Thanks to the increasing number of private equity firms interested in acquiring a stake in NHL clubs, team valuations will continue to soar. W. Graeme Roustan shares his valuations of every team.
Private equity is now in on the action of driving the value of NHL and all professional sports franchises, and this is just the beginning of jaw-dropping valuations that have absolutely no direct connection to or correlation with a normal adjusted EBITDA multiple.
David 'Doc' O'Connor and I first met when he was an agent to the stars and managing partner of Creative Artists Agency. I was living in Beverly Hills and had some movie rights, which is why, for a short time, CAA was my agent. Doc left CAA after 30 years in 2015 to become the president and CEO of Madison Square Gardens Company, which owns the New York Rangers, the NBA's Knicks and many other business operations.
After a cup of coffee lasting two years, he co-founded and became a managing partner of Arctos Partners, which describes itself on LinkedIn as "…a Dallas, New York and London based private equity firm focused on acquiring passive minority stakes in professional sports franchises as well as providing liquidity and structured growth capital solutions to sports franchise control owners and governors."
Arctos was the first private equity firm the NHL allowed to purchase a minority stake in a team when they bought a reported 30-percent stake in the Tampa Bay Lightning (20 percent in 2022 and another 10 percent in 2023) and a 10-percent stake in the Minnesota Wild in 2022. They also have ownership stakes in the Pittsburgh Penguins (via Fenway Sports Group) and the New Jersey Devils.
It was due to the opening of the ownership suite by the NHL in 2022 to private equity, and what that would mean to valuations, that The Hockey News recognized we needed to include Doc in the Hockey Industry Executives silo in the People of Power and Influence package, where he has appeared since then.
Arctos made news in December 2025, when rumors hit the wire that KKR, the global leader in private equity, with nearly 300 acquisitions and almost $700 billion in assets, was about to announce it was acquiring Arctos. For full disclosure, Doc and I were talking about Arctos owning a 20-percent stake in the Ottawa Senators as part of my bid to acquire the team in 2023, which fell short to my friend and current Senators owner and governor Michael Andlauer. As I stated in my Publisher's Note in Volume 76, Issue 14, Andlauer is the right owner for the Ottawa Senators.
Whether or not you think private equity is good in that it provides founders of companies a way to either exit their investment completely or merely take some money off the table, or, conversely, that private equity destroys companies by loading them up with debt only to see them declare bankruptcy, it is here to stay.
There are some who say it was private equity that loaded up Performance Sports Group (Bauer) with $330 million of debt to acquire Easton Baseball in 2014 that caused its bankruptcy and CCAA filing in 2016. Someone should write a book about that. Hmmmm.
There has never been a time when there is more private equity chasing what seems to be fewer and fewer deals. With all that dry powder available and few deals, that only drives up the price of the underlying valuations. In my opinion, this is exactly what is driving up the valuations of NHL teams and all teams in all sports leagues around the world. Yes, media contracts and other revenue streams are up, but those percentage increases are nowhere near those of the valuations of any franchise in any league. Just ask the owners of any sports franchise who are losing tens of millions of dollars a year in operations, and they will tell you they don't see the correlation.
All NHL team valuations will continue to increase year over year for as long as there are private equity firms and other wealthy individuals who want the euphoric rush that comes with ownership. With no end in sight, I expect values to continue to soar for a very long time.
With this being my eighth annual dedicated Money & Power issue, those of you who have been following my valuations know I do not follow the "formula" calculation process that Forbes or Sportico employs but rather my supply-and-demand methodology.
I base my approach on my experience of having been in several NHL-team-acquisition processes (my first one being in 1988 in San Jose) and my conversations with existing owners, one of whom told me recently, when referring to Forbes and Sportico, that "…they have no clue on the numbers."
The simple fact is that the real-life valuation methodology is what amount it would take to wrestle away a portion of any franchise or the entire franchise, which is a negotiation. I assure everyone that these negotiations do not start with a financial-formula model. They always start with the owner telling the potential buyer what the number is, and that number comes from what is in their head and heart.
NHL Team Valuations
For a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money & Power 2026 issue, available at THN.com/free.