Former player Anson Carter, investors formally request NHL expansion to Atlanta

The NHL’s potential return to the Atlanta metro area, an idea that has spent years gaining momentum, took another step toward reality Tuesday.

A group of investors fronted by former NHL player Anson Carter formally requested “to commence an expansion process,” per a statement from the group, according to multiple reports Tuesday. Smith Entertainment Group, the owners of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, made a similar request in January, with the aim of bringing a team to Salt Lake City.

The 32-team NHL isn’t formally pursuing expansion, but the last new franchise, Seattle, netted the rest of the league’s owners $650 million in expansion fees. Any future buy-in would be worth closer to $1 billion.

“The League appreciates Anson’s passion for bringing NHL hockey back to the Atlanta area, and he has certainly kept the subject on our radar screen for several years running,” the NHL said in a statement to The Athletic. “While, as we have made clear, we have no expansion-oriented process in place currently, it’s always good to know there is bona fide interest.”

NHL teams have twice left Atlanta: The Flames moved to Calgary in 1980, and the Thrashers — doomed in part by mediocre rosters, poor ownership and a misplaced arena — to Winnipeg in 2011.

Carter’s plan, centered around an arena proposal in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, has the support of that city’s mayor and the commission chairman of Fulton County.

The development would sit on the 84-acre North Point Mall property, in Atlanta’s Fulton County and a 15-minute bus ride from the final stop of the MARTA rail system. That specific site — and the city of Alpharetta, more generally — has long been viewed as an ideal home for any future NHL arena, due to a core of hockey fans that coalesced in the area during the Thrashers’ time in Atlanta.

In November 2022, Alpharetta’s city council denied a 10-year, $550 million plan to build retail and restaurant spaces, a hotel and 1,000 residential properties while demolishing a part of the mall.

Carter, now a broadcast analyst on TNT and a longtime area resident, said in the release that his partners in the Alpharetta Sports and Entertainment group include Neil Leibman, the co-managing partner of Top Tier Sports, an ownership group that holds stakes in several minor-league franchises; Peter Simon, part of sports investment firm and management group Simon Sports; and Aaron Zeigler, the CEO of a Michigan-based automotive sales group that bears his last name and says it has 84 franchises in four states. New York Life, meanwhile, was announced as a partner in the proposed arena development.

In the release, Carter noted he’d been “in dialogue” about Atlanta-area expansion with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman since 2019, and that decisions on expansion lie with the league’s board of governors.

A second potential Atlanta-area arena development, in neighboring Forsyth County, will receive about $400 million in public funds only if it comes with an NHL team attached, according to a January vote by the county’s commissioners. The so-called Gathering at South Forsyth would cost about $2 billion overall.

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(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)