Does anyone know if there are coyotes in Utah?

Reports suggest the NHL is considering the sale and relocation of its Arizona franchise to Salt Lake City. Apparently even Gary Bettman can sour on the desert

Hockeytown, USA? (Photo by Brent Pace on Unsplash)

Sometimes news comes out in a slow drip. A reporter gets a tip, writes something that hints at big developments to come, others jump in to try to match it, and the story develops in small pieces at a time. Drip, drip, drip.

Sometimes that first part happens, and then the taps are cranked wide open, the news bursting forth so fast that it’s hard to catch all the developments as they rush past.

On Wednesday the second scenario happened. Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff reported mid-morning (Eastern time) that the NHL was drafting two schedules for next season: one with the Arizona Coyotes in Arizona, and the other with them in Salt Lake City.

Zoinks! This was, on the one hand, crazy. The Coyotes just announced, only days ago, the organization’s plan to bid on a parcel of state-owned land in Phoenix where, if successful, they would then build a huge multi-use project with a hockey arena as a centrepiece. The team wasn’t even asking for public money, which had killed the last potential arena project in Tempe, and the auction was still more than two months away. After all the years spent with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman insisting, against all available evidence, that the Coyotes had a long and rosy future in Arizona, now he was ready to pull up shop and see them off to Utah?

Within hours, though, Seravalli was reporting that more than just schedule talk, significant progress was being made on a possible sale and relocation. Various NHL insiders — at ESPN, The Athletic, Sportsnet — then said discussions had taken place with Ryan Smith, the billionaire owner of the Utah Jazz, who has basically been shouting from the rooftops for months that he wants to bring an NHL franchise to Salt Lake City.

All the reports used the same hedging language — nothing was a done deal, there were many moving parts, much work to be done, etc — but there was suddenly a critical mass of reporting that suggested the Coyotes were not long for Arizona.

Quite why the news tumbled out in this manner, all but kneecapping Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo as he tries to get the local market excited about the artist’s renderings of his new Phoenix mega-project, is something only Bettman and his lieutenants know. The reports all said details of the potential relocation were included in a memo to league owners, which is not a super-secret way of doing things. You want something to leak? Put it in writing, distribute widely.

Here’s a guess: The league wants this business done before the land auction takes place so that, in the event the Coyotes win it, that doesn’t lead to yet another years-long process to get the arena project approved, let alone built, all while the NHL team continues playing out of a 5,000-seat arena at Arizona State University. Even in Meruelo’s best-case scenario, the new Phoenix arena wouldn’t be ready until the Coyotes played another three seasons at ASU.

In which case, fair enough. It is indeed stupid that the Coyotes would play another three years in a small college arena, but it was stupid when they moved there in the first place, and Bettman was OK with that. When, exactly, did he lose patience with Meruelo? When the Tempe plan fell through last year? When he came back with an even more ambitious — and, thus, uncertain — long-range plan? When Bettman realized he was going to have to fake-smile his way through Phoenix-arena updates until at least 2027?

The funniest outcome of all this is that the Utah plan falls apart as quickly as it came together, and the NHL is forced to pretend that, actually, they never doubted Meruelo’s Phoenix plan for a minute. If you think Bettman couldn’t be quite that shameless, you’ve never seen him give a press conference.

Programming update

Unobstructed Views heads to the United Kingdom next week, which is a fancier way of saying my friend and I are going on a long-planned trip to watch some soccer, which we will call football like true fans. The publishing schedule is a little uncertain, but at least a couple of posts should arrive in your inbox at some point. Thanks, as always, for reading.