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.
