Howl long has this been going on.

Jerry Colangelo was surprised by the phone call.

Several years prior, the face of the Phoenix Suns' front office had reached out to the National Hockey League. He was building a new arena for the Suns, and having two tenants in it with more than 40 guaranteed dates would certainly be better than one, so how would the NHL feel about putting a franchise in the Valley of the Sun? According to Jonathon Gatehouse's The Instigator, the league office told him "hockey would never work in the desert," and that was pretty much that.

But now, three years and change after Colangelo had opened up his dazzling hoops palace, here was the commissioner of the NHL calling him, asking Jerry if he thought hockey could work in the desert. 

Things had changed a bit, you see. This was a new commissioner, Gary Bettman, and the league he oversaw was in the middle of a pretty rapid shift. There were now teams in Tampa, Miami, Dallas, and Anaheim, and another one that very nearly moved to Nashville but won the Stanley Cup instead. There was a national TV deal worth actual money with Fox, who was very interested in getting more American markets in the league. Coinciding with that, the Canadian dollar was in freefall, which had already contributed to the Quebec Nordiques crossing the border to Denver. And now, Gary had another Canadian problem on his hands. 

The Winnipeg Jets were in the process of being sold to Richard Burke and Steve Gluckstern, who planned to move them to Burke's home of Minnesota to replace the departed North Stars. But prospects for that move were falling apart. So, could Colangelo offer his steady hand and guide this franchise to Phoenix? After all, the landscape had changed.

Unfortunately, Colangelo's vision for the arena, now built, had also changed. Rejected by the pre-Bettman NHL, America West Arena had been built solely with basketball in mind, and to perfection. Yes, they could add ice-making facilities. Yes, they could, technically, get a 200-foot ice rink in it. But there would have to be some, uh, compromises. Approximately 5,287 of them. It would not be an ideal venue for top-tier pro hockey in an untested market, but in the short term, it could do. After all, the Ottawa Senators started off playing under the grandstand of a football stadium, and the Tampa Bay Lightning first played in a barn at the state fairgrounds before turning a failed baseball stadium into a surprisingly successful hockey rink. 

Sure, Colangelo could get on board, and bring Burke and Gluckstern and their 41 home games a year to his basketball arena, where the seats would hang over the ice on one end. Eventually, the team would need its own venue, but in the meantime, they could take a few years, build up a fanbase, and seek out a spot for a true home. For a little while, though, they could get by in less than ideal accommodations.

All of this is to say: It has always been this way for the Coyotes. It has been more than a quarter-century, and they have known no other form of existence.

Even the short term proved too much for the Coyotes' initial owners. By 1998, Colangelo had removed himself from the proceedings. So did Gluckstern, a New Yorker who sold his stake to buy in on a franchise closer to home that was having some, shall we say, federal prison problems. This left Burke holding the bag, and he was ready to offload to Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, who was going to put the team in Portland with his Trail Blazers. But that would not happen, because Gary Bettman had decided hockey did, in fact, belong in the desert. The commissioner took a personal interest in the ownership search until he found someone willing to keep the team in town, even lobbying Wayne Gretzky to get on board when said owner needed partners and some star power to secure financing. Grand plans for an arena in Scottsdale (where the fans and money were) blew up, so they settled on an offer in Glendale (where nothing was,) and it's all been nonstop calliope music ever since.

With Glendale tired of the swindle they had gotten themselves into, the Coyotes and their new owner (who definitely has the money, trust him, there was just a mistake that one time, for 17 consecutive months,) are trying to get Tempe to buy in on the facility that will make desert hockey a raging success story, this time for sure. In the meantime, though, the team will happily play out the interim, at least three years but almost certainly longer than that, in a 5,000 seat college rink. Or, maybe a little less. For context here, the Oakland/California (Golden) Seals, the team that was probably the most rollicking embarrassment in the modern NHL, and is the last North American major pro sports franchise to outright fold, was good for about 5,000 on most nights. The Coyotes are willingly putting themselves in a situation where that is their ceiling, if everything breaks just right.

But that's not all, because with this franchise, it never is. Because ASU's facilities are being built to NCAA standards, the Coyotes are going to have to add on to bring them up to NHL standards, and do so all on their dime, about $20 million. Arizona State will be taking that as cash up front, because the news in Glendale travels to Tempe fairly easily, it turns out. (Again, Coyotes owner Alex Mereulo is definitely good for the money; he just, uh, has to go back out to his car for a second to go get a thing.) And when the Coyotes leave campus for their shiny new arena in Tempe (cough,) all of the facilities they built become university property. 

According to Craig Morgan, the revenue limitations don't stop at capacity, which again, could be less than one-sixth of the United Center. Arena naming rights? That's ASU's money. Ads on the boards, on screens, around the seating bowl and in the concourses? All ASU's money. Parking revenue? That's ASU's money, unless the Coyotes work to develop some sort of "premium" service where they could collect the additional charges. Perhaps the team could run a robust valet service and park all the cars in Glendale; I understand the parking lots there are vast and sparsely occupied. Did I mention that the target date for the arena getting up to NHL standards is December, meaning the Coyotes could start their season with two solid months on the road? Oh, and by the way, ASU has already booked most of the weekend dates either for their own teams or other events, so it'll be almost exclusively Monday-through-Thursday home games for the Yotes once they're actually allowed in the building.

Congratulations to this league of billionaire businessmen: You are getting yourselves clowned by America's Drunkest University.

So, why does this pursuit of NHL hockey in Arizona persist, even after decades of bad ideas, aborted plans, and stacks of cash set aflame? Well, this franchise has been Gary Bettman's special case since the get-go, so it could be argued that we're just watching 25 years of the sunk cost fallacy at work. But it's not exclusively Bettman; he does serve at the pleasure of the owners, after all, and he once convinced them to all chip in and buy the team out of bankruptcy. (For a little while, they could get by.) So it's worth considering what, at the very least Bettman is doing to convince his bosses this is an endeavor worth prolonging. The Coyotes' on-ice product is an open sewer; not a guaranteed win every time they come to town, but about as close as you can get in the current NHL. They are also the preferred dumping ground for unwanted contracts, happily taking on the back ends of front-loaded deals that will get them to the salary floor for dimes on the dollar. Who can forget the storied Coyotes years of Chris Pronger, Marian Hossa, and Pavel Datsyuk, for instance? And because the Coyotes have been drawing no one and will draw even fewer fans going forward, that's less "Hockey Related Revenue" for the league, which means less of a chance of the salary cap going up. I imagine it's an easy sell to the other 31 owners to each put in $700,000 for the Coyotes to play in a tiny college rink now, when you tell them it means $3 million less in salaries they'll have to pay out later.

As for the Coyotes' actual owner, there's good reason for him to stay in, besides whatever incentives and assistance he's getting from the league like all those who preceded him. Alex Mereulo is a casino guy, and now his hockey team has its most valuable asset in history: a license to operate a sports gambling operation in Arizona. That's easy money for a guy who seems suspiciously short on funds at times, and since it doesn't count as Hockey Related Revenue, it's all money that he will never have to put back into his players.

So far all the reasons the Arizona Coyotes simply should not be, there are also plenty of reasons they will continue to be. Tune back into this blog in ten years, when the Arizona Coyotes are playing weekday afternoon matinees at a rec rink in Prescott because they're booked at night for a puppet show.

Right here, this is what you came for.

The Blackhawks held a livestreamed "town hall" meeting Wednesday night in advance of announced 8:30 start against the Minnesota Wild, which is as close to a playoff feeling a fan will be able to get out of the Hawks this season. The stream had about 800 viewers as it entered a Q & A session, which, to put in terms of NHL viewership, would make it "a rousing success for the Arizona Coyotes."

Before it was done, it was guaranteed to be the most-watched video in the league for the evening, and had a nationwide trend on Twitter, all thanks to one W. Rockwell Wirtz.

And now he goes after @_phil_thompson. Absolutely insane from Rocky Wirtz. Smh. pic.twitter.com/dMHYOHUbkQ

— Wally Maz (@WallMaz35) February 3, 2022

I'm not going to go too deep into the substance of this embarrassing tirade here; Mark Lazerus has already posted a very good column about it for The Athletic, and you can (and should) probably read it for a dollar right now, plus the New York Times will probably make it a bundle deal with Wordle or something down the road. But I do want to note two things that struck me.

First, Rocky went off on a question that he apparently did not understand or did not want to. Lazerus asked about what the team has been doing to ensure another horrific abuser does not receive shelter in their inner sanctum. After all, the report the team commissioned cited organizational failures in allowing the abuse to occur and consciously covering it up, even if there was no proof Rocky knew about it up at the top. The Hawks publicly pledged change and reform after releasing the report. They have not been available to take a single question on the matter in the months since. This is a more than fair question to ask. And yet, as soon as it's asked, you can see the gears turn in Rocky's head, and it is classic Wirtz Corp. thinking. I didn't pay out a huge damn settlement and pay a bunch of lawyers to draft an airtight non-disclosure agreement to have to put up with hearing about this crap anymore. And so, he was not going to hear about it. Like Mark McGwire on Capitol Hill, he was not here to talk about the past, because the past makes him look bad.

More importantly, you see Danny Wirtz, the alleged current head of the franchise, try to get this disaster back on the tracks, starting to actually answer the question in his role as CEO. And all it takes is one word from Rocky.

No.

And Danny clamps it airtight.

There was supposed to have been a passing of the torch to the younger generation of the family this season, as Rocky busied himself with booze and real estate and the other affairs of the family business. Danny was going to take the Hawks into the future, working past arguably the franchise's darkest moment back toward success on and off the ice. And with one word, two letters, Rocky, in the words of Jay Zawaski, "cut his nuts off" on that stage for all the hockey world to see. They can arrange the names however they want in the media guide, there's no doubt as to who's still running the show on West Madison.

The second point comes from the follow-up question from the Chicago Tribune's Phil Thompson. After a bit more stonewalling and fury about the club's response to - let's state it again for emphasis - covering up the sexual abuse of an employee by one of his superiors, Thompson pivoted to a question about the disappointment he's seen from season ticket holders in interviews, not only about the product and its direction, but the downward trend of ticket resale values accompanying it. Rocky's tone and approach do not change one bit, as he faces a question that is indisputably about the present, not the past.

"Is that a fact? Are you, are you... I didn't realize you are in our ticket department. C'mon. C'mon. Let's talk about the negative stuff. Let's talk about your paper, and what the sports page looks like."

So we can't ask the Blackhawks about the past. We can't ask about aspects of the present or the future that may relate to the past, because that's in the past, which we don't talk about. We also can't talk about the present in a way that's negative, because bad things are to only be discussed in private by executives only, or something, and to bring it up is, I don't know, failing fake news media or something? John McDonough may have met the curb, but the strongarm omerta he instilled in the front office certainly still resides.

If you close your eyes while listening to it all, you can almost see Bill Wirtz and Bob Pulford blustering at a folding table, speaking in a dismissive, above-it-all tone that somehow made scotch leech out of your cable box.

For this, they would like you to pay money.

Honorable Losses.

I'm going to return to writing about hockey by talking about Australian Football, as is the standard process for this sort of thing.

Back in 2012, the AFL's Richmond Tigers were in the midst of their third decade of league irrelevance - a proud, founding club that hadn't hoisted a title since Olivia Newton-John dazzled moviegoers, critics, and awards voters alike with her unparalleled performance in Xanadu. But for the first time in awhile, there were genuine signs of things being on the upswing, with young talent and veterans alike showing development around one true star player. And then the club started out of the gate 1-4, albeit with three of those losses coming by just a few points against teams that were considered top contenders that year. Some in the press nearly treated these as wins - Hey, the Tigers can finally hang with the big boys for most of a game! - and referred to them with a term that has stuck with me ever since: "Honourable losses." In other words, yes, you still lost, but you didn't get your dicks kicked in for four quarters and bring shame upon the sport with your presence, which is more than we were expecting!

Tigers Head Coach Damien Hardwick was not having it.

"They're learning that we're getting better and the great thing I love to see in their faces is that after that game it's bitter disappointment.

"It's not like, 'Oh we're not good enough' ... you saw Chris after the game and he was very demoralised. I've no doubt it's a spur and they'll come out all guns blazing.

"I think in previous years we would have been quite happy with the effort we'd given. It's no longer acceptable for us to have those honourable losses and that's the sign of a footy club maturing and demanding that we've got to get better and start winning those games.

The Tigers ripped off four wins in their next five matches, but still were not quite there in 2012, finishing out of the postseason at 10-11-1. Hardwick stayed on, the core talent developed further and was bolstered by sharp drafting and signings, and the losses were never considered honorable, whether in the regular season or postseason. By 2020, the Richmond Tigers were holding the Premiership Trophy high for all to see, for the third time in four seasons.

Which brings us to this week for the Chicago Blackhawks.

I saw and heard some praise for the Hawks last night near the end of their 6-4 loss to the Avalanche - their second in five nights to that particular Western Conference demolition unit. After all, they got stonewalled by a hot hand in goal Monday, and very nearly took the Avs to OT at home on Friday, until Cale Makar killed any hope of a Gary Bettman Loser Point™ with an empty-net goal from behind the opposing blue line that hit the back of the net on the fly, a thing that I did not think was possible unless the puck had built-in drone controls. Sure, Nathan MacKinnon wasn't playing, and both of the losses were against Colorado's backup goalie, whose name I will never be able to pronounce correctly on the first try. But still, the Hawks were almost there for almost the whole game against the best team in the conference - and twice in one week! Aren't those some honorable losses, something on which the team can hang its collective hat?

If you're reading this, you probably remember that playoff series against the Red Wings in 2009 - that feeling of a team on the rise, almost, but not quite there. That feeling, of course, proved out. What's important to note now, and what's different from those 2009 Hawks or those 2012 Tigers, is that these Hawks are on the other side of the apex. The "good losses" come as a passing reminder of a not-so-distant time when the team could hang with the best the league had to offer, because they were also among the elite. Remember when it used to be like this every night? Please hold on to that, and pretend last weekend against Minnesota never happened. 

On this side of the hill, the honorable losses become fewer and farther between, with an occasional sprinkling of "surprise wins." The two remaining cornerstones of the franchise are both on the wrong side of thirty, and both starting to show it. The captain, clearly frustrated and on the decline, still coming to terms and adjusting to what a new disease has done to his body and mind. The elite scorer sometimes just... can't anymore. For a month. And in his parting gift to his employer, Stan Bowman took these two $10-million, no-move contracts, and threw on another albatross: a defenseman who, if he does not decline, will sometimes be a legitimate first-pairing player. He provides a $9.5 million cap hit for eight seasons after the current one.

This could be a milepost on the way toward bottoming out and building toward a successful next chapter. Unfortunately, the Hawks are much more likely headed toward limbo, that dreadful spot between false hope and fire sale, where management and ownership believe they are just one offseason and a couple of signings away from turning this whole thing around. Or, possibly, given the financial constraints brought on by the three players listed above, just presenting as such and hoping not too many season ticket holders catch on to the long, slow decline.

Given the past year, the losses may end up being the only honorable thing left about the organization.