ATLANTA — One of the first people Frank Ferrara met when he came to the Atlanta area to help revive dreams of a return of a National Hockey League team to this sprawling southern city was former NHL player and local businessman Tim Ecclestone.
Ecclestone was known simply as ‘Coach’ to his friends and that is what Ecclestone became to Ferrara, who was the driving force behind the dramatic rise of Arizona State University as a Division-1 hockey team and the construction of Mullett Arena.
Ferrara is now the right-hand man to billionaire automative mogul Vernon Krause, the main investor in one of two groups hoping to land an expansion franchise and bring NHL hockey back to Atlanta for what would be an unprecedented third go-round.
Ecclestone regularly shared with Ferrara his contacts in the tight-knit Atlanta hockey community and his insights into the game. Ecclestone also shared his enthusiasm for the project and his belief that NHL hockey could and would thrive in Atlanta given proper ownership and a better arena location.
“He really was a bit of my window into what the local market is about,” Ferrara said.
The last time the two spoke they made plans to get together for dinner and, in a bit of fancy, the former player and coach asked Ferrara who he thought the new team’s first opponent might be on opening night in Georgia and what ideas Ferrara liked for a new name for an expansion team.
Ecclestone died at age 76 in March.
“He said, ‘I just can’t wait for opening night,’” Ferrara recalled. “He said, ‘People have been waiting so long for this.’
“I’m left with the feeling of how important this is to the ardent NHL fans there,” he added.
Ecclestone’s dreams of bringing the NHL back to Atlanta didn’t die with him, though, as Ferrara keeps them close as the Krause team tries to navigate the difficult path to an expansion team.
“We lost something we couldn’t afford to lose when he passed in early March,” Ferrara told Sportsnet in a lengthy interview. “When we pull this off, he will be with us in spirit.”
This is the human, the emotional side, of the expansion debate not just as it relates to Atlanta but all the other markets that are covetous of having an NHL team in their backyard.
As important as those narratives are, they don’t pay the freight. And there is much freight to be paid if NHL hockey is coming back to Atlanta.
Ferrara spent two decades working on the financial side with the National Football League and was lured to Arizona where he helped build Mullett Arena as the permanent home to the Sun Devils’ D-1 men’s hockey team. The arena was also home for two seasons to the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes before the team moved abruptly this off-season to Utah.
Several years ago Ferrara was approached by Krause, a self-professed diehard Atlanta Thrashers fan who wasn’t in a position to take a run at owning the Thrashers when they departed in the summer of 2011 for Winnipeg, about his dream of returning the NHL to the area.
He is in such a position now and is the main man behind a multi-billion-dollar project in Forsyth County, north of the city.
“He comes at this with the spirit of a fan, like me. He’s got a lot of passion for the sport in making it better,” Ferrara said of Krause.
“When I saw the project, I was more than intrigued.”