The Greatest Boondoggle in Pro Sports
The Arizona Coyotes' long, insane saga and what happens now
Over the past month, the NHL playoffs have been raging. For each of the first two rounds I posted up preview articles on this site, which were fun to do but we’re now late enough in the playoffs that there’s less to talk about, fewer series to dig into. Rather than doing a deep dive on the conference finals (I may do a big one on the Stanley Cup Finals), I decided to turn my attention to a different NHL story unfolding right now, one I find much more interesting: the Arizona Coyotes.
On Tuesday night, the Coyotes got spanked in a public referendum in the city of Tempe, Arizona, that would’ve given them clearance to build a $2.1 B “entertainment district”, which would’ve included, among other things, a new stadium. With the vote going against the team in decisive fashion (all three propositions failed by double digits), the Arizona Coyotes hockey team is facing a grim and uncertain future. They are currently in a 4,600 seat college rink operated by Arizona State University and have no immediate plan to move into a proper NHL arena anywhere in the state of Arizona. After over a quarter century, NHL hockey in the Valley of the Sun may finally be meeting its demise, a half-dozen ownership groups, three arenas, a bankruptcy, an eviction, eight coaches, and just two playoff series victories later.
How did we get here, why are we here, and what could happen to the team next? I will attempt to fill you in on the most insane story saga in modern North American professional sports.
The Arizona Coyotes, the backstory
For some of my readers who aren’t big NHL fans, first of all, I’m surprised you’re reading, and second, I will do my best to explain how we ended up in this predicament. The Arizona Coyotes were originally the Winnipeg Jets, a World Hockey Association (WHA) franchise that began when the WHA started up as a primary competitor to the NHL in 1972. Very basically, the WHA was set up to rival the NHL just like the ABA was rivaling the NBA, which went well for awhile until both teams starting posting huge financial losses. The two leagues merged in 1979 and the Jets, the best team in the WHA at the time, made the cut and were included into the NHL, along with the Hartford Whalers, the Edmonton Oilers, and the Quebec Nordiques.
NHL owners, furious about the cost the WHA had inflicted on them, gutted these four teams of all their best players, and no team was hurt more than Winnipeg. Their once mighty roster was decimated and in their second NHL season, the Jets went 9-57-14. They got superstar center Dale Hawerchuk out of that disaster and built a solid team that was competitive in the 80s but they were always at least third fiddle in the Smythe Division to the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames. After an attempted re-tool in the early 90s, the team declined in quality and the finances were poor.
The Canadian dollar had sunk like the Titanic to an all-time low value, jeopardizing the finances of nearly every Canadian market. Winnipeg, as a very small market, was in deep trouble. Attempts to keep the team came up unsuccessful and the NHL, which wasn’t hiding its desire to expand into the American Sun Belt, was content to facilitate a relocation to Phoenix, Arizona. The Jets moved one year after its fellow Canadian WHA squad Quebec did (to Colorado) and one year before its American WHA brethren Hartford did (to Carolina). It was Order 66 for the WHA franchises and the Winnipeg Jets were struck down in the process. Out of the ashes, the Phoenix Coyotes were born.
The first half-decade for the Coyotes was not bad on the ice. They had a decent team, not a great one, but one that could at least make the playoffs. The likes of Keith Tkachuk, Jeremy Roenick, Teppo Numminen, Shane Doan, and Rick Tocchet helped them be one of those teams whose reward for a decent regular season was getting taken to the woodshed by the Red Wings or Avalanche. Unfortunately, they didn’t get a deep run into the playoffs to grab the attention of fans the way both Carolina and Colorado did within five years of relocation.
NHL.com
There were problems off-ice, though. The team had moved into what was then called the America West Arena in downtown Phoenix, home to the Suns. The arena had not been built for hockey, meaning its sight-lines were suboptimal, to say the least. Video boards were placed in awkward places and some seats had completely obstructed1 views of the ice, tanking ticket prices. Capacity had to be reduced and with what tickets were being sold going for cheap, the result was a losing financial operation. Not to mention that hockey was very new in the desert and the team wasn’t that great.
The Coyotes needed to go elsewhere and they had a new owner. Steve Ellman bought out the original three owners in 2001 and decided to move the team from downtown Phoenix to Glendale, Arizona, a distant suburb (attempts to renovate America West Arena went nowhere). In conjunction with the City of Glendale, the Coyotes constructed a new arena which they moved into halfway through 2003-04. It was originally called Glendale Arena before it was re-named to one of the most gloriously humiliating arena names in pro sports history, “Jobing.com Arena”.
Ellman unloaded the team shortly after moving to Glendale to trucking magnate Jerry Moyes, around the time Ellman’s old investment partner was made head coach of the team… Wayne Gretzky. The tenure with #99 behind the bench went about as well as anyone who’s ever heard Gretzky try to critique other players thought it would2, and the mid-2000s Coyotes were a disaster. In case you were wondering if fans already unfamiliar with hockey were interested in driving farther away from where they live to see a bad team play, turns out they were not! By late 2008, rumors circulated that the team was insolvent and the NHL was secretly wiring Moyes cash to pay the bills. In May 2009, the Coyotes filed for bankruptcy and the league disappeared Jerry Moyes, yoinking the franchise from him to prevent him from selling to Jim Balsillie (who wanted to relocate to Hamilton, Ontario).
The NHL ended up emerging from bankruptcy with full control of the team, dodging the bankruptcy court’s desire to sell the team to Balsillie. They then planned to offload the team to either Chicago Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf or a group vaguely called Ice Edge. To no one familiar with Reinsdorf’s competency as an owner in other leagues’ surprise, the deal with him fell apart and it wasn’t too long until it fell apart with Ice Edge too. The NHL would end up owning the Coyotes for nearly four years, from the fall of 2009 to the summer of 2013. During that period the Coyotes sustained their greatest on-ice success in franchise history under coach Dave Tippett. They garnered 100 points once and finally won a couple playoff rounds in 2012, making a deep run to the Western Conference Finals thanks to great goaltending from Mike Smith.
That got some fans in the building and excitement behind the team, but the NHL was still swallowing financial losses owning the team. Eager to get it off their hands, they sold the team in 2013 after the Glendale City Council approved a new lease with the team by a narrow 4-3 margin. The new ownership group was a collection of investors called IceArizona, who agreed to change the team’s name from the Phoenix Coyotes to the Arizona Coyotes, to reflect their status playing in Glendale.
The end of the bankruptcy began the chapter leading up to the present. The arena in Glendale was not a tenable solution due to its location, plans to find a new arena were a succession of long-winded failures, the team is a disaster on the ice, and are tied up in a series of embarrassing lawsuits off the ice. The team planned to build an arena in Tempe, Arizona, but it fell through. Andrew Barroway, who became eventual majority owner in 2017, sold to Alex Meruelo in 2019 for a paltry $300 M, presumably to get this mess off his hands.
Meruelo’s tenure has not been terribly different from the previous owners in the macro, but has somehow been the most laughable one yet. The team attempted to draft Mitchell Miller in 2020, a prospect whose history of racist bullying of a classmate with disabilities drew massive controversy, and the Coyotes then renounced the selection. They also forfeited a 2021 first round draft pick after violating rules surrounding testing prospects at the NHL combine.
Joe Camporeale - USA Today
Meanwhile, The Athletic’s Katie Strang published a devastating expose on the team and Meruelo in February 2021, portraying Meruelo’s treatment of employees as highly questionable and indicating a general lack of knowledge about NHL hockey. It also identified eight vendors who had not been paid for their work on behalf of the Coyotes, including one who claimed the team owed him $257,406.25 for unpaid services and an additional $19,305.47 in unpaid taxes. Even sadder, the story claimed the team refused to expense pizza for the players in 2020 due to the cost.
In case there’s question about whether those anecdotes may be true, the behavior of the organization in building its team lines up perfectly with that portrayal. Take a look at their current roster: of $66,881,773 they claim to be spending on players, $26,898,810 of it is owed to four pseudo-retired players who are claiming injuries and will never play again. The catch? Those contracts are often largely covered by insurance. The active roster itself at the end of the season consisted of 20 players with a cumulative cap hit of just over $40 M… the NHL salary cap is $82.5 M. And the money being paid out to those active players may be even less than the cap hits, since the cap hit represents an average yearly salary (average annual value or AAV) over the life of the contract as opposed to what the player actually receives in a given year.
Take Nick Schmaltz for example, a rare good player on this terrible Coyotes team. His cap hit/AAV is $5.85 M over the next three seasons (total: $17.55), but the player is set to make $24.45 M in actual salary and for that reason, speculation is now building that the team will trade him this summer. The same thing happened with Jakob Chychrun at the trade deadline, a talented young defenseman who the team traded in March for purely draft picks and at a lower cost than anticipated. Why? It was believed the team didn’t want to take any player contracts back and Chychrun is another player in the coming years who will have salary higher than the cap hit.
The Coyotes have been run on-ice like a money laundering scheme. They hide behind LTIR contracts covered by insurance and trade players as soon as they’re due to make any real money. It’s created a nearly hopeless cycle to be a fan of this team, not unlike the Oakland A’s in baseball, another blatant money laundering scheme run by a team trapped in a terrible stadium.
It’s no surprise then that in the fall of 2021, the saddest chapter in Coyotes franchise history arrived: on December 8, 2021, the team was informed by the Glendale arena that they would be locked out by December 20 if they did not pay $1.3 M in unpaid taxes to the city. The team claimed “human error” and paid them immediately, but a non-stop battle between the Coyotes and the City of Glendale over the arena was drying to a close. Glendale, like a sensible landlord with a con-man tenant, wanted the Coyotes out.
Meanwhile the team still had made only limited progress on a new arena, leading to a Hail Mary solution so crazy that only the NHL and a commissioner driven to support a team purely by ego and spite could come up with. The Coyotes would move into a tiny but brand new college hockey rink, known as Mullett Arena and operated by Arizona State University. It seats just 5,000 for NCAA games, even fewer for NHL games (10,000 smaller than the next closest NHL stadium), and despite the sheer implausibility of the plan, the NHL claimed the finances actually made total sense. No one thought Mullett Arena was a longterm solution, but it hinged on a new stadium being built in Tempe.
Despite the fact Meruelo is a shyster, the new stadium in Tempe could bring tranquility to this saga. Tempe is home to ASU, so tons of young college kids who may be interested in hockey would be next door, and it’s closer to downtown Phoenix than Glendale. It seemed like a great idea and perhaps the team could have attendance to finally support a real payroll of players. The Coyotes and the NHL brokered a deal with the Tempe City Council for the arena, a brand new stadium, hotels, retail, a sportsbook, and housing. Unfortunately, the plan would need to go before the voters, which the NHL projected confidence in from the beginning.
The warning signs were there, a mobilized opposition that was somehow outspending a pro sports team in ads, one driven by labor unions who felt spurned by not being guaranteed contracts on the projected. Not to mention the fact that given what has happened with similar arena/entertainment district plans in other cities that need tax breaks for approval (the team often reneges on a lot of what they planned to build), voters had a justifiable reason to be skeptical. The Coyotes continued to say the vote would go well, but it wasn’t a great sign when GM Bill Armstrong was going door-to-door to get out the vote. On Tuesday night, the Coyotes “yea” side of the vote got hammered, losing 57-43 and 56-44 across the three proposals. No new stadium in Tempe, a team estimated to be losing close to $10 M annually with no end in sight, and an ownership group/league running out of options in Arizona. Crisis time!
ESPN.com
The big questions in Arizona
I was going to make this segment all about what the options are in Arizona, and I’ll get to that momentarily, but I understand that your biggest question after reading all that chaos and insanity is…
Why the hell has the NHL been so obsessed with keeping the Coyotes in Arizona?
This is the biggest question of all and the answer is basically that Gary Bettman is the Dril “I’m not owned!!” tweet. As some have remarked, Bettman has spent roughly 1/3 of his life battling over the future of the Coyotes and rather than each failure creating a desire to drop the team like a bad habit, Bettman digs in further. No matter whether you praise or dislike Bettman’s tenure as head of the NHL3, the one indisputable trait of his time as commissioner is a philosophy built around NEVER declaring defeat. The Coyotes moving would be admitting defeat, the greatest of all.
Of course, there are legitimate reasons to want to keep the team in Arizona. Phoenix is a large market and obviously you’d like to keep a team there, but it’s not that large. The city proper is indeed huge, but the metro area itself (defined by the Census’ Combined Statistical Area (CSA) metric) is 2 M smaller than Atlanta, a market the league gave up on over a decade ago. They don’t want to leave Phoenix, sure, but they didn’t want to leave Atlanta either and did so without this drawn out, exhausting saga.
The only explanation is the personal element to it. The NHL had to own the team for quite some time and assumed years and years of losses, under Bettman’s leadership. With every chance to get out, Bettman instead got more deeply invested in keeping the team in Arizona. He’s resisted every call to move the team and every previous failure was met with an immediate “NHL in Arizona today, NHL in Arizona tomorrow, NHL in Arizona forever!!!!” (okay, maybe I’m paraphrasing). They could’ve sold to Balsillie in 2009, let them move to Hamilton, and washed their hands of the situation, but Bettman refused.4 Now, nearly 15 years later, we’re right back where we started from and the realization of that is precisely why Bettman has been so resistant to letting Arizona die: admitting to everyone that the past 15 years of work was completely pointless. That the millions of dollars in debt was a waste.
Of course, we all know intuitively that it probably was, something that will become official if the Coyotes relocate. But Bettman doesn’t want anyone else to know he’s not wearing any clothes, even if we can see through the not-so-faint curtain that he’s naked. So, he will probably keep digging in. Despite a surprising change of tone on Tuesday night after the vote, the indications are that the league will try to keep the team in Arizona. Now, as we’ll explain shortly, the chance of doing so looks awfully slim at this point, but Bettman will present that façade until it crumbles. Everything was fine and dandy with the Atlanta Thrashers… until the day they packed up and moved to Winnipeg. This is how Bettman operates and we shouldn’t be remotely surprised. Bettman is never wrong, except for the occasional time he isn’t right.
So, can the Coyotes stay in Arizona?
After a sullen message on Tuesday night, here’s the statement from the team:
While we are very disappointed Tempe voters did not approve the proposed Entertainment District, we want to thank all our loyal fans who supported the Coyotes over the years. Your loyalty is what makes our Pack strong.
During the 2023-24 season, the Arizona Coyotes will play at Mullett Arena. In addition, we remain committed to Arizona and have already started re-engaging with local officials and sites to solidify a new permanent home in the Valley.
We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks.
This is about as vague as you can get and the insistence on playing in Mullett another year isn’t crazy. The Ottawa Senators are being sold right now and the draft and offseason are upcoming, not exactly the best timing for the league. Regardless of whether the team stays in Arizona long term or is relocated, it makes a lot of sense to give it one more year at Mullett, so that a move wouldn’t be hasty. The Thrashers lost their building and had to move quickly because there was no other option. The Coyotes have the stopgap that is Mullett, so they might as well use it.
But everyone knows Mullett Arena is not a long-term solution. Is there one in Arizona? In a good piece by Craig S. Morgan of GoPHNX.com after the vote, there are several “options”. The biggest one is to go back downtown to the Phoenix Suns arena… you know, the one that didn’t work the first time. It’s not called America West Arena anymore but it’s the same building. The Suns were sold recently to Michigan-based billionaire Mat Ishbia, removing the Sarver family and their feud with the Coyotes from the equation. Still, it’s not clear if Ishbia wants them in the building and even if he did, the same problems are still there. The now-called Footprint Center is a basketball arena and has recently been renovated to make it even better for basketball and worse for hockey. To be a long-term solution, the Coyotes would need Ishbia to agree to new renovations to fit it for hockey, two years after the building was just renovated for $240 M. That one seems extremely unlikely to me and would possibly need city intervention to happen.
If the Coyotes can’t go into the Footprint Center, they’re likely locked out of downtown Phoenix. That leaves a couple options, the first one to knock off is a return to Glendale. Not happening in a million years. An AZCentral article published with reactions from Glendale city officials to the Tempe vote reads like a local government that would rather have an asteroid hit their city than for the Coyotes to return. The team is homeless because Glendale didn’t work and Glendale hates their guts.
So then we are talking about two possible plots of land, one in Mesa, AZ, and one out where the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community holds land. The Mesa site is the former home of Fiesta Mall, ~10-15 miles driving distance from downtown Phoenix. Not ideal, but the land does need redeveloping. However, the hoops are just like those in Tempe, negotiating with local government and it would require a vote of residents. If they couldn’t win a vote in Tempe, a place with a younger populace, can they win one in a more conservative and retiree-focused city like Mesa?
The site out on the Salt River Reservation has its own issues. I’m not sure exactly where it is located on the 101, but just using the existing Talking Stick Resort as a measuring point, that’s 20 miles driving from downtown Phoenix. The Coyotes wouldn’t be able to own the land, brokering a deal with the Bureau of Indian Affairs presents more hurdles, and the associated casino, which Meruelo is really after, would be less profitable because revenue would have to be shared with the native people who own it. It sounds like the community here is open to negotiating but it’s not an easy deal to pull off and not an appealing one for what the Coyotes are after.
Then there’s the overriding issue here. Any move besides going back to the Footprint Center where the Suns play is going to take years and years to enact, which may not be possible given the stopgap at Mullett. For a gauge on how long this takes in a region that has been repeatedly hostile to the Coyotes, the NHL submitted their Tempe plan on September 3, 2021. It didn’t face the voters for approval until May 2023. After that, there’s no indication of when the project was going to actually break-ground but when it did, it would be about two years to build the arena (as is standard for NHL/NBA stadiums). Even if they started building it this fall, you’re looking at a grand opening in fall 2025. That’s four years after the plan was submitted!
Realistically, from the beginning of negotiating to finishing the arena, you’d be looking at four to five years. And the clock on that hasn’t even started ticking yet because we’re back to square zero. Having already played one season in Mullett Arena, the Coyotes would be asking the league to play up to six seasons in Mullett Arena, a stay that could last until the end of the 2020s. Is that remotely possible for an arena that is comically tiny, they don’t own, and is reportedly losing $10 M for the team annually? I doubt it would be remotely palatable to the players, who would see a stay of that duration in Mullett Arena as a drain on league-wide revenue, possibly limiting the salary cap and player salaries. You could even see an injunction from the NHLPA in that scenario to block it.
Mullett Arena was already a laughingstock that the players only went along with given the promise it would 1.) only be three years and 2.) a state of the art building was coming soon. Now it’s not coming soon. There’s also the other owners, who you’d think wouldn’t be too excited to prop up a long-term investment in Mullett when it’s sucking cash from the league. Unless they can move the team into Footprint Center with the promise of massive renovations, I don’t see a way forward here. The Mullett-and-Tempe-Vote rope-a-dope felt like the last stand of the league in Arizona (a Coyotes source admitted to ESPN that ‘there is no Plan B’). Right now your “Hail Mary” options are trying another vote in Mesa (seemingly the preferred plan?) or hoping the Suns let you drop a ton of money to renovate a building that was just renovated two years ago, a building the Coyotes already failed in. Yikes!
Coming soon?
Relocation
Given everything I’ve laid out here, you probably know where I’m going with this: move the goddamn team. I am not against hockey in Arizona and would like to see it succeed. I am an advocate of growing the game and it’s great to see that the Coyotes’ presence in Arizona helped give us Auston Matthews, Tage Thompson, and Matthew Knies + the ASU hockey team. I just don’t know how the NHL can succeed in Arizona right now. This team is not profitable, has never been profitable, and does not have a path to profitability any time soon with these plans. Given how cursed this franchise has been, it feels better to move them elsewhere and go back to Phoenix in the next round of expansion, giving the area a window to air out.
So if the Coyotes are being moved, where could they go? This is where we dip into the reservoir of possible expansion markets that have been rumored about. First of all, it’s not going to be Atlanta or Quebec City due to geography. They need to keep this franchise in the Western Conference for balance and ideally in the Central Division. So what western markets are there? Debate has seemed to settle on four options:
Salt Lake City has been the sexy name in recent weeks and immediately kickstarted conversation, with Andy Strickland tweeting that internal league sources view Salt Lake as the backup/escape plan here. Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith has been buying up sports teams recently, and he’s in his mid-40s, is ecstatic about owning teams, and has expressed interest in the NHL recently. He met back in late March with Bettman in New York about bringing a team to Utah and Elliotte Friedman mentioned at the time on his podcast that “I do think Ryan Smith is the exact kind of owner the NHL would want”. The league clearly has interest in SLC too, playing a preseason game there last fall, and planning to do so again this fall.
Friedman brought up Salt Lake again on Monday on his podcast saying that “I know a lot of people who think the NHL will be in Salt Lake within a decade”. The fact that Smith met with Bettman just six weeks before the vote in Tempe makes it seem impossible to believe that relocation of the Coyotes was not discussed and Friedman noted Wednesday that “Ryan Smith prefers his own fresh new team versus a move team”. I don’t think we learn a lot from that quote, everyone would prefer a fresh team to the Coyotes’ balance sheet, but the fact a “move team” is a possibility says to me that Bettman touched base with Smith about it when they met in New York.
The big thing here is whether Smith steps up to the plate and gives the NHL an attractive out from Arizona. What that entails is probably two things, first being small renovations to the Vivint Arena where the Jazz play. It’s a clunky fit for hockey with a small capacity (14,000), so perhaps a renovation that gets it up to 15,500 and fixes some issues for hockey could do the job. And then you’d need a new building to be a long-term home. Luckily, Salt Lake City was already planning that as part of their 2030 or 2034 Winter Olympics bid, so local government seems to be on board with a sparkling new hockey rink. It would be on Smith to make tweaks to the building he owns as the temporary home and to get the wheels in motion on a permanent home. Do those two things and put up the sale $$$ and I think you may have yourself a deal.
Houston is the pie in the sky option for the league, sexier as a much larger market than Salt Lake City but also daunting. The NHL has been interested in Houston for some time, but the issue with this plan is whether there is an owner ready. The Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta met with the NHL in 2017 and has pitched hockey in Houston, but Friedman reported on his podcast Wednesday morning that the previous meeting did not come with a financial offer the league liked and one that lacked passion comparable to what the NHL wants (or presumably that Smith offers).
The region of Houston is not loaded with NHL-caliber hockey rinks, the best option being the Toyota Center, where the Rockets play and where the AHL’s Houston Aeros once played (they left in 2013). It is suitable for hockey, but if the league wasn’t pumped about Fertitta, they’d be selling to a group that would have to negotiate with Fertitta about using the building. Moreover, while I’m not sure the NHL is prioritizing this, I would be worried about the Coyotes getting lost in the shuffle in Houston, a non-traditional market with strong sports brands competing against it. And if you don’t have that passionate ownership behind it, the problem is even more likely to manifest. Finally, there’s the question of expansion. As a mega-market with oodles of corporate offices, Houston is one of the likeliest markets to post an exorbitant expansion fee next time around, possibly upwards of $800 M. Cannibalizing that expansion market with relocation has to be on the mind.
Kansas City has long been talked about as an NHL relocation city, ever since the Scouts left in 1976. Unlike Salt Lake City or Houston, they do have a Grade-A building in the T-Mobile Center, an arena that sits largely unused outside of concerts. KC could also give the Coyotes the winter to themselves with no basketball team in town. The issue is KC is the smallest media market being considered here and they don’t have an owner ready to go. Though Patrick Mahomes wants to bring the Coyotes to KC, he’s not yet a billionaire and needs a sugar daddy here. As reported a few months back, Lamar Hunt Jr. (co-owner of the Chiefs), who was once interested in the NHL, has largely given up due to cost. If there’s no owner ready to step in to make it happen, it doesn’t feel likely to me even if the arena is nice.
Sacramento is on the periphery of discussion here, mostly due to the involvement of Kings owner Vivek Ranadive in the bidding for the Ottawa Senators. It’s begun to catch eyeballs about the possibility of the NHL in Sacramento, but I don’t see a ton of appeal here otherwise. Moving the Coyotes to Sacramento would require Vegas to switch divisions, it’s not clear how well the Golden 1 Center is to fit hockey, and does the NHL really want four teams in the state of California? This one seems awfully far-fetched to me, but it deserves a cursory mention.
Here’s what it feels like: it’s on one of these cities to get a plan together to take the Coyotes. There aren’t any answers in Arizona, but there aren’t any immediate relocation options either yet, hence one more year in Mullett. That gives the NHL a window to either pull a rabbit out of the hat in Arizona or an ownership group to step up with an offer and a plan. Is Ryan Smith of SLC willing to do that? He tweeted back in April that getting an NHL team was “in motion” but is he ready right now? Like I said, he’d need to get a plan together for both the short term and long term future of the team in Salt Lake City, but otherwise the move makes sense, a cold weather city with tourism based partially around winter sports and a well supported NBA team.
One option the NHL has with the stopgap of Mullett Arena is getting a bidding war going, possibly between Houston and Salt Lake, but given that they probably don’t want this to go public, I’m not sure it goes down that road. But the logic applies to Houston too, this being a window for an owner to step up with a plan. Salt Lake feels likelier because I think Houston makes more sense to leave as an expansion market and also Salt Lake has an owner the NHL seems to like, rather than one they’re tepid on, but they’d need a building to get figured out.
So what comes next? The Coyotes will play another year in Tempe, claiming that they’re “re-engaging” with long-term solutions in Arizona (while apparently crowd sourcing arena locations). Behind the scenes that will involve last ditch efforts in the desert but is likely cover for Bettman to finally negotiate an exit strategy. If the Coyotes follow the Thrashers model, everything will be fine until suddenly one day, they’re being sold and moving to a new city. Or maybe Ishbia proves to be the savior of hockey in Arizona and they work out a deal to keep the team in Phoenix playing in the Footprint Center. It’s hard to say right now how it will go, I’d lean strongly towards relocation, handicapping Salt Lake as the favorite, followed by Houston and distantly Kansas City, but everything is still in play. The NHL has been running round for 25 years in the Valley of the Sun, cooking up increasingly pathetic plans to keep the team, maybe they have one more up their sleeve. Mesa? Scottsdale?
I’d propose moving the team to Salt Lake City if Smith cobbles together a deal, with a plan to go to Houston and back to Phoenix (perhaps being paired with Atlanta and Quebec in the east) during the next round of NHL expansion. Three of those four are non-traditional markets, which I think will do better with proper expansion teams and years to prepare, and could all pay king’s ransom expansion fees given their vibrant economies. Salt Lake makes less sense for expansion beyond the arena question and profiles better as a relocation fix for Arizona to me.
Again, I don’t know what will happen, but one thing will be true through all this though. This saga will be chaotic, insane, completely irrational and messy until it isn’t. Someone please step up and put this poor team out of its misery.
Thankfully these views weren’t as bad as those seats at Wrigley or at old Tiger Stadium where your seat is directly behind a pole
“No, this Valtteri Filppula guy, he’s just as good as I was, I tell ya. Great hockey player!”
I generally find myself in the middle ground on these debates
Even if they didn’t want a team in Hamilton, which Toronto and Buffalo definitely didn’t, you could’ve let the team relocate to Winnipeg or somewhere else in 2009