Naples' Hoffmann gets official approval to buy NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins

The Hoffmann Family of Cos. has officially added the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins to its ever-growing business empire.

The company, which operates out of Naples, Chicago and St. Louis, won unanimous approval from the NHL Board of Governors Tuesday to buy the team.

The purchase from the Fenway Sports Group was announced in December but needed the approval before it could move forward.

According to a statement from Hoffmann, the transaction is expected to close imminently.

Financial terms were not disclosed but in December ESPN reported that it could be worth between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion.

Geoff Hoffmann, CEO of Hoffmann’s private equity arm, will serve as governor.

The team’s president of hockey operations and general manager Kyle Dubas will serve as an alternate governor as will Greg Hoffmann, CEO of the businesses’ real estate arm, and David Hoffmann, the family patriarch and the company’s founder and chairman.

(A governor in the NHL is the main representative for the team.)

The Hoffmann Family of Cos. owns more than 200 companies with 400 locations in 30 countries and employs 27,000 people.

And it is not new to hockey.

The team already owns the Florida Everblades, a minor league team based in Estero that it bought in 2019.

And Geoff Hoffmann and his wife Megan, as part of the company’s philanthropic work, also founded Type 1 Timer Hockey in 2022, the only nonprofit hockey camp in North America dedicated to supporting young athletes with type 1 diabetes. Their son Henry was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was seven years old.

It’s also not new to Western Pennsylvania.

The company owns Viking Plastics in Meadville, a city about 90 miles north of Pittsburgh.

“This is a defining moment for our family,” Geoff Hoffmann says in the statement. “The Penguins represent everything Hoffmann Family of Companies stands for — community, excellence and long-term thinking.”