NFL COO Tod Leiweke stepped down Tuesday and reports indicate that the former Seahawks CEO will team up with his brother and help lead Seattle’s potential new NHL franchise. Both the Seattle Times and KIRO Radio report that Leiweke will return to Seattle and join his brother, Tim Leiweke, who heads up Oak View Group, the ownership firm trying to bring an NHL expansion team to the Emerald City. Leiweke spent the past three years as a top NFL executive and led the Seahawks from 2003 to 2010. He spoke at our GeekWire Sports Tech Summit this past summer and… Read More
The Seattle SuperSonics played their last game at Key Arena in 2008, a few months after Amazon planted its flag just down the road with a 1.7 million-square foot office campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood. Fast forward a decade, and Amazon’s campus is more than four times its original size, with more to come, and a group of billionaires are preparing to renovate the Seattle Center stadium in pursuit of a professional hockey team. Amazon figures to have a significant impact on the project, both through its 50,000 downtown workers that could serve as a potential built-in fanbase… Read More
Seattle Freeze didn’t even make the list. Speculation about what name could be bestowed on a potential National Hockey League expansion team in Seattle turned interesting this week with the revelation that a number of domain names have been registered by the group renovating KeyArena. According to a report by Clark Rasmussen at DetroitHockey.net, 38 domains representing 13 potential team names were registered by a lawyer representing Oak View Group. While the group and Seattle haven’t been awarded a franchise yet — potentially the league’s 32nd — it’s never too early to drop the gloves and fight over which, if… Read More
OK, the Sonics aren’t coming back (just yet), but Seattle moved a step closer to giving hockey geeks (raise your hand — are you out there?) a reason to celebrate on Thursday when the NHL announced how it feels about an expansion franchise in the city. According to various reports — and tweets from Pierre LeBrun, a hockey guru for Canada’s The Sports Network — NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said during the league’s Board of Governors meetings in Florida Thursday that the process for expansion in Seattle has begun. And it’s not cheap. Bettman announces that the NHL Board of… Read More
Updated 4:15 p.m. Wednesday: Promising to build a world-class arena, and with it potentially lure an NBA or NHL team to Seattle, Mayor Ed Murray announced Wednesday that he has selected Oak View Group to renovate the 55-year-old KeyArena. “If the Space Needle is the front door of this beautiful place, KeyArena is the action-packed rec room,” Murray said during a news conference (watch in full in the video above) from the venue at Seattle Center. The mayor was joined by a host of dignitaries, including Oak View founders Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff, former Seattle Supersonics head coach Lenny Wilkens, and owners… Read More
