It looks as if we’re finally here, at the end of the Coyotes era in Arizona. The Coyotes moved to Phoenix from Winnipeg in July of 1996, which means almost three decades of bickering, turmoil and instability are about to come to an end. By all accounts, one of the main attractions of the proposed sale and relocation of the Coyotes to Salt Lake City will be the prospect of stability provided by Ryan Smith, owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz.
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Smith has made his interest in an NHL franchise known for some time, but he also understood he had to play by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s rules.
Primarily that meant waiting patiently until the time was ripe for the league to finally say yes to his overture — at which point he’d either get a chance to bid for an expansion franchise or serve as a landing place for a team badly in need of a new home.
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That’s the critical starting point here — understanding that the process couldn’t be rushed because Bettman had invested so much time, effort and personal capital in trying to keep the Coyotes in Phoenix.
In fact, for about four years, between 2009 and 2012, Bettman was the Coyotes’ de facto owner. This was after Jerry Moyes put the team into bankruptcy, which meant the league was running the team, setting budgets and otherwise providing financial governance to the hockey operations department as they tried to find suitable ownership. It is sometimes difficult to keep track of who owned the Coyotes and for how long (Richard Burke, Steve Ellman, Moyes, a consortium of Canadian investors fronted by George Gosbee, Andrew Barroway and most recently Alex Meruelo) and all those who kicked the tires on the franchise, without ever investing any actual dollars into the operation.
That group includes but was not limited to Jerry Reinsdorf, Matt Hulsizer, Greg Jamison, Darin Pastor, a group called Ice Edge — and most famously of all — the BlackBerry executive Jim Balsillie. Balsillie wanted to buy the team for $212.5 million and relocate it to Hamilton, Ont., a bid that an Arizona bankruptcy court eventually scuttled. If that had gone through, the matter would have been settled by 2009.
Instead, the NHL got 15 additional years of drama. Disputes between the team and its landlord, the city of Glendale, over unpaid bills bubbled up time after time. Eventually, the Coyotes moved out of Gila River Arena in Glendale and into their current temporary home, the 4,600-seat Mullett Arena, on the campus of Arizona State University where they’ve operated for the past two seasons.
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It’s not an NHL-caliber arena on any level and for the last little while, Marty Walsh, the executive director of the NHL Players’ Association, has been publicly critical of the arrangement. Why? Because under the NHL’s current collective bargaining agreement, the players and owners divide all hockey-related revenue 50/50. The fact that the Coyotes have generated so little revenue hurts the overall bottom line and keeps money out of the players’ pockets.
The Coyotes have been a corporate clown show for so long mostly because Bettman couldn’t let go of his obsession with the market. The Coyotes team originally played at America West Arena, home of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, and though the arena itself was not designed for hockey, and thus had about 2,000 obstructed view seats near the ice, the team drew well in the beginning.
It was a downtown arena, and easy to access.
The critical error came in 2001 when Burke sold the team to Ellman, who couldn’t make a go of it financially as a tenant at America West and ultimately moved the team to suburban Glendale. But getting fans in and out of the arena, especially on weeknights because of traffic congestion on the city’s ring road, ultimately undid the operation, which continued to bleed red ink.
For decades, Bettman kept showing up for bankruptcy hearings and city council meetings; the latest of which took place about a year ago, when voters in Tempe turned down three propositions to build a $2.1 billion entertainment district that would have included a new arena for the Coyotes.
Bettman promised that the Coyotes would be in Arizona forever if the plan had been approved. It wasn’t.
As recently as earlier this month, the Coyotes announced — with great fanfare — a plan to win an auction for state-owned land in Phoenix and develop an arena and entertainment district there.
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But the timeline was vague and would have meant at least three more years of playing at Mullett Arena, even if they won the auction, secured the financing for the construction and completed the project in an expedited manner.
It was too much of a hope-and-a-prayer situation, even for Bettman, the Coyotes’ strongest advocate.
Many people couldn’t understand Bettman’s obsession with the market, but it really isn’t hard to explain.
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Bettman’s forever vision for the NHL has always involved a geographic “footprint” that had teams strategically sprinkled across the United States. Phoenix is the fifth-most populous city in the U.S. and supported minor hockey years before the NHL arrived on the scene. It was supposed to work. It would have worked, if not for the arena and ownership instability.
And ultimately, when all the details of the sale emerge, it is likely that Meruelo will not only pocket $1 billion from the sale of the team to the league (which would then flip it to Smith) but he would be given the first right of refusal on an expansion team in Arizona.
Accordingly, it’s not as if Bettman is giving up on the market altogether. He’s just giving it a chance to breathe — which is right out of his playbook. Not a complete surrender, which is what it might look like to the outside world. Just a temporary reprieve.
In the end, it’s hard not to dissect every part of the Coyotes’ never-ending sad story without seeing Bettman’s fingerprints everywhere you look. For years, the unwavering message was that the Coyotes would work in Phoenix — eventually. More recently, a little hedging. That he was “reasonably” confident that Meruelo’s plan to build a new arena would resolve the matter, once and for all.
And now, silence from the commissioner and only a brief acknowledgment from his deputy, Bill Daly, to our Pierre LeBrun, that the league was “continuing to work on a solution to what has been a challenging and difficult situation … and not in a position to comment beyond that.”
Fair enough.
From NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly regarding the Coyotes (and Salt Lake City) speculation:
“The League is continuing to work on a solution to what has been a challenging and difficult situation. But we are not in a position to comment beyond that.''— Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) April 10, 2024
Finalizing a deal this complicated, and of this magnitude, is not the work of a moment.
But it could be a happily-ever-after outcome for all parties concerned, depending on how it ultimately unfolds.
Salt Lake City gets a hockey team with a good young nucleus and lots of draft capital going forward. It means none of the growing pains usually associated with an expansion franchise. Meanwhile, Meruelo gets the first crack at an expansion team and if he can’t swing it, then maybe someone else will.
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The bottom line is, if a new NHL franchise ever re-emerges in Arizona, it will get a chance to start from scratch and be free from the history of league and ownership mismanagement that has been a constant for almost 30 years.
It’s long past time to turn the page on this sorry saga. Maybe the sequel, if it is ever written, can be a fairy-tale success story.
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(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
