NHL Expansion: Should the League Ever Consider Teams Outside of North America?

The NHL wouldn't be the first North American team to consider expanding overseas. That said, Adam Proteau thinks it is a huge long shot to happen.

THN.com has been exploring the prospects of NHL expansion this past week, with breakdowns of cities favored to land an NHL team (Houston, Atlanta and Phoenix), and other towns taking a back seat in expansion talks (Quebec City, a second team in Toronto, as well as Hamilton, Ont.). But there’s one more group of teams that occasionally gets mentioned regarding expansion – non-North-American teams in places such as England, Sweden, Finland and China, among other locations.

Now, let’s be clear – the prospect of expansion to Europe remains an incredibly long long shot to ever occur. The NHL has been staging a handful of pre-season and regular-season games in Scandinavian countries as well as in Germany and England. But it would take a massive strategic set of maneuvers for the NHL to set up a system that would have NHL teams making lengthy trips to Europe to get 41 home dates per season for an expansion team to work properly.

Other leagues, including the NFL, have explored European expansion. But it hasn’t yet happened for good reason. The logistics of situating a team on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean have all kinds of potential drawbacks, including the prospects of players being far from their families in North America. 

It’s true that European players have to deal with a similar reality when they choose to play in America or Canada, but there’s already a structure in place (along with support systems) for that relationship. And suffice it to say that a good number of NHL players who negotiate contracts with their team almost certainly would put that European franchise on their list of teams they’d veto a trade to. Of course, a European NHL team would still be able to fill a 23-man roster, but the competitive disadvantages would be considerable.

There is a track record for European or Asian teams playing in a North American league, but it is a truncated one, with the now-defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League putting two franchises in China. That experiment was short-lived, with the two Chinese teams merging into one before the CWHL folded in 2019. It was an admirable attempt at growing the women’s game globally, but the practical elements made it untenable over the long term.

That’s a trajectory we believe you’d see if the NHL tried expanding to London, Stockholm or another large non-North-American city. There would be a honeymoon phase in which the new franchises would thrive in attendance and media coverage, but in the long haul, the problems of expansion to such faraway lands would bubble to the fore and prove difficult to address. 

If it were that lucrative and easy to do, the NHL or another ‘Big Four’ North American pro sports league would’ve done it already. It’s not, though, so the best a European town could hope for would be to stage more regular-season NHL games than the two or three they’re accustomed to staging every season.

We’ve always believed that it’s important to grow the sport on a worldwide basis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s crucial to install a team in a non-North-American market. The NHL has done well enough with only teams in the U.S. and Canada, and there’s no overriding element to European expansion that would tip the scales in its favor. 

The status quo is going to be maintained for the next few years at least, and if the NHL does expand again as many believe it will, it’ll be North American cities that they expand to. That might not please every hockey fan, but it’s the reality of the situation.