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2025-26 NHL Miscellaneous Thread

Minnesota re-signed center Michael McCarron, 6 years/$3.3 million AAV. He gets a full NMC and a 15 team NTC in the last 3 years. He’s coming off a 2 year deal with a $900k AAV signed by Nashville during which he delivered 13 goals and 18 assists in 153 games for the Preds and Wild.
 
Honestly, I’m guessing that there is no trade list … or that the team leaked that three team version to make Larkin look bad, at which point his agent expanded it. As for an actual list? Nah. It’s too early in the process for one thing.
 
The Dallas Stars are leaving downtown Dallas for suburban Plano, about 17 miles north of the American Airlines Center. The Plano City Council approved $700 million in funding to redevelop The Shops at Willow Bend into an entertainment district surrounding the new arena. Their existing lease at American Airlines Center expires in 2031. The move will put them closer to their practice facility and executive offices in Frisco, leaving them about a 6 miles north commute.

This follows the Dallas Mavericks announcement last week that they too plan to leave Dallas for the northern suburbs, when their lease expires, also in 2031. They’re not moving as far north as Plano, about 10 miles north of the arena.

When the moves are complete, only the WNBA Dallas Wings will be playing in Dallas. They currently play in Arlington but are building an arena in Dallas to be completed next year . The Cowboys and Rangers play in Arlington, about 20 miles west of Dallas, FC Dallas plays in Frisco.

 
andyt said:
The Dallas Stars are leaving downtown Dallas for suburban Plano, about 17 miles north of the American Airlines Center. The Plano City Council approved $700 million in funding to redevelop The Shops at Willow Bend into an entertainment district surrounding the new arena. Their existing lease at American Airlines Center expires in 2031. The move will put them closer to their practice facility and executive offices in Frisco, leaving them about a 6 miles north commute.

This follows the Dallas Mavericks announcement last week that they too plan to leave Dallas for the northern suburbs, when their lease expires, also in 2031. They’re not moving as far north as Plano, about 10 miles north of the arena.

When the moves are complete, only the WNBA Dallas Wings will be playing in Dallas. They currently play in Arlington but are building an arena in Dallas to be completed next year . The Cowboys and Rangers play in Arlington, about 20 miles west of Dallas, FC Dallas plays in Frisco.

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A lot of teams are/will be moving from city centers.....When Atlanta moved to Cobb County they did a 3 year study and found 95% of their season ticket holders and buyers lived outside Atlanta and closer to where the Battery is now. Unless you are in NY or LA to an extent, downtown arena's dont make much sense anymore.
 
HeyKurtz said:
No it wasn't. No one involved with the decision in the mid-1990s foresaw the rise of arena districts.
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I don’t know about the decision makers, but I can tell you that PK initially wanted to develope the land around the arena similar to what is proposed now. He talked about it a lot when he came to town. But, at the time the land was not made available and he didn’t have enough “friends” in the area to make it happen. Not sure he had the funding to make it happen but he had plans
 
HeyKurtz said:
No it wasn't. No one involved with the decision in the mid-1990s foresaw the rise of arena districts.
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It was accidentally forward thinking.

Remember that the building started as a solely NC State project and that ground had actually been broken before Karmanos worked out the relocation deal. For that single use facility, pairing it with the football stadium’s parking made perfect sense even if all the Downtown-ophiles hated it. The land was “free” and the roads only needed to be moderately upgraded. Then Karmanos dropped a Whalers sized anvil in the room and 30 years later we’re still constantly having to explain to the out of town press why the arena is so far from the city center.

Planners gave some passing thought to mixed use development on the site down the road, but I was in those rooms and can 100% promise that it was just that … passing thought. Steve Stroud had some private schemes about how to get his grubby development mitts on that secondary land, but even he hadn’t given it much more than blue sky thought. I met with a couple of his senior guys later and found out that Stroud envisioned the Arena Authority eventually having carte blanche to redevelop everything on that side of Trinity all the way up to Blue Ridge, and up Blue Ridge through the rest of the old State of NC buildings. That was some seriously long term thinking since the State only recently started to change the use of some of that property.

As to Fayettenam’s point about Karmanos … yeah, he said a lot of stuff that he hadn’t fully thought through in the early days. When he first met with NC State’s people he didn’t even fully grasp the distinction that the arena was on State of North Carolina land and thus had all manner of use restrictions, not to mention the layer upon layer of approvals that were going to be required to even change the building footprint to accomodate a pro hockey team. Anything he mumbled about additional development, in retrospect, it was probably whispered in his ear by Stroud anyway. He cozied up with Karmanos pretty hard in the early days before Stroud tried to big foot the Arena Authority and got himself chucked out of the loop.
 
BTW, given the circumstances, it was a freaking miracle that we ever got the team up and operational in Raleigh. We current day fans don’t pause to appreciate just how tricky all that stuff was, and how much of it depended on pure good fortune and timing. Raleigh as a mature, settled NHL market is absolutely remarkable. Don’t ever take it for granted
 
ThinIce said:
I remember the downtown supporters raising holy hell that the arena wasn't going to be built there. At the time, I didn't much care, but in hindsight, I'm really happy it ended up where it did.
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Honestly, it worked out for everybody. Downtown got gentrified all on its own, without a ton of public money spent on an arena to jump-start the process. And can you even imagine the nightmare combination of Tom Dundon with the City of Raleigh as his landlord? God help us all, that would have been horrific and this last round of lease negotiations could well have ended in misery.

Cases in point … see the Bears moving to Indiana and the Stars and Mavericks moving to bloody Plano. We could have been driving to freaking Pittsboro or somewhere to see hockey by now.
 
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