Expansion chatter has a way of resurfacing right as the season starts, and this September it arrived with actual dates attached. Deputy commissioner Bill Daly spent the past week tamping down the idea that a Texas franchise is a formality, and the league has an update on the expansion process scheduled for the September 22 Board of Governors meeting. That comes out of the six-month exploration into Houston and Austin that Gary Bettman laid out to the governors back in June, with the Friedkin group as the prospective ownership and a new arena as the central obstacle.
So what would a 33rd team actually change? Start with the schedule, because an odd number of clubs is a structural headache. The current 32-team format divides cleanly into four eight-team divisions, and dropping one more franchise into the mix means either an unbalanced division or a permanently idle team on any given night. That’s a significant part of why talk of a 34th club in Phoenix or Atlanta has run alongside the Texas process rather than after it — Daly has framed it as one down, potentially one to go, with a Texas debut eyed for 2029-30 and no requirement that both arrive together.
The competitive question is the more interesting one. Vegas and Seattle rewrote expectations for what expansion terms should look like, and no general manager has forgotten it. A friendlier expansion draft than the 2000s version means a new club can be a playoff threat immediately, which changes protection math for every existing team and quietly inflates the value of depth defensemen and goaltenders three years out. If you want a sense of how quickly that can go sideways for the other 31 clubs, Vegas Born: The Remarkable Story of the Golden Knights remains the clearest case study.
There’s also the geography. A Houston or Austin team gives Dallas a genuine in-state rival, the kind of regional pairing the league leans on to build local TV and gate interest. Those matchups don’t have a century behind them the way the Original Six pairings do, but manufactured proximity has worked before.
Monday’s meeting should clarify how fast any of this moves.
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