The WHL Arena Guide - Rose Garden, Portland Winterhawks

Portland’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum is one of the few arenas entered on the US Register of Historic Places – it is a triumph of Mid-Century Modernist architecture. But it only holds just under 13,000 people, and by the standards of the NBA of the 1990’s, that was no longer enough. The Portland Trail Blazers moved across the street to the new Rose Garden (now the Moda Center) in 1995, a full-sized and up-to-date arena, and in some cities, it would have been curtains for the old arena. But Portland, thankfully, kept the Coliseum open, and from 1995 to 2020, the Winterhawks played a split schedule, with most of their games (along with all their banners and team history) on display at the Coliseum, and about a quarter to a third of their games each year at the big rink.

I’ve not been to the Moda Center, but my friend Steve McLean has, and he reports that the arena is luxurious, with fully padded seats and a decent atmosphere for WHL games by the standards of an NBA-sized arena. In 2021, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Winterhawks’ new owners decided to consolidate their operations in one building, and moved permanently back to the Coliseum. No one knew it at the time, but the last Winterhawks game of the abandoned 2019-20 season was the last game the team would play there. One expects that the Winterhawks may well still play odd games there into the future, but after twenty-six years, the Moda Center can now be considered a former WHL building.