The Edmonton Oilers have recently had a wealth of fortunes, especially with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, who were first and second on the NHL Network’s training list of the sport’s top players. Edmonton will face the Dallas Stars in the Western Conference Finals for the next time in three months, and the team is tied 1-1 in its line with the Dallas Stars.
The small-market Oilers are even flourishing off the snow, with Rogers Place being one of the most profitable fields in the NHL and the ICE District, which is the second-largest mixed-use growth in North America, behind even Hudson Yards in New York.
” The ICE District is really the center of all the action in our city”, Tim Shipton, Oilers Entertainment Group professional, said in a telephone meeting. It’s” the position people want to be,” the statement goes.

OEG owns the Oilers, the ICE District, privileges to perform Rogers Place, and clubs in the American Hockey League and American students’ Western Hockey League. The ICE District includes various levels of financial with shopping and eating, business room, a game, home condos, a JW Marriott resort and outdoor plaza. OEG sold to Alberta income director AIMCo for$ 300 million the business section of the 69-story Stantec Tower as well as an office tower.
More than 11, 000 supporters have gathered outside the area for both home and away games during the NHL playoffs, in addition to the 18, 000-plus fans who have been gathered inside Rogers Place, which has been occupied for road activity see parties. OEG makes money off of every meal and beverage served both inside and outside the arena.
” We’ve been sprawling for decades, and it’s easy to not focus on development in a downtown when you have all this land”, Puneeta McBryan, executive director of the Downtown Business Association of Edmonton, said in an interview. ” But it has really changed how we built our city and how our downtown looks.”
OEG has invested CA$ 2 billion ($ 1.5 billion using current exchange rates ) during Phase 1 of building the ICE District, with Phase 2 scheduled to include 2, 500 housing units and more green space. Since the Oilers first announced their plans for the arena, an additional CA$ 2 billion has been spent by other entities in the area to develop the real estate.
The Oilers generated the fifth- highest revenue in the NHL during the 2022- 23 season at an estimated$ 281 million net of revenue sharing, by Sportico’s count. Every team in a metro area that is at least three times as large by population as the club, ranked eighth in terms of team value at$ 1.6 billion. Sportico’s valuation includes the team’s gaming operations, OEG Digital Gaming, and the sports- related components of the ICE District, which represent a fraction of the development’s total value.
The original proposals did not include this ICE District version. Daryl Katz, the team’s owner, purchased the team for$ 170 million in 2008 and began acquiring a contiguous parcel of land downtown. The initial master agreement for Katz to invest only$ 75 million to develop the area outside the$ 380 million arena, which was mostly gravel parking lots and an old Greyhound station, was approved in 2013. Mixed- use developments were rare a decade- plus ago, with L. A. Live one of the few success stories—Atlanta’s Battery was still four years away.

Edmonton is the uncommon city with a lot of vacant, commercial land in the heart of downtown. Additionally, it has a very young population, and there was a net migration from all of Canada.
” We had all these young people moving here, looking for apartments and cafes and everything that comes with dense urban development,” McBryan said. It was just this perfect meeting of a catalyst, investment, and demand, as they say,” We did n’t really have the scale that we needed.”
Shipton claims that OEG has a” steady stream” of senior executives and owners from all of the major sports leagues seeking information on the success of the building and its environs.
When Daryl Katz purchased the team, he had a vision for a sports-entertainment district that would promote downtown’s vibrancy and economic activity, according to Shipton. ” We are now seeing that vision in reality”.