Landry: No immediate plans for an NHL team in New Orleans, but ‘we would talk to anybody’

Alex Pietrangelo of the Vegas Golden Knights shoots the puck against the Dallas Stars during the second period in Game Seven of the First Round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs at American Airlines Center on May 5, 2024, in Dallas, Texas. (Cooper Neill/Getty Images)

Gov. Jeff Landry didn’t rule out putting a professional hockey franchise in New Orleans but said there hasn’t been any discussion between him and the National Hockey League about doing so.

“I think New Orleans is one of those cities that is poised to be the place where sports happens,” Landry said in an interview earlier this week. “We would talk to the NHL. We would talk to anybody that wants to bring anything there.”

“Certainly, if there’s an appetite for them to come to New Orleans, we’re interested in having one,” the governor said.

Rumblings about the NHL coming to New Orleans picked up when Nic Perkin, the owner of a new minor league hockey team in Monroe, talked at length about the possibility during a news conference last week.

“If Las Vegas can stand up a championship hockey team in the middle of the desert, New Orleans can stand up a NHL team in the middle of the bayou,” Perkin said at a kickoff event for the revived Monroe Moccasins franchise. “So count on that to happen, and please feel free to tell me that it won’t happen, I can always use the motivation.”

Perkin was referencing the Vegas Golden Knights, an 2017 NHL expansion team that won the Stanley Cup last year. He said he had talked to Landry about the prospect of a New Orleans NHL franchise, which the governor confirmed.

“We visited with him. We are kind of excited about what he’s doing up in north Louisiana as well,” Landry said.

In an interview with KNOE-TV in Monroe , Perkin was more bullish about the proposal than Landry.

“We firmly believe an NHL team should be stood up in New Orleans, certainly within the next five years,” Perkin told the television station. “We’ve been speaking to the governor’s office about it, about creating incentives, about setting up facilities. Obviously, we would need a world-class arena in New Orleans for that.”

NHL teams already exist in several Southern markets including Dallas, Nashville, Tennessee, Tampa Bay, Florida, and Raleigh, North Carolina. The Florida Panthers, located in the Miami area, are currently leading in the Stanley Cup finals matchup against the Edmonton Oilers.

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“We’re starting to put together the bid committee in terms of people from all over the country. We’re talking to everything from big private equity groups, both here in Louisiana, as well as in New York, Connecticut, across the country. The money is definitely there,” Perkin said.

Rumors about where NHL teams will relocate or expand have heated up recently. The league is reportedly considering moving the Arizona Coyotes, a franchise that has languished for years, to Salt Lake City .

Houston, Kansas City, San Diego and Portland, Oregon, have also been mentioned as potential sites for expansion . Atlanta continues to be in the conversation as well, despite having two failed attempts at NHL franchises.

Outside of Perkin, New Orleans is rarely, if ever, mentioned as a potential NHL market among hockey journalists.

“Quite frankly, as popular as professional sports are, money is the least of the issues. Our job is really to prove to the NHL that a viable team could exist in New Orleans,” Perkin told KNOE .

Minor league hockey has picked up in Louisiana. The Moccasins will drop the puck in October, and the Baton Rouge Zydeco had their inaugural season last year. Both are members of the Federal Prospects Hockey League. The Shreveport Mudbugs is a member of the North American Hockey League, a developmental organization for professional hockey.

The now defunct New Orleans Brass, Baton Rouge Kingfish and Lafayette IceGators were part of the East Coast Hockey League. A second iteration of the IceGators played in the Southern Professional Hockey League from 2009 to 2016.

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