Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Seattle Times editorial -- ‘Bring a professional hockey team to Seattle area’

seattle.jpg

Seattle’s largest newspaper is fully on board with the idea of bringing an NHL team to the Seattle metropolitan area.

However, what the Seattle Times is less supportive of is investor Chris Hansen’s controversial plan to build an arena in the city’s SoDo neighborhood.

Instead, the Times believes the focus should turn to a couple of alternative sites in the surrounding cities of Tukwila and Bellevue.

“New York investor Ray Bartoszek nearly landed a deal to bring the Phoenix Coyotes to the Seattle area in 2013, and is now aiming for a huge parcel south of Boeing Field owned by Seattle real-estate developer David Sabey,” wrote the newspaper in an editorial. “A second group involves former NBA team executive Jac Sperling and a Bellevue site near the future Sound Transit station.

“Both are more palatable than the effort, led by hedge-fund manager Chris Hansen, to shoehorn an arena next to Seattle’s working waterfront, with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from Seattle.”

Hansen’s plan is also reliant on the landing of an NBA franchise to play in the arena. And unfortunately for Hansen, the NBA just doesn’t have any teams available at the moment.

Not that the alternative sites haven’t raised their own doubts. However, the more time passes, the more Hansen’s dream appears to be fading.

“As things stand right now, there’s no building,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told ESPN.com for its story on Seattle.

“I don’t know what speed or not groups are moving at. We’re just listening to expressions of interest. People from three different places in greater Seattle are saying ‘We’re interested and we think we can get a building,’ but nobody has a building.”

Related: Two alternate locations emerge for Seattle arena