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.

Please don't like my sport.

The Ottawa Senators play Game 7 tonight. And whether they defeat the Penguins for the Prince of Wales Trophy (which no player dare touch, lest they accidentally unleash its plague of salamanders upon the province), they fall short, or they fail to snatch the trophy from a bunch of guys on horseback, it should be fairly clear that the Senators would be nowhere near this close to June hockey without Erik Karlsson carrying them through most of the postseason.

There's been repeated talk about this year's playoffs as a sort of "coming-out" party for Karlsson, as the dashing Swedish defenseman has been integral in the Sens' surprising deep run. He has 16 points in 18 games. Both of the goals he's tallied have been game-winners. In fact, before Tuesday night's victory, Karlsson had been on the ice for every single Senators game-winning goal of this postseason. He also does stuff like this on occasion, holy jeezus:

#GottaSeeIt: Erik Karlsson springs Mike Hoffman for a breakaway and a beauty finish. #StanleyCup pic.twitter.com/N9Pr2Y6N4w

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) April 17, 2017

And despite the solid offensive numbers, he's anything but the second coming of Mike Green; Karlsson is a no-doubt top-tier defender, with incredible speed and strength on the ice, despite playing through the postseason with a pair of hairline fractures in his heel, plus whatever maladies get revealed after the Senators' final game. ("Karlsson had three fractured ribs... Anderson's left arm was swapped out with an elaborate K'Nex set... Cody Ceci had this hangnail that just wouldn't go away.")

So yes, the Erik Karlsson Show has been in full effect, and deservedly so. What a great story, a player coming out of nowhere to light up the league and lead his underdog team to unexpected success!

Except, for anyone who follows the NHL closely, all this talk of Karlsson's sudden prominence is yet another indictment of this garage league and its complete inability to market its players and its game to a league-wide audience, much less a nationwide or continent-wide one.

Erik Karlsson is not some flash in the pan. He is not some suddenly-emergent youngster. He is a former first-round pick in his eighth NHL season. He is his team's captain, averaging 0.82 points per game for his regular-season career. He is a four-time All-Star, and there have only been five All-Star games during his career. He was the leading scorer in the 2014 Olympics (tied with Phil! Kessel,) and was named the Games' most valuable defenseman. He has twice won the freaking Norris Trophy, the award that ostensibly goes to the best defenseman in the league whose prominent voices are hailing his sudden emergence over the last two months. Erik Karlsson has the credentials to be a Face of the League (and what a face, damn those Swedes,) so why is he only now getting consistent recognition?

One of the arguments I've heard about this is "Well, he plays in Ottawa." And sure, Ottawa is a Canadian market, and probably the Canadian NHL market that gets the least national attention in Canada. The Sens have been either an early-round flameout or an easily-ignored non-qualifier for the last decade. Their owner cries poor and begs for government money for a downtown stadium while hindering his own team with a self-imposed salary cap. The Rideau Canal smells like gravy, and not in the good way. Great player, not-so-great, small-market team. Can't expect a guy in any situation like that to light up TV sets from coast to coast, after all.

And yet, to borrow a page from every trashpile meme that circulates the internet yearly between April and June: Look at the NBA. Right around the time Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered their league, they figured out that if they gave big marketing pushes to exciting star players, it would be beneficial to the league as a whole. Then Michael Jordan came around a few years later, and that strategy worked out pretty okay for them. (Fun parallel: Magic entered the NBA in 1979, as Wayne Gretzky fell into the NHL's lap; Jordan turned pro in 1984, the same year as Mario Lemieux.)

Here's how that NBA strategy works out: I know who Giannis Antetokounmpo is. I barely watch any basketball, and I'm not even going to take a passing attempt at saying his name out loud, but I know who he is, and I know he's fun as hell to watch. This is despite the fact that he plays for the Milwaukee Bucks, a team that has been wholly irrelevant in the NBA for three solid decades, and plays in the 41st-largest U.S. media market. (Milwaukee's city population is about 360,000 people less than Ottawa's, though its metropolitan area is about 200,000 people larger.) The Bucks are so pointless in the NBA, in fact, that when the time came to justify handing over several hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to the Bucks' owners for a new stadium, this is the best sales pitch state officials could come up with:

Photo of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker balances out the Karlsson pic linked earlier.

So the Bucks play sub-.500 basketball in a small market, but their star player still makes his presence known throughout the league, because the NBA has more than half a clue what it's doing. In fact, it gets that casual fans would probably rather watch interesting and fun players than watch two "big" teams that suck eggs; that's why the NBA lets its TV partners flex out crappy games toward the end of the season, even if said crappy game involves media markets #1 and #3. You'd think the NHL and NBC would get the message on this with the Blackhawks' window inching toward a close, the Red Wings already in the dumper, the Bruins on the fringe, the Kings tearing it all down, and the Rangers just boring the ever-loving crap out of everyone in a 50-mile radius every time they take the ice. But it's hard to see the self-fulfilling prophecy of "only fans of these teams will watch, so these are the only teams we'll put on national games" getting altered any time soon. So if Nashville wins the Cup this year, let's all prepare ourselves to double over in laughter when they don't get booked for a single 11:30 Sunday game on NBC and Wings-Bruins gets three slots.

These decisions are not merely based in business sense or a lack thereof, though; they are also rooted in the often misguided and backward tendencies of Hockey Culture. Speaking of the Predators, Evan F. Moore wrote yesterday in The Shadow League about how Hockey Culture suppressed, then ostracized P.K. Subban. While there is an obvious racial component to Subban's treatment, many of the broad strokes against him by The Guardians of The Right Way can be applied to so many other would-be household names. Look at him drawing attention to himself. Look at him having too much fun out there, even though every damn pregame interview from our lead sideline reporter ends with Pierre telling a player to have fun out there. Look at him not being a boring, anonymous cog in our team machine. These things must be stamped out and discouraged in favor of monotone platitudes about getting pucks in deep and playing our game out there. Fealty to The Team and The History must take precedent above all. Sure, Subban has shown nothing but love and respect for the game's legends, and even forged a deep emotional bond with The Canadien during his time in Montreal. And there was the whole millions of dollars and countless hours of service donated to sick children thing.

But, you know, dancing and fancy handshakes and too much smiling, so it's far better to build the team around Shea Weber and Steve Ott and get our asses walloped in the first round. It's losing The Right Way, you see.

There are encouraging cracks forming in Hockey Culture. Social media has allowed players capable of expressing themselves to actually do so, winning over new fans outside of their home markets in the process. Remember when we viewed Roberto Luongo as a whiny jerk, and not a self-deprecating goof worth cheering for? Remember when hockey fans latched on to a doofy fifth-liner like Paul Bissonnette because it was such a shock to find a hockey player at any level of skill with something genuine and interesting to say?

Players who haven't already had the personality drummed out of them through Bantam and Junior can can finally give their fans a more authentic version of themselves, and something to cheer for besides the home team's laundry. (Note that this does not always work out as a positive; hello, Thomas Greiss.) And as fans become more aware of the game's great players, regardless of the markets they play in, perhaps the NHL will get the message that showcasing and marketing all of these great players will only be to its benefit.

Or the league can just cross its fingers and hope that Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, or Washington, but definitely not Ottawa, oh God, not Ottawa, make it into the Final each and every year.

Go Sens.