Give NHL’S Bettman credit when it’s due
As free-agency rules liberalized and salaries rose in the 1990s, smaller NHL markets were squeezed to the point of asphyxiation. In cities where owners weren’t particularly civic-minded and/ or local, mounting losses made for quick getaways.
Keep in mind that commissioner Gary Bettman serves at the pleasure of the Board of Governors (read: “billionaire owners”), and when he gets marching orders, he marches. Early in his career, before he had the cachet to act more “in the best interest of the league,” he marched much faster.
The Minnesota North Stars had a happy-footed owner with an arena problem and gallons of red ink. They moved to Dallas in 1993. It was a criminal act on a certain level — how could Minnesota not have a hockey team? —
and it was later fixed through expansion.
The Hartford Whalers had an absentee owner with an ice-cold heart who was bent on moving the team as soon as he got his hands on it (Anthony Precourt Sr., if you will). They moved to Raleigh in 1997.
Smaller-market Canadian teams had a particular problem. Players were being paid in American dollars, and it created a gap for teams with revenues in Canadian dollars. This was before the league came up with a Canadian assistance plan.
The Quebec Nordiques moved to Denver in 1995. (The Avalanche promptly won the Stanley Cup).
The original Winnipeg Jets moved to Phoenix in 1996. Twelve years later, Winnipeg was able to poach the Thrashers because, as it turned out, Atlanta is not exactly a thriving hockey market. Plus, Thrashers owners were suing one another, which did not help.
It has been 25 years of drama in the desert. The Phoenix/arizona Coyotes have had five different owners and/or ownership groups, the NHL among them; the league took the team into receivership after one of owners filed the team into bankruptcy in 2009.
The Coyotes have long had an arena problem. They were originally housed in a downtown basketball arena. They wanted to build a complex in Scottsdale but the numbers didn't work, not for Scottsdale. The solution was to build an arena, and a mall around it, in a field in Glendale.
The dream was that hockey fans on the other side of the valley would drive the highway loop to come for the games and stay for the outlet shopping, or something like that. Sales taxes were the bulwark of the plan. Did we mention that the owner put the team into bankruptcy in 2009?
Thursday, the city of Glendale announced that will not renew the Coyotes' lease beyond the 2021-22 season and tweeted that Gila River Arena, which it owns, will shift its focus to “larger, more impactful events.”
The team said all of its efforts are aimed at keeping the Coyotes in Arizona.
There had been talk that the Coyotes might throw in with Arizona State and build a shared arena in Tempe, but the school backed out. The plan for a Tempe arena is not completely dead. Phoenix is another option. We'll see what happens over the next month.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects are being rounded up. There is talk of Houston, which was feeling out expansion before the league put a team in Seattle. Houston has an arena at the ready. So does Quebec. Available franchises are a hot ticket. Even Hartford (via its mayor, Luke Bronin) is making noises.
“First of all, I don't think the Coyotes franchise is going anywhere,” Bettman told New York radio station WFAN. “I think the city of Glendale is negotiating. It's no secret that (Coyotes owner) Alex Meruelo is looking at his options to build a new arena somewhere else. And I think the city of Glendale basically said to the Coyotes, ‘You have to sign a 20year lease or we're not going to renew.'
“I think they're just negotiating. I'm not worried about the Coyotes. I think their future stays in the greater Phoenix area.”
In the past, Bettman has said that Glendale and its arena are no longer viable. That is probably part truth and part negotiating gamesmanship. He's a lawyer.
The Coyotes are a team with a lingering arena problem compounded by a history of messy management and poor decisions. In this century, such a franchise is an outlier.
Labor wars and collective bargaining brought revenue sharing to the NHL, and revenue sharing has brought stability that did not exist in the 1990s. That might be an overgeneralization, but there's truth at the heart of it.
It's a credit to Bettman, now an established wrangler of billionaire owners, and to the NHL Players' Association, which gained in strength.
There are bad commissioners (Don Garber, Rob Manfred, Don Garber again). Bettman is often pilloried, sometimes deservedly. Yet, through 18 months of a pandemic and major losses in revenues, he has managed to extend the collective bargaining agreement and broker new television-rights deals with ESPN and Turner.
In situations where there is potential for a franchise relocation, the team to root for is the fans. To Bettman's credit, he has been, and remains, a staunch advocate for the Coyotes' market and, by extension, their fan base. It's almost like he's trying to do the right thing.