Sad Coyotes saga has happy ending for some
The Arizona Coyotes have long felt like a scam, or at least an ongoing mistake. They never had a rink that worked. Glendale was a far-flung disaster, and moving to the 4,600seat Mullett Arena was a humiliating stopgap, no matter how charming you could tell yourself it was. This is the National Hockey League; there have been plenty of embarrassing moments. But the Coyotes have provided more than their share.
So, is this how it ends for now, not with a bang but with a sudden shellgame shuffle to Utah? The reports bloomed and multiplied earlier this week like warnings, and each one raised the ante. On Monday, prospective NHL owner Ryan Smith asked fans whether, y’know, they had any thoughts on a team name. On Wednesday, Daily Faceoff reported the Coyotes were in talks to move to Salt Lake City. Within an hour, ESPN reported sale prices. Current Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo would sell the team to the NHL for $1 billion (U.S.) and the NHL would sell it to Smith for as much as $1.3 billion, and Meruelo could maybe buy an expansion team for less in future.
At the time, Sportsnet said it could happen as soon as April 18.
Every report was crammed with caveats: fluid situation, lots of work to be done, nothing done yet, but things could also move faster than Nathan MacKinnon. They were the kind of caveats you might issue before booking moving trucks for 1 a.m.
Well, Friday night it broke that Coyotes players had been told they were indeed going to Utah. And it felt both inevitable and a sort of shock.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman fought very, very hard to keep the Coyotes in Arizona; too hard, you could say. It cost the league’s players — all of them — because the franchise has been bleeding money in the desert for well over 15 years. They could have been moved to Hamilton. They could have been moved to Quebec City. (A team can always be moved to Quebec City, in theory, depending how the league feels about prospective owner Pierre-Karl Péladeau. His flirtations with separation weren’t a popular move in league circles.)
Instead, the Coyotes were left to rot in the desert. The franchise soaked local government for millions — in 2012, Glendale had a civic population of 227,000 and was paying the Coyotes $42 million over three years to manage the arena, amid a massive municipal budget shortfall — but not so many millions that the team didn’t still lose money.
And, meanwhile, Phoenix hockey fans got hosed, absolutely hosed, in the vague name of loyalty. The team employees, too, who endured reports of toxic workplaces, limited resources and a constant threat of extinction. The franchise went through cycles of rebuilds and trades and lived on memories of Shane Doan, and reached the playoffs once in the past 12 years.
It was during COVID, in an empty rink in Vancouver. It must have been hard to love them.
Hockey in the desert did help create Auston Matthews, who has a chance to become the greatest American player ever. It created Matthew Knies and more. But, overall, it’s been a chase to nowhere.
And the last-ditch plan was to win a land auction that, even if successful, would mean a minimum of three more years in the Mullett bandbox.
You can play in the NHL equivalent of a parking lot, honestly, for so long. This deal as described would close the circle nicely: a rich guy buys an NHL team for well over a billion dollars, the league pockets up to $300 million to split among 31 teams and the owner of the Coyotes keeps the rights to the team name and colours and history. And, if he can somehow finagle an NHL-calibre rink sometime in the very near future, he could get an expansion team. It’s almost poetic, really.
But, at this moment, this is also a failed frontier in a time where franchise values are soaring and pro sports can only be screwed up with a fair amount of effort. Yes, there should be more teams in Canada — a second team in Toronto, for instance. And yes, Hamilton with Jim Balsillie might have worked.
You can’t say much more than that, though: not with the Winnipeg Jets sounding alarm bells, not with the Canadian dollar at 72 cents U.S. No, you have to hand it to the NHL. They’re going to make some money off this misbegotten adventure, sell the players and front office to a rich guy, and maybe get back to Arizona if they haven’t absolutely poisoned the well.
And all the NHL had to do was squander better opportunities, devastate a local government or two and run a franchise into the ground over 20 years. Nice work if you can get it. Just not for everyone.