The City of Portland and various booster groups within the city have long sought to add to its stable of major league teams. Efforts to add a Major League Baseball team have come and gone with fits and starts over the decades. Recently prominent politicians and business groups set their sights on bringing in a WNBA team, with the league expected to expand in a few years. Some of the efforts have evolved to bring in new sports. When Merritt Paulson originally purchased the then (NASL) Timbers and Triple-A baseball Beavers, it was to lure a Major League Baseball team. Instead, he soon pivoted to bringing the Timbers into MLs, an effort that eventually succeeded and turned what is now Providence Park into a world-class soccer venue.
Other efforts have stuck to the same course. Last month, the Portland Diamond Project began eying yet another piece of real estate in Portland for their long-envisioned plan of building a major league-caliber stadium in Portland to lure in a Major League Baseball team. They are now looking at the economically teetering Lloyd Center Mall area as a potential site. This comes after the project has tried and failed and doing the same thing in Delta Park, Portland Public Schools headquarters, and other locations around the city. When their one real chance at a team in recent years popped up, the Oakland A’s, they were caught completely flat-footed. The A’s will instead be relocating to Las Vegas, which rapidly pushed through plans for a new stadium after several years of negotiating with the A’s ownership group.
This isn’t to denigrate the folks behind the Portland Diamond Project, who I am sure are of goodwill in their efforts to bring Major League Baseball to Portland. It’s just to say that at some point, folks must realize something isn’t happening. Portland has been considered the “next” city for a big-league team for over two decades, and efforts have never moved beyond selling bumper stickers. A Portland Major League team has no political support, no stadium, and not much going for it beyond the mantra of “If you build it, they will come,” which is great for a movie line but doesn’t always work in reality. Even a stadium is no guarantee of a team. Just ask Kansas City, which completed a state-of-the-art indoor arena for hockey and basketball in 2007 and has yet to attract an NHL or NBA team.
However, one thing Portland does have is an indoor arena that will soon be going through significant upgrades and already has shown it can host NBA basketball and be configured for hockey. One thing Portland doesn’t have is a major-league hockey team.
While Major League Baseball has not expanded since 1998 and, once the A’s move, has only relocated two teams in the past two decades, the NHL has added six expansion teams over the same time period and relocated once. Currently, the Arizona Coyotes are a potential relocation candidate, having been essentially kicked out of their home in Phoenix, a new arena in Tempe rejected by voters, and are currently playing in a 5,000-seat college hockey arena. Meanwhile, the league’s last two expansion teams, the Las Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken, have both been rousing successes. The Kraken made the playoffs in their second year of existence and regularly fill Climate Pledge Arena. The Golden Knights made the Stanley Cup finals and just captured the Stanley Cup this past season. With this much excitement about its newest franchises, It would only make sense for the NHL to a) put a vagabond Arizona franchise in a location where it can be successful and b) continue to add to the excitement by adding more new teams.
And in looking to add more teams, why not Portland? It makes far more sense to add a team to a potential I-5 NHL rivalry than to put a team in Atlanta for the third time. For the NHL and the City of Portland, an NHL team would be a win-win. While a Major League Baseball team would take a significant investment in time, land, and money for an area that routinely drew mere hundreds of fans to Portland Beavers games, the city has already proved it can support hockey with the Winterhawks, has a building in place to house a team, and would not need significant infrastructure upgrades to make it work.
The Portland Diamond Project had pursued a Major League Baseball team in Portland for years and is absolutely no farther today than when they first started. If anything, Portland is farther away from a Major League Baseball team today than when the city pursued the Montreal Expos in the early-2000’s, and the effort garnered some political support. With the effort to gain a baseball team stagnant, perhaps it’s time to look beyond baseball to change the goal from attracting a Major League Baseball team to attracting a major league team, period.
Whether it be the NBA, the NHL, or maybe someday MLB, it’s important that those hoping to bring a major league team to Portland set their sights on a goal that is achievable at some point in the reasonable future. And focusing those efforts on sports that don’t require large investments in building new stadiums and infrastructure makes it more likely that Portlanders would be able to see a new team in action, instead of it just existing on a drawing board.
