The Arizona Coyotes are (finally) dead
With the latest arena gambit in the desert seemingly doomed, reports say plans for a resurrection have been shelved. So what did the NHL get for its 28-year struggle?
The Stanley Cup Final ended this week, in a finish that was sadly a little predictable. The Edmonton Oilers found that four wins in a row was a tough ask, and Game 7 included the kind of unfortunate luck that can make playoff hockey so thankless. Ah, well. Good try, fellas. You had some magnificent beards.
But all the focus on the Final drew attention away from a story that passed by quietly. Reports in Arizona say that Alex Meruelo, until quite recently the owner of the Arizona Coyotes, has given up on a plan that would have seen him “reactivate” the Coyotes had he been able to get a new arena built within five years.
That plan always sounded a little crazy, if we’re honest. As part of the deal struck a couple months ago to rescue the Coyotes from having to play several more years at Mullett Arena, the 4,600-seat college hockey barn in which the Coyotes were squatting for the past two seasons, Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith bought the NHL team for US$1.2-billion and whisked it off to Salt Lake City. Meruelo kept the rights to the Coyotes brand — I bet he really had to fight the NHL for those — and reiterated that he was committed to a state land auction, which was supposed to take place on this very day, June 27, for a large parcel that would form the basis of a multi-use entertainment district with an arena at its centre.
The land auction seems to have been the spur to move the team to Utah, because it was possible that Meruelo would win the auction, where he was so far the only known bidder, and then begin a lengthy process during which he tried to get the arena district built. These projects are famously difficult to do, especially when a billionaire owner is looking for taxpayer funding for the project, and very especially when the team in question has a truly remarkable history of arena-related hijinks. No sooner had Meruelo pointed to the land auction as the (latest) first step in solving the Coyotes’ arena problem than local politicians started expressing skepticism about the proposal. Shipping the franchise to Utah gave the NHL the chance to tell Meruelo to get his shit sorted out without keeping the Coyotes stuck in their tiny home while he was trying to do the sorting.
But last Friday, the Arizona State Land Department announced that the auction was cancelled. (Mournful coyote howl). It said that they realized, having done some asking around, that the land wasn’t properly zoned for an arena, and they wanted Meruelo to get the required approvals before bidding on the land. The ASLD said, essentially, it didn’t want to sell the guy this 95-acre parcel of land worth something like $70-million and then discover that the arena wouldn’t be approved. Suddenly you’ve given the billionaire a sweet deal on land for a condo project. Seems prudent to make sure the grand arena plan could be realized.
Meruelo didn’t think so. The Coyotes put out a sniffy statement after the auction was cancelled that didn’t sound like they were looking forward to working together in harmony.
The best part is when it says the state is “forgoing millions, and potentially billions” of dollars that would have gone to education by cancelling the auction. BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR CHILDREN. It seems awfully binary: either allow this land auction to proceed, or watch Arizona’s children grow up to be idiots.
Meruelo hasn’t said anything publicly, but the reporting from Arizona does not equivocate: He’s walking away. And, honestly, why wouldn’t he? Even if this land deal went in his favour and he eventually got an arena built in a favourable arrangement using the normal mix of tax breaks and sweetheart leases, he would have still had to give Smith US$1-billion back upon “reactivation” of the Coyotes. I honestly don’t understand that part of the deal. I guess the idea is that Smith bailed him out by buying the Coyotes at a massively inflated price and one billion dollars would have been the cost of buying back into the NHL. But if Meruelo is in fact walking away, he gets to keep the billion dollars, which is an insane profit on a franchise that he bought five years ago for a reported US$300-million. Admittedly, he might well have sunk hundreds of millions into it in the interim.
And in the end, the Coyotes will mostly be remembered as an example of Gary Bettman’s incredible stubbornness. Relocated to Phoenix from Winnipeg in 1996, the Coyotes were almost immediately embroiled in arena drama as they tried to find a home that was not primarily built for basketball. A move to Scottsdale fell through, and they eventually settled on Glendale, a suburb northwest of Phoenix, moving there in time for the 2003 season. But the entertainment district — sound familiar? — around the arena took years to materialize, the owner sold in 2006, and three years later the new owner took the team into bankruptcy as part of a bold strategy to transfer ownership to Jim Balsillie, the rich Canadian tech dude, who would relocate the Coyotes to Hamilton.
But Bettman didn’t want to give up on Arizona, and he REALLY didn’t want this Balsillie character in his governors’ meetings, so the NHL bought the Coyotes to stop that from happening. It took four years, and at least four failed ownership bids, before the NHL finally unloaded the Coyotes on a consortium of business fellows who somehow thought they could make Glendale work. This was in 2013. Just two years later, Glendale voted to cancel their 15-year lease with the Coyotes. This was, basically, on a technicality. Some people who had worked for the city also did some work for the team and someone figured out this might be a contractual breach and so the council voted to void the whole thing. This was, to be clear, incredible: The city was losing so much money with the Coyotes as an arena tenant that they wanted the NHL to go away. It preferred an empty arena, with doors closed, to one that was open for hockey games that were one-third full. Through all this time, Bettman responded to questions about the viability of hockey in Arizona with a mixture of condescension and disdain. At times it felt like he was the only human on Earth who still held the position that the NHL in Phoenix would eventually work.
But still Bettman persevered. Glendale eventually relented, having secured much better lease terms for the city, and the Coyotes remained. The team also remained a financial mess, and Meruelo arrived in 2019. He started talking to Tempe about a new arena, then hatched a plan to develop a site in conjunction with Arizona State University, and in 2021 Glendale told him to please leave. This led to the Mullett Arena situation, a temporary fix while the team worked on yet another new plan for Tempe. This time voters shot it down, rejecting it in a referendum last spring.
Which brings us more or less to the current situation. After all the years of Bettman shooting down relocation talk and insisting that such speculation was foolish, after various owners pledged commitments to making hockey work in a decidedly non-hockey land, the team disappeared in a flash when it became apparent that the stop-gap Mullett plan might becomes semi-permanent. Even then, the commissioner held out the possibility of reviving the Coyotes rather than admit that Phoenix/Glendale/Tempe/Scottsdale did not, actually, seem all that interested in supporting the team. But the great plan to return the NHL to the desert lasted all of two months. Even Meruelo isn’t particularly arsed about pursuing the revival, having balked at its first hurdle.
And so, over almost three decades, how many of those seasons were the Coyotes, in any of their homes, actually popular and profitable? Five? I think I would take the under. I guess Bettman can be proud of one thing: no commissioner, in any sport, has stuck by a failing market anywhere near that long. Points for loyalty, I guess.