Here’s a fun headline to start your week with:

Arizona’s Terrible Hockey Team Wants a Third Taxpayer Funded Stadium Since 1996

The article, in the libertarian magazine Reason, doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it is a great overview of the Arizona Coyotes situation, in which the team relocated from Winnipeg to Phoenix in 1996, then across town to Glendale in 2002, and now is trying to move to Tempe or anyplace else in the Phoenix area that will build them a new arena. The team owners are not just looking to play off cities against each other, though, but get state funding, which is extra-stupid because:

Since the team is already in the area, building a new stadium would not create a new source of tax revenue for Arizona, says Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross. Moving from Glendale to Tempe, Matheson says, merely would shift the economic benefits from one municipality to another.

And also:

Building more stadiums in a single metropolitan area will only create more competition for a limited number of major events.

“Lady Gaga isn’t going to play both Phoenix and Glendale,” is how Matheson puts it.

And then there’s:

The Coyotes are unlikely to leave for greener pastures, though, because NHL executives care much more about having a team in the Phoenix area than anyone in the Phoenix area cares about having a hockey team. The Phoenix metropolitan area is the sixth largest media market in the United States, which means an NHL benefits from having a presence there—even if the team is terrible and the fans are apathetic—for marketing purposes and television advertising revenue.

That’s more debatable: The NHL’s national U.S. TV revenue is pretty piddly as these things go, and I really doubt NBC said during negotiations, “Well, since you have that all-important Phoenix hockey viewership market, we’ll tack on an extra $25 million a year.” More likely is that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is fixated on his “Sunbelt strategy” to to seed NHL franchises across the U.S. South and West, and doesn’t want to back down — though since that’s a strategy predicated on filling U.S. markets to get bigger U.S. TV deals, I suppose Reason is at least half-right. You’d kind of think by now that some of the other NHL owners would be saying, “Gary, this whole Arizona thing isn’t working out, let the team move somewhere that it can actually sell a ticket or two,” but I suppose where there’s arena-subsidy life, there’s hope.

So if Arizona Coyotes owner Andrew Barroway and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman though that threatening vaguely that the franchise “cannot survive” in its existing arena in Glendale was going to shake loose money from the state legislature, yeah, no, that’s not happening. State senate president Steve Yarbrough told the Arizona Republic yesterday that “I have no expectation that that bill is going to move,” and even the bill’s sponsor was reduced to mumbling something about how where there’s life, there’s hope:

[Sen. Bob] Worsley, who pushed the bill through a committee he chairs in February, said it “may be the case” the legislation is in trouble. Yet he noted that no bills truly are dead until the Legislature adjourns.

So assuming that the bill to write as much as $1 billion in blank checks to local sports teams for new buildings isn’t going anywhere, now what? Barroway and his co-owners may not be getting paid $8 million a year to run the Glendale arena anymore, but they still have a fairly cushy lease that has already been extended through 2018, so they can easily keep going year-to-year while trying to find some other Phoenix-area elected body eager to throw public money at them. They could try to move the team, but the options there aren’t much better: Quebec would require selling the team to Quebecor, Seattle still doesn’t have an NHL-ready arena, and other cities are even more of a shot in the dark. The real answer here appears to be “if you’re going to buy a hockey franchise, maybe don’t buy one that plays in a non-hockey hotbed and has never been able to draw flies,” but Barroway and company have made their bed, so honestly unless you’re a Coyotes fan, there’s no reason to worry about how they choose to lie in it.

So how’s that whole threaten that the Arizona Coyotes will move (somewhere) if they don’t get a new arena to replace their new arena in Glendale that replaced their new arena in Phoenix thing going over with Arizona elected officials and the media? Not well at all:

[Glendale city manager Kevin Phelps and former mayor Elaine Scruggs] said lawmakers should kill an arena funding bill…

They added that the NHL and team are trying to pull a fast one on taxpayers and, by putting a losing team on the ice, the Coyotes have no one but themselves to blame for their financial problems.

“We have continually invested heavily to keep NHL in the state of Arizona. We have held up our end of the bargain. They have not held up their end of the bargain. They cannot put a product on the ice for a community that has a lot of options,” Phelps said. “They don’t believe there is any correlation to the fact that they have not put a team that has been competitive for many, many years.”…

“And we are paying $13 million in arena debt payments, plus annual capital maintenance where we can spend $1 to $2 million a year,” Phelps said. “Our frustration is starting to build a little bit.”

Okay, sure, Glendale officials are going to be steamed, given that this whole thing started when they canceled the Coyotes’ sweetheart lease and the Coyotes owners said, “If you’re not going to pay us $8 million a year to play in our taxpayer-built arena, then screw you.” What about reaction elsewhere, say from Arizona Republic sports columnist Dan Bickley?

Bettman’s three-page letter to the Arizona legislature is backfiring badly on the NHL’s snappish commissioner. His bold-faced remarks that the Coyotes “cannot and will not remain in Glendale” come off as heavy-handed threats that absolve a hockey team from its non-competitive past while chiding a local government for withdrawing hefty subsidies it can no longer afford…

The Coyotes have failed on their end of the bargain, running their franchise on the cheap while depending on handouts to survive. If this team had consistently exposed Arizonans to the majesty of playoff hockey over the past decade, this conversation would sound much different.

And how about Republic non-sports columnist Laurie Roberts?

Glendale taxpayers still owe $145 million on the 13-year-old hockey arena. Glendale taxpayers, once they’ve paid off their debt, will have invested nearly a half a billion dollars in trying to keep the NHL in the state, according to city officials.

And this is the thanks they get, Mr. Bettman?

The Coyotes want $225 million in public money to help pay for a new arena complex either in downtown Phoenix or the East Valley. They also want control of a planned adjacent hotel and surrounding real estate development. Team owners moan that they just haven’t been able to turn a profit on the west side.

I wonder … Is the team’s inability to turn a profit because this Valley won’t support hockey? Or is it because this Valley won’t support bad hockey?

Sense a theme here? If there’s one lesson that we’ve learned over and over in stadium and arena battles, it’s that as much as there is public distaste for giving tax money to rich sports team owners, what people really hate is giving tax money to rich owners of sports teams that suck. (This undoubtedly plays into the dismal poll numbers for the Coyotes owners’ demands, too.) Dropping vague threats to move your team because you’re unhappy with your lease and claim you can’t make money is one thing; doing so when you’ve won all of two playoff series in your 21-year history is the kind of chutzpah that isn’t likely to win you many friends, or even many enemies who’ll give you money just out of fear that the team will leave.

The irony, of course, is that having Arizona taxpayers pay for a new arena to let the Coyotes move from one part of the state to another would still be a terrible idea even if the team were winning Stanley Cups. Maybe Andrew Barroway and Anthony LeBlanc should try putting together a winning team before trying their move-threat gambit, so it’ll go over better — though if they were to do that, they might risk people actually showing up to games in Glendale, which would make it tougher to argue that they need a new arena. This whole extortion thing is more difficult than it looks.

So many vague rumors and whinging going on around the Arizona Coyotes‘ attempts to get somebody else to pay for building them a new arena against the will of state residents so that they don’t have to play in their perfectly good old one, I’ve gotta go to bullet points:

• Coyotes execs have met with Mesa City Manager Chris Brady to discuss a new arena! Twice! Mesa Mayor John Giles chimed in, “If I were the Coyotes, I know I would want to be there. But whether it’s a good deal for Mesa or not is something that we’ll have to look into.” Which seems to be code for “If the state legislature agrees to foot most of the bill with sales-tax kickbacks, sure we’ll consider it,” but way too soon to tell about any of this.
• The city of Phoenix has extended its contract with Barrett Sports Group to explore whether to renovate the Suns‘ arena, and possibly try to make it more workable for hockey. Again, this is not a plan, or even a plan for a plan, but they’re looking into it.
• State Senator Bob Worsley, who is behind that sales-tax kickback bill that his colleagues in the state legislature aren’t so hot on, has written an op-ed in the Arizona Republic insisting that his bill “tears up the playbook on facility deals” because it involves “no state tax increases, no risk to the state, and no existing revenue from the state General Fund,” which is only true if you think that state sales tax receipts will soar just by virtue of the Coyotes moving from one part of the state to another. Apparently if you’re a state senator, you’re not subject to newspapers’ stringent fact-checking requirements.

Upshot: Nothing, really, other than that lots of people are still trying to solve Coyotes owner Anthony LeBlanc’s problem that he doesn’t want to keep playing in Glendale unless he’s paid $8 million a year by the city to do so. It’s a tough life, being an NHL owner.

So we know that Arizona state legislators aren’t crazy about the idea of giving the Coyotes $170 million in state sales-tax money for a new arena so they can leave Glendale (and possibly as much as $375 million apiece for another other sports construction deals that come along), but what do Arizona voters think of the plan? Turns out they really, really hate it:

Seven out of 10 voters statewide and in Maricopa County say they oppose using sales tax dollars to help pay for a new hockey arena, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Eight out of 10 reject state legislation that would create a special taxing district to build an arena. That number grew to nine in 10 when poll respondents were told about the remaining public debt on the arena that Glendale built for the Coyotes in 2003.

In case you think this sounds like the more residents learn about the deal the more they hate it, yeah, exactly:

“The poll shows that the more voters know about the proposed plan the less they like it,” [poll conductor Bert] Coleman said in a release.

All this is leading some people (okay, sportswriters) to flip out about what will happen in the Coyotes are forced to leave, but, you know, there is a perfectly acceptable arena there in Glendale — it’s just that Coyotes owner Anthony LeBlanc is throwing a hissy fit over having to play there without getting paid $8 million a year to do so. Sure, this could potentially be the final straw that tips LeBlanc into moving the team elsewhere, but that 1) is far from certain, given that he’s already extended his Glendale lease once to buy time and 2) could be true of pretty much anything, and you can’t negotiate a sports lease while tiptoeing around in fear that if you make any demands, the team will bolt. I mean, you can, and elected officials do so all the time, but it’s stupid and counterproductive.

Anyway, now that the people of Arizona have spoken that LeBlanc should suck it up and stay in Glendale, it’ll be very interesting to see what the response is. My money’s on flying to Seattle for the weekend and seeing if that throws a scare into the populace.