Opinion: Salt Lake City just cleaned our clocks and took our NHL franchise, the Arizona Coyotes. And what does Phoenix do? It yawns.
One Last Howl: The Arizona Coyotes fans say goodbye to the franchise
The Arizona Coyotes played their final game in front of their home fans in the Valley at Mullett Arena in Tempe on April 17, 2024.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has always struck me as an ill-tempered S.O.B. whose face was pre-cast in a permanent scowl.
But, my Lord, was that man good to Phoenix.
He was long suffering as Arizona tried and tried again to get its act together and finally be worthy of an NHL franchise.
He was patient through all the knucklehead owners and financial crises and indifferent fans, not just over years, but decades.
He defended us even as a half-dozen North American cities licked their chops at the thought of biting down and running off with our unloved NHL team.
Bettman wanted the Coyotes to work here
Go ahead and blame whoever you want for the Coyotes exit, but don’t you ever blame Gary Bettman or the NHL.
They tried. They really tried.
Bettman’s dream was to make Phoenix one of the pearls in his sunbelt string of NHL franchises that would sparkle across the continental south.
His vision was to build ice hockey arenas in the biggest U.S. cities where the snow never falls.
And when hockey finally arrived in metro Phoenix, he protected his “sunbelt strategy” and our team.
You can go back 15 years and find Bettman fending off the wolves at The (Toronto) Globe and Mail as they slapped the scowl off his face with this:
“The 2009 NHL playoffs are being overwhelmed by the Phoenix Coyotes’ bankruptcy proceeding, a story of failure in a non-traditional market. Relocated from Winnipeg after the 1995-96 season, the Coyotes’ tenure in Phoenix, a secondary U.S. market, has been marked by tepid interest and loads of red ink.”
Unlike Phoenix, Salt Lake City wants a team
Back then, Bettman went to court to keep the team in metro Phoenix as others tried to move it to Hamilton, Ontario.
The commissioner’s stubborn refusal to give up on Arizona was already an old story. He had been our patient and undying champion up until today.
In the end, we proved unworthy.
And nothing expressed that so well as the Arizona Coyotes fans chanting at the team’s last game, “Salt Lake sucks! Salt Lake sucks!”
Salt Lake, my friends, just cleaned our clocks.
Because Salt Lake meets the fundamental prerequisite for having an NHL franchise.
It actually…
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