Our Top Ten NHL Arenas

We spent a few hockey seasons traveling to all 30 NHL arenas from October 2008 to December 2010.

We love hockey. Love it. LOVE IT. We watch it all the time, as in, every single day there is a game on and we're home, we watch hockey. While Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, and the like are awesome, having no hockey on has been a bit of a downer for us during this quarantine. Thankfully, the NHL Network has been replaying old games, which is certainly better than no hockey at all (and, admittedly, some of the games are super exciting to watch, even when we already know the outcome!), but we are really missing live hockey broadcasts!

I've already written in the past about several of our trips, and we are currently all caught up on the NHL arenas. Since completing the original 30 arenas, six new ones have been built, and we visited those between 2014 and 2019, with the final one being Edmonton last year. The links to my posts about arenas #31 through #35 can be found HERE, and the Edmonton arena post is HERE.

When we created our Top Ten MLB Stadiums list last week, we already knew we'd be doing a list of NHL arenas for today's Travel Tuesday and it was surprisingly easy to come up with our top ten! Unsurprisingly, there was no difficulty in quickly identifying the very best arena in the NHL, and the worst arenas, too!

As with the baseball stadiums, we took in account the overall fan experience, the architecture, the arena features, the staff, the parking/transportation, and how the arena seemed to be managed and cared for. Also along the same lines as our stadium list, there were times when we were home team fans, visiting team fans, and hockey-but-indifferent-to-the-two-teams fans. This is evident because two of our top ten arenas are home to teams we dislike, and five of our top ten are home to teams we feel fairly neutral about. Those choices speak to how great the overall experience was, even though we don't count ourselves among that team's fans. One of the top ten choices where we dislike the team, I also really dislike the city, so I think that says a lot about the arena!

The top arena is absolutely number one. No other arena even comes close! The other nine are listed in no particular order!

The best arena in the NHL! 

Beautiful!

I wish we lived closer
because I would attend a game
here as often as possible!

L & C's Top Ten NHL Arenas

Little Caesars Arena

home of the Detroit Red Wings

PPG Paints Arena

home the Pittsburgh Penguins

ScotiaBank Arena

home of the Toronto Maple Leafs

SAP Center

home of the San Jose Sharks

T-Mobile Arena

home of the Las Vegas Golden Knights

Nationwide Arena

home of the Columbus Blue Jackets

Bridgestone Arena

home of the Nashville Predators

Bell Centre

home of the Montreal Canadiens

Gila River Arena / Jobing.com Arena

home of the Arizona Coyotes

KeyBank Center

home of the Buffalo Sabres

As for the WORST arena, that dubious honor belongs to the New York Islanders. Actually, the two worst arenas both belong to the Islanders! Their old arena was a complete dump, and the new one offered the most awful and disappointing fan experience ever. More than four years after attending that game, I am still disgusted. You can read about that nonsense HERE.

THE WORST:

Nassau Coliseum

home of the New York Islanders

AND

Barclays Center

home of the New York Islanders

36 arenas visited with #37 on the horizon when the new Seattle NHL team gets going!

Happy Tails to you!