Go ahead and dream, San Diego. It’s hard to blame you with pucks whistling toward nets and bodies banging on the boards Friday at Pechanga Arena.
When the Ducks laced up against the Kings in a preseason game, it was the first time the NHL had staged one of these in the city since 1994. As Alex Laferriere lit the lamp cherry-red for Los Angeles in the first period, it was tempting to squint at a horizon where the league is skating around a new 16,000-or-so-seat arena.
That facility is waiting for shovels wielded by the Stan Kroenke-fueled Midway Rising group in (fingers crossed) 2026, with a possible opening a couple years later.
The vexing problem with some of the best dreams: They’re too good to come true. There’s a blue line-wide set of reasons the NHL or NBA coming to San Diego any time soon constitutes the longest of shots.
Glacial expansion options, Kroenke’s current ownership of teams in both leagues, preferred cities already positioned for opportunities, current arena plans lacking the level of traffic mitigation and surface-road improvements for top-tier professional sports and more strangle optimism.
Dream anyway, San Diego. Why not? If you build it … there’s a heartbeat, no matter how faint.
Ducks President Aaron Teats was asked to play along with a thought exercise about the NHL considering San Diego years down the road. A major reason it is simply that, at this point, is the active AHL relationship with the Ducks.
Can San Diego, with its multitude of coastal distractions, prop up a top-tier sports league?
“It’s hard to put predictive thought on that, but we’ve grown to learn over the last seven years that this market is ionate about sports,” Teats said of attendance for the Gulls, the best in the Pacific Division and fourth in the AHL in that time. “I wouldn’t put limits on San Diego’s desire for sports in any way.”
Desire is one thing. Doing it is another.
Offer a nugget of hope, you ask? OK, but it’s not much. Seating capacity does not have to be a deal-killer once the arena kicks open its doors. The NHL’s Winnipeg Jets play in an arena that seats 15,321. The New Jersey Devis? The Prudential Center holds 16,514.
Six other NHL arenas hold 17,500 or less and that would be seven teams if the Coyotes were playing in their old arena instead of 4,600-seat Mullett Arena at Arizona State. The arena plan in San Diego puts it with stretch-and-strain distance.
In the NBA, the Hawks and Pelicans dunk in buildings seating 16,867 or less with three more teams under 17,600.
The right owner and a stubborn push probably could find a way. It’s all the other thorns that could draw team-landing blood. Navigating the myriad potholes would require money, an uncommon mastery of deal-making and a rabbit to pair with a hat.
The Kroenke group has not hinted that a sports team at the highest levels of hockey or basketball is part of the arena’s master plan. Are they tamping down expectations to buy time and sort obstacles? Or is this simply a savvy real-estate grab and nothing more?
Until something changes, dreaming of the NHL or NBA remains a rosy exercise in imagination.
Though unlikely does not mean never, they share the same zip code for now.
“We’re excited at the prospect of the Gulls playing in a state-of-the-art facility,” Teats said. “The fans deserve a new facility.”
The Gulls have “no direct involvement” with the project, Teats said, but they remain connected, voicing hockey-related thoughts.
The involvement of Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the NHL’s Avalanche and NBA’s Nuggets?
“It certainly represents an opportunity for a first-class project,” Teats said.
On Friday, hockey celebrated in San Diego in ways it has not in nearly three decades. Local football-tossing legend Drew Brees dropped the first puck. Hall of Fame NFL -catcher Andre Reed waved on the center-ice video board. Sweaters of the skate-related kind filled the concourse.
The Gulls mascot tumbled to the ice as the teams skated out, foreshadowing the team’s rough, early 4-1 deficit that ended in a 4-3 loss.
It was big-boy hockey, though. It made you envision what it might look like in a big-boy arena with a big-boy team San Diego could call its own. An arena, at the very least, means three decades would not between NHL appearances.
At most? Well, that’s the dreaming part.
