The NHL is in ongoing talks with both Phoenix and Atlanta about becoming the league's 34th franchise, per Gino Hard, with deputy commissioner Bill Daly calling it early conversations. And if your gut reaction is "wait, haven't both of those markets already burned the league before?" then congratulations, you've been paying attention.

Because the receipts here are rough. Atlanta has lost two franchises: the Flames left for Calgary in 1980, and the Thrashers bolted for Winnipeg in 2011. Arizona lost the Coyotes after years of arena sagas and ownership drama, so that's three failed markets between the two of them. The NHL going back to either one is like me drafting a player who burned me last season in the third round because "the talent is still there." Sometimes it works out. Usually you're just donating to the league office's relocation fund.

But the numbers side of me gets it, and this is where I stop being a cynic for a second. Expansion fees have historically been enormous money for the other owners, and whatever a 34th team costs, split among the existing franchises, it's a serious check cut to every owner for doing absolutely nothing. If someone offered you that kind of cash to add one more competitor to your league, you'd take the meeting too.

Atlanta is the more interesting data case to me. It's a big market, and I don't buy "the market doesn't care" as the read on the Thrashers. Bad ownership and a mostly miserable on-ice product will kill a fanbase anywhere. Ask any Panthers fan from the 2010s, before that franchise got its act together, what neglect does to attendance.

Phoenix is the nostalgia pick, and a riskier one in my view. The Coyotes had genuinely loyal fans, the ticket-buying kind who showed up for years while the arena situation rotted. The league also clearly loved the market's potential. But the potential was the whole pitch for two decades and it never became a permanent building. If a new ownership group walks in with an actual shovel-ready arena plan, the math changes. Without that, you're just running the same simulation again and expecting a different output.

Ray Delgado teases me all the time about trusting spreadsheets over eyeballs, and this topic is exactly the kind of thing where his sun-belt-was-right argument ages better than my skepticism. Vegas and Seattle have been expansion home runs by any eyeball test, and warm-weather markets generally stopped being the punchline they were twenty years ago. That's my read on it, not a sourced claim. The old guard argument that hockey can't work outside the cold belt has looked dead for a while now.

From a league-structure angle, my speculation only: 34 teams means 17 per conference, which creates either an odd scheduling partner every night or pressure for realignment. I'd bet on realignment eventually, and if it's Atlanta, I'd guess somebody moves divisions. Deb will tell you the geography doesn't matter as long as the rivalries survive, and she's probably right. File the whole structural thing away, because a 34th team would ripple into fantasy hockey streaming plans too, whenever it actually lands.

My read, and it's just a read: Atlanta gets the nod if the league picks one, because the market size beats the Phoenix emotional case. But I've been wrong before, and I track my receipts. Phoenix fans, tell me why I'm wrong, you've earned the right to be defensive about this one.