turner, the Braves and Hawks owner, Atlanta icon and billionaire founder of CNN, entered the picture. His push for a downtown arena and the return of the NHL were inextricable. Turner paid an $80 million expansion fee for the Thrashers and secured the construction of Philips Arena, on the site of the Hawks’ and Flames’ previous home, the Omni. The hockey team, though, were second-class citizens from the start.

“There was nothing that was right or set up to succeed,” Ferraro said. “(Waddell) was telling me about the budget. They didn’t have one, basically. (Turner was) like, ‘Here are the Hawks, here are the Braves, and you guys get whatever is left over.’”

Those leftover funds manifested in low payroll numbers. The overall mindset also led to things like a weight room that initially looked like a “health club,” Ferraro said, stocked with supported weights, calf machines and other equipment with zero utility for professional hockey players. Members of the inaugural roster moved to the area without much in the way of resources like real-estate advice or doctor recommendations, something that today would be unthinkable.

“(Turner) doesn’t like hockey,” Adler said. “He never did because he viewed everything through television and didn’t feel it fit.”

By 2003, with his arena goal long met, Turner’s other business ventures led to the team changing hands. Time Warner, the parent company of Turner’s broadcasting corporation, merged with AOL. The end result was the sale of the Thrashers, the Hawks and the arena’s operating rights to the Atlanta Spirit, a partnership between nine businessmen from Atlanta, Boston and Washington, D.C.

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Shortly after their purchase was completed, despite public proclamations to the contrary, the Spirit tried to sell the Thrashers — a fact that came out in one of the many lawsuits involving them over the next several years.

“I’m listening to these people,” Adler said, recalling an early interaction with the Atlanta Spirit, “and going ‘These guys are nuts.'”

By 2005, Steve Belkin, the owner with the largest personal stake at 30 percent, was being sued by the rest of the group over a botched Hawks transaction; the legal proceedings lasted until December 2010. Belkin did not contribute to any cash calls during the five-year mess.

A few months later, they’d found a buyer. True North, after a failed attempt to purchase and relocate the league-operated Arizona Coyotes to Winnipeg, pivoted to the Thrashers. Rather than taking over for the Spirit and hoping a new Atlanta-based ownership group would emerge, the NHL bit, and that was that.

Anything similar taking place with a post-Vegas ownership group, in Atlanta or any other North American city, wouldn’t just be unacceptable — it’d be nearly unimaginable. The simplest reason for that is the amount of money involved. Fenway Sports Group, with their 2021 purchase of the Penguins, joined the NHL owners club for more than 10 times what Turner paid for the Thrashers. The Kraken footed a $650 million expansion fee.

A number that large raises the stakes, which would’ve helped with Turner. It’s also a barrier to entry, which would’ve helped with the Spirit. The days of purchasing an NHL team as part of an NBA/arena contract bundle — and immediately trying to flip it, as did the Spirit — seem to be over.

Amidst all the legal backbiting between the partners, and the pall that cast over the franchise, were other public missteps. The biggest, according to Ben Wright, a longtime Spirit employee who managed web content for the Thrashers, was when owner Bruce Levenson, in a “town hall” meeting with season-ticket holders, told a roomful of the Thrashers’ most dedicated supporters to “just deal with” price increases.

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“That’s when the fans really knew they didn’t care,” Wright said.

Waddell was succinct: “It was an ownership issue, not the city that failed. … It was a difficult ownership group to work with.”

The lesson for any new ownership group in the area, Adler said, is simple: Work harder.

“You’ve got to treat it just like the minor leagues, and you’ve got to market the s— out of it,” he said.

Adler would know; he brought the Knights, an expansion IHL team, to the Omni in 1991. With 16 years at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey under his belt, he said he used his “circus promoter” mindset to grind out a spot at the table.

“(Grassroots is) not a cliché. That’s what it is,” he said. “I needed to get (kids) to understand what this game was all about.”

Before long, the Knights were outdrawing the Hawks in their own building. Adler said in-arena sponsors, including a local furniture company, paid the Knights higher advertising rates, too

“We lived in fear. And we worked in fear. And that’s why it worked. I think the Southern markets have to be done that way,” Adler said. “The reason we did better than the Hawks is they were arrogant. ‘We’re the NBA. They gotta come.’ ‘Well, OK, we’re gonna show them.’ And we did. We outworked them. We out-sponsored them.”

In 1993-94, they won a championship. At that point, none of Atlanta’s major pro teams had done the same, and the city responded accordingly.

“They threw us a parade. For a minor league hockey team in a major league market,” Adler said.

The parade, of course, was through downtown Atlanta. If there is ever another celebration of a championship hockey team in the area, it’ll likely begin about 30 miles north.

Step 3: An arena in the right location

Ferraro, like many of the first-batch Thrashers, got an early, unwelcome education in Atlanta’s legendary traffic. Most of them — again, without any real guidance on where to move — chose to live near the team’s planned practice rink in Duluth, Ga.

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A rush-hour trip from that area to downtown Atlanta would call for, conservatively, an hour on I-85. That was an issue for players, but at least they were paid for their trouble. Fans were another story.

“You were jamming I-don’t-know-how-many people into one highway that goes into two exits. You got no chance,” Ferraro said. “So people are like, ‘I’m not going down there. I’m never going to get in. I’m never going to get out. It’s a weeknight.’

Adler, for his part, said a feasibility study he commissioned with the Knights in the 90s told him that any new arena would be best located in the suburbs. By that point, he said, he and his partner were trying to attract the NHL themselves. When those plans fell through — in part, he said, because of Turner’s quest to build downtown — and the Knights moved to Quebec, Adler instead took over the Houston Aeros.

Now, after nearly 25 more years of population growth and the presence of hockey in the area, the consensus is clear: Any new NHL team would have to be located in the northern suburbs. Any other choice would be a non-starter.

“You know, we haven’t studied (the change in the market),” commissioner Gary Bettman said at the NHL GM meetings in March. “But to the extent that we’re getting expressions of interest from the general Atlanta region, it’s in locations for arenas that are different than where they’ve been.”

In the years after the Thrashers’ founding, the core of the hockey-fan market has coalesced around Alpharetta, home of The Cooler, a two-sheet ice complex located off the Georgia 400 section of US-19. One of the rink’s core customers is the Atlanta Amateur Hockey League.

About to start its 50th year, the AAHL is, at any given time, one of the few large adult leagues in the United States. About 1,700 players are spread between three levels, with games scheduled at rinks in Alpharetta, Sandy Spring, Kennesaw and Cumming.

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“If there were more rinks out there, we could fill them,” AAHL president Kevin Luebke told The Athletic. He believes that an arena in “a northern zip code” would be a success.

“Who wants to go downtown to watch a hockey game and fight the traffic there and fight the traffic back?” Luebke said. “You (put a rink in Alpharetta), that’s a game changer.”

That theoretical arena, according to Atlanta hockey sources, would most likely be located on one of two land parcels. One includes Alpharetta’s 84-acre North Point Mall property, in Atlanta’s Fulton County and a 15-minute bus ride from the final stop of the MARTA rail system.

In November, Alpharetta’s city council denied a 10-year, $550 million plan by Trademark Properties to build retail and restaurant spaces, a hotel and 1,000 residential properties while demolishing a part of the mall.

“There’s nothing going in over there we need,” councilman Dan Merkel said, according to Appen Media. “We’ve got plenty of hotels, we’ve got plenty of office space … apartments, we’ve got them and they’re coming.”

When asked for insight on increased chatter linking Alpharetta with a prospective NHL team, Merkel told The Athletic he was “not in a position to discuss.”

Plans for the other potential site, six miles north of the mall in Forsyth County, have already been released. In late April, local officials and developer Vernon Krause announced their intention to build a $2 billion “world-class entertainment hub for North Georgia including best-in-class dining, local and high-end retail, a boutique and business hotel, a community center, varied residential options and an arena designed to host a range of top-tier events.”

The arena, officials said, would cover 750,000 square feet and seat about 18,000.

“If the NHL at some time decides they want to expand,” Carl Hirsh, managing partner of the project’s consulting firm Stafford Sports, told Fox 5, “we would love to talk to them about that.”

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The project, known as The Gathering at South Forsyth, is undeniably farther along than any other, boasts the benefit of a robust PR campaign and can bask in comparisons with The Battery, a similar, successful “district” development at the Braves’ Truist Park in Cobb County.

Its drawbacks are just as clear. That extra six miles take it further afield from public transportation and into a county that, until the late 20th century, had a reputation for extreme violence and hostility toward Black people.

In May, Forsyth County took the next step, greenlighting a financial study on the proposal.

Ultimately, the theoretical draw of a firm NHL foothold in Atlanta is obvious: money. There are expansion fees to consider, should the league eventually choose that route. The issue, Daly said, is not on the table at the league’s annual board meeting this month.

Still, there’s a pending sale in Ottawa that could drive franchise price tags even further into the stratosphere.

There’s a team in flux in Arizona, as well, and a 13,000-capacity, hockey-capable building in Duluth’s Gas South Arena that could work as a short-term home.

There’s been reported interest from Salt Lake City in getting a team. Daly confirmed he spoke directly with Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith about that. “We’ve certainly talked to Ryan Smith,”  Daly said, “and he has indicated he has an interest in bringing the NHL to Salt Lake City.”

There’s a league rightsholder, Turner Sports, headquartered in Atlanta. There are more potential TV eyeballs available than all but five markets in the United States, with more joining year-over-year.

There are also lessons learned.

“As I always say, never say never,” Waddell said. “Never say never.”

(Top photos: Robin Alam, Minas Panagiotakis, Scott Cunningham / Getty Images)