19971776 Club
NHL awards four expansion franchises; Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, and Minnesota to join the league
Bettman's push into the Sunbelt adds nearly 70,000 seats across cities that have never hosted professional hockey, with the first new team set to take the ice in 1998.
By 1997, the NHL under Commissioner Gary Bettman was determined to plant the game in American cities that had never seen professional hockey. That June, the league approved four new franchises in a tiered expansion: Nashville for the 1998-99 season, Atlanta for 1999-2000, and both Columbus and Minnesota for 2000-01. The four teams — the Predators, Thrashers, Blue Jackets, and Wild — would together add nearly 70,000 new seats to the league's footprint. Three of the four franchises are still playing where they started; the Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg in 2011…
