And what about the Coyotes? GOPHNX’s Craig Morgan, who during the Tempe vote established himself as sympathetic to the team owners’ arena plans and who loves him some anonymous sources, has the scoop, such as it is:
League sources and sources affiliated with the individual sites confirmed to PHNX Sports that the Coyotes are considering sites in Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale and on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land.
That is pretty much a list of everywhere in the Phoenix area that isn’t Tempe or Glendale, where Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo has already burned his bridges. Morgan lists a couple of specific sites — on the Red Mountain Freeway at Alma School Road in Mesa, west of Loop 101 in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community — and says Meruelo is especially looking at “county islands,” sites that aren’t within any city limits, potentially avoiding another city referendum, though he also notes that “achieving tax abatements is a challenge that the team will have to navigate on county islands.”
And there’s the rub: Finding a place to build an arena or stadium is seldom the stumbling block for a sports team owner: It’s more figuring out how to pay for it, especially if you don’t want it to be you. Any arena plan would seem to be a long way off from even being presented to a city or county for approval, which makes sense given that Coyotes execs don’t appear to have actually talked to any local elected officials about Plan Bs, instead counting on winning the Tempe arena vote that they very much did not. As always, try not to be too distracted by the Google Earth screengrabs of vacant land, and follow the money.
If the Coyotes decided they wanted to build on tribal land, would those “tax abatements” only come from the Indian community or are there other local taxes that they would be subject to that could be “abated”?
I am assuming when they say “abatements” they mean some version of a TIF, which is not really an abatement or reduction… it is a redirection of taxes from paying for normal municipal/government services to paying for the building the taxes are levied on.
It is very, very hard to see how that would work on Indian lands… unless Meruelo was willing to pay some of his own expenses. If he was willing to do that, why wouldn’t he just build where the people are without a superTIF?
Seems like selling to the suns owner is the only play to keep the team in Arizona.
How so? As it’s been mentioned here before, the recently renovated Suns arena is not adaptable to hockey. Would the Suns owner really buy a money losing franchise and pay Glendale market rate to use their hockey ready arena?
It’s not a *good* plan, but it’s the best bad plan they have.
It would require all of the following to happen.
1) Alex Meruelo being willing to sell.
2) Mat Ishbia, who is spending an outrageous sum on the Suns right now, being interested and willing to meet a price that Meruelo would accept.
3) Mat Ishbia or Phoenix or both to undo all the renovations the previous Suns’ owners completed recently and rebuilding the whole thing to be at all suitable for hockey.
4) The other owners accepting that deal, knowing full well that the team would always be a second-class citizen in Phoenix, rather than pushing to move the franchise to an owner in SLC or San Diego or somebody else that really wants it.
I don’t think all of those are likely to happen. The biggest problem is #2 and #3, which are interconnected.
Given all the bad blood between Phoenix and the Coyotes given all their complaining about America West Arena when they played there and the recent airport fight, I give a -100% chance of the Coyotes locating in Phoenix. The ghost of George Zraket also haunts the Coyotes in Scottsdale. The Salt River Community controls gaming rights on the reservation so there’s little benefit to a reservation location. The only chance is the Alma School gravel pit, which could be annexed by Mesa. The mall behind Bass Pro Shops is dead, so Mesa has little to lose giving the Coyotes long term GLPET and sales tax breaks. The billion dollar plus question is who will pay for the arena and surrounding infrastructure.
Right now the biggest concern for the Phoenix Suns is leaving bankrupt Bally Sports and catching on with the new broadcast-TV network that’s airing the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA. That could happen as early as next week.
And for those who want the Coyotes to move to Houston? In local TV ratings for the clinching Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final, Houston was nowhere near the top 20.
Not to mention that they’d be a tenant in Houston, unless the Rockets’ owner buys them, too.
Eliotte Friedman has reported that Houston is unlikely because it would require a deal with the Rockets and that looks unlikely.
The TV ratings for the Stanley Cup in Houston don’t mean anything given that there were no teams from Houston playing.
Everyone already understands that there aren’t a lot of hockey fans in these new markets. That’s the whole point. Putting teams in these cities creates new hockey fans. Whether it creates enough to justify the cost and opportunity cost depends on a lot of other factors.
Ther were no teams from Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville or Hobbs, New Mexico playing in the Stanley Cup Finals either. If fans only watch if their team is in, then 30 markets will have abysmal ratings. Bettman has this NBA fettish and can’t come to realize that basketball is popular everywhere and hockey isn’t.
Bettman is well-aware that the NBA is more popular because he helped make the NBA what is is when he worked for them.
The Stanley Cup finals may have abysmal ratings in all but two US markets, but they’re still less abysmal in each of those markets than they would be if those places didn’t have an NHL team at all. That’s the NHL’s approach. And, in the RSN era, it’s worked more than it hasn’t. It’s unclear how the end of local cable will change that, but we’ll see.
Anyway, the right comparison isn’t the NBA which has all kinds of built-in advantages.
The right comparison is what the NHL would look like in the counterfactual situation of it never expanding beyond it’s traditional base, and while that’s impossible to absolutely prove, I think it can show pretty easily that it has more fans, per capita, than it did 40 years ago. The players certainly make more money, even adjusting for inflation, and the franchises are worth a lot more.
Not everything needs to be the biggest thing to be a success. This American obsession with always being the richest, biggest, and most popular is going to doom us all.
And, notably, even though this year’s Stanley Cup ratings were the just barely above the pandemic levels, and well below last year, game 5 was the night’s top program in the key demographics of adults 18-49, 18-34 and 25-54, suggesting that the problem, such as it is, isn’t just hockey but that more and more people don’t want to watch anything on cable at all.
It’s also worth noting NBA’s ratings last week weren’t particularly great either.
Neither series turned out to be very close, which turns away a lot of casual fans. Game 5 of the Vegas-Florida series was a complete blow out so nobody actively rooting for the Knights would have stuck with it. It’s just an inherent issue with the seven-game format. Same with the NBA finals and Denver.
Chucky, true…Houston was nowhere near the top 20 in ratings.
But we also weren’t top 20 in the ratings for the National Lacrosse League championship either.
Now, if we had an NLL team things would be totally different. Like if we had an NHL team our hockey viewing ratings would be better.
Why would the Rockets owner, who has a $4 billion asset plus control of the Toyota Center pay anything for a hockey team that would add another payroll and block dates that could have concerts etc? The Coyotes would be a lose lose lose proportion in Houston. Bettman refuses to place the Coyotes in the Golden (Horseshoe) mine where loonies fall from the sky. It’s time to send Meruelo packing and long long long past time to send Bettman packing.
I doubt he can find 40+ concerts a year to fill his arena. There are a number of successful franchises that share with the NBA. A few are owned by the same people. It can work. But he might just not want to do it. It’s a valuable asset to have, but there are easier ways to make money.
It’s not Bettman that refuses to put a team in Hamilton, it’s the Sabres and the Leafs.
Adding teams in Houston and Atlanta would boost their TV revenue more than teams in Hamilton or Quebec. At least, that was true 10 or 20 years ago. But the way TV is headed, the difference might no longer be enough to make much difference. We’ll see how it plays out.
If your goal is get another NHL franchise in Canada, putting it in Atlanta first is a tried-and-true method for success. Two for two, thus far.
In fairness to Craig Morgan, he’s very much on the side of whatever might keep the team in Arizona, but I don’t think he’s actually sympathetic to Alex Meruelo. I heard him do a radio hit where he said that he thinks the league’s other owners should try to get rid of him, even if they can somehow keep the team in Arizona.
That’s true — I’ll edit to correct it.
Yeah.
I can see why a sportswriter would want to keep the team they cover in the city they already live. But I don’t think he grasped what a rip-off the Tempe plan was and I get the feeling that he’s overestimating how badly the rest of the owners want to hang onto Arizona now that they’re out of viable options.
They need to find an area around the Phoenix city were there close to the airport and light rail. Plus having retail ,bars , and restaurants. I would look at the old arena at the mad house on McDowell were the Arizona state fair has events and concerts. Used to watch roadrunners and mustangs play hockey there. Remodel it or tear it down and build a new arena.That area needs some new blood infused in that neighborhood . It is closer to anything there current ownership it proposing right now. Just a suggestion.
Scottsdale has already said they don’t want them their. Mesa is like “yeah they can try the site of the dead mall but we’re not giving tax incentives.” Also Mesa doesn’t own the mall.
This whole thing of the Suns owner buying them is wishful thinking. Why would he buy a team that’s losing money and has no fan base. It would be one thing if he was negotiating for a new or revamped arena and the second team was a bargaining chip, but that’s not the case.
It’s time Bettman and the NHL accept reality. This market is dead. Maybe in 10-15 years when the Suns arena is being replaced they can try an expansion team like they did in Denver.
I think everyone involved knows the reality. They employ accountants to thell them these things.
But apparently Alex Meruelo isn’t ready to sell – either because one of these other options really has a non-zero chance of working or he just isn’t ready to admit defeat or both.
But it hasn’t reached the point yet where the other owners are going to compel him to sell either. As we’ve seen in the NFL and NBA, owners will do everything they can to actually vote another owner out. They just want the financial or legal pressure to build on them enough to *choose* to sell. But that can take a long time.
I don’t get the bit about Meruelo not wanting to pay for the arena. He quite literally and transparently does. The only part of the Tempe proposal that wasn’t out of his pocket was the land remediation, which was Tempe’s responsibility/liability and he still ended up amending the proposal to agree to cover it – but through a bond that would be paid back via their taxable revenue. On JUST the land remediation.
That’s the basis/crux of his pitch: he’s paying for the arena himself. And it makes sense, because the arena is a part of any franchise’s valuation, so if he ever wants to make money off the franchise down the road, owning the arena they play in is a massive benefit.
Again, the issue isn’t that Meruelo or the Coyotes aren’t wanting to pitch in – they want to pay for it themselves – the issue is finding a place where they won’t have to go through a lengthy/chaotic public vote process while still staying in the Central/East Valley near the fanbase.
What fan base? They can’t sell out a 4800 seat arena and there is no evidence from the franchise’s near 30yr tenure in the desert that they ever will.
If he wants to “own” the arena he’s going to have to pay property taxes on it. He does not want to own the arena. He wants to be the beneficial and controlling entity for this development without owning it, and he wants all the property tax revenue associated with it to be funnelled back to HIM to pay for it all.
“If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs.
If we had some eggs”.
This is a franchise that announced yesterday(?) that they would be playing just one of their nine exhibition games at home next season.
Now THAT is community commitment. He’s already shopping the franchise to any community that might want it.
The good news for Meruelo is that he’ll probably nearly double his money when he sells despite managing the franchise abyssmally and losing money in each year he owned it.
Capitalism at it’s finest…. the taxpayer picks up the losses while some incompetent bandit makes off with what little revenue there is to pilfer. Welcome to the sports cartel monkeyhouse….
“The only part of the Tempe proposal that wasn’t out of his pocket was the land remediation”
That’s not accurate — it leaves out the GPLET, which would have kicked back about $300m worth of taxes to Meruelo.
This is the same lie that the A’s told about Howard Terminal.
“We’ll pay for the actual stadium, as long as the public pays for all of these other things that must happen in order for us to pay for the stadium.”
It is, and Fisher certainly isn’t the only other owner to do it.
Sometimes they even try to say something like “since the jproperty, ticket and entertainment taxes cut into our profits on ticket or other sales, it’s really all coming out of our pockets so we’re paying for all of it”.
On that basis, I have paid for the military procument budget of several large countries for more than half a century.
It’s just not how math works.