Stop the presses! Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo has announced that he did a thing!
“We can confirm that Coyotes Owner, Chairman & Governor Alex Meruelo has executed a Letter of Intent to purchase a parcel of land located in Mesa, Arizona to be the potential site for a sports arena and entertainment district for the Club,” the statement said. “The Coyotes remain committed to building the first privately funded sports facility in Arizona history and ensuring the Valley as the Club’s permanent home. In addition to this property in Mesa, the Club will continue to explore other potential sites in the East Valley.”
Okay then! But what sort of thing, exactly, did Meruelo actually do? He didn’t purchase any land in Mesa for an arena, and he didn’t commit to purchasing any land: a letter of intent (or even a Letter of Intent) is just expressing interest in buying land, and maybe a price he would pay if he did buy it, though he didn’t reveal that part. He also notably did not commit to actually building on that land if he does get a chance to buy it, especially with that bit about “will continue to explore other potential sites in the East Valley.” So really, before yesterday Meruelo was shopping around the Phoenix area for a potential arena site; today he’s still shopping around, but has filled out the memo field of a check with “for the intersection of Alma School Road and Loop 202.”
What this announcement does do is provide the appearance of momentum to Meruelo’s arena plans, which has been sorely lacking ever since voters in Tempe 86ed his proposal there in a vote in May. It may not seem like much, but anything that can be done to shift the public discourse from “Are we even still talking about a new Coyotes arena?” to “Where will the new Coyotes arena go?” is the first step toward jump-starting the whole process.
The most important step, meanwhile, is finding someone to pay to build the thing. (Yes, Meruelo said it would be entirely privately funded, but he said that about the Tempe plan too, and that was off by about half a billion dollars.) And to commit to paying without going through one of those pesky public votes, where people are allowed to vote no:
“We’ve told them that one of the things we want to avoid is a public referendum, and everything that we’re looking at is to hopefully have this be something that would avoid that,” [said Coyotes president Xavier Gutierrez].
Getting from no options to at least one option that involves guaranteed money with no risk of a public vote is going to take some doing, so it’s understandable that Meruelo wants to keep his options open, especially with multiple cities in the area that he can potentially play off against each other, if he can get enough of them interested to get any kind of bidding war going. This may be the tiniest of first steps, but it’s enough to get some headlines about how things are moving forward, which is a small price to pay for issuing a press release about what’s going through your head.
So they’re trading an arena deemed remote on the west side of The Valley, for a remote arena on the east side of The Valley.
I know Bettman loves AZ, but this is just embarrassing.
..and it has been embarrassing for a long, long time.
I keep waiting for the PA lawyers to demand that the Coyotes losses be excluded from HRR calculations for salary cap purposes. If they league owners want to continue to sink their own money into the (boiling hot) black hole, they are free to do so… but it should not come out of the players’ end.
As for the fans who pay through the nose for tickets elsewhere so Bettman can continue to refuse to acknowledge his mistake, they have a choice. They can say no. Until they do so in large enough numbers, I guess they are ok with subsidizing the dead dogs.
Yeah, but from all the reporting I’ve read, the PA cannot do much right now except complain.
This “Bettman just won’t let it go” thing is a canard. I used to believe it, but I’ve learned that it’s more complicated than that.
Or at least, I’m confident that the issue is that he and the other owners are just too loyal to bad owners.
Bettman did admit the mistake in Atlanta, in a way. Ge and the owners let them move to a small arena in Winnipeg. If the “southern strategy” was all just hubris, that was a pretty humiliating repudiation of it.
But, Bettman would argue – with justification – that the problem there was ownership and not so much Atlanta per se. But that’s really his fault (or their fault. The owners have committees). They let the Thrashers fall into the hands of people who did not want to own an NHL team or have any clue how to run one. That was avoidable.
And if and when this falls apart in Arizona, it will also be primarily the fault of the ownership and secondarily the fault of the people who let him become an owner. There’s nothing about Arizona that makes it inherently more hockey-hostile than a number of places where it has been successful.
Making a sunbelt city like hockey is not impossible. But it is hard. It requires an arena people want to go to, lot of investment in PR and grassroots hockey development, and a winning team. The Coyotes have repeatedly failed miserably at all of those except, perhaps, the grassroots hockey part.
There’s some evidence, perhaps, that the NHL is learning from its errors in picking who it goes into business with.
For example, whatever else you can say about him, Vegas’s owner is exactly what the NHL should be looking for.
And the same time Vegas got a team, Seattle had a couple of bids too. As I understand it, they were all shambolic. (Quebec had a bid too, but that wasn’t really considered for reasons we’ve covered.)
Instead of just going with one of those bad Seattle ideas to round out the numbers and get a team in a place they knew they wanted to be, they decided to stay with 31 teams and wait for Seattle to get it’s sh*t together, which it eventually did. They should have done that in Atlanta, but they didn’t.
And a few teams that were saddled with bad owners now seem to be stable now. Ottawa, the Islanders, the Predators. I don’t know if they’re all good people, but they can at least afford to own the teams.
But in Arizona, they’re stuck with the clownshow they’ve got. Because owners don’t like to push out other owners. It would take a while even if they did.
There does not seem to be another viable owner in Arizona, and none of the other cities that get mentioned has an NHL-ready arena or a very specific plan to build one.
If they just moved to Salt Lake or Houston or Portland now, there’s a very real chance that they’d be right back in this same position in five years.
And if they moved to Quebec or Hamilton, there’s a reasonably high chance that a dip in the loony would put them in the same position they were with the Senators not long ago (or, arguably, with Winnipeg now).
They know it’s a dumpster fire now. But, for PR purposes if nothing else, they’d really rather move a franchise from one bad situation into another bad situation.
Quote:
“This “Bettman just won’t let it go” thing is a canard. I used to believe it, but I’ve learned that it’s more complicated than that.
Or at least, I’m confident that the issue is that he and the other owners are just too loyal to bad owners.
Bettman did admit the mistake in Atlanta, in a way. Ge and the owners let them move to a small arena in Winnipeg. If the “southern strategy” was all just hubris, that was a pretty humiliating repudiation of it.”
Bettman had to let the Thrashers go, the NHL was two years deep into their Coyotes drama and as embarrassing as it was to have one franchise essentially default to the league, he couldn’t have another fail and justify just leaving it there indefinitely.
That’s not to say his infatuation with Arizona has been entirely personal or without logic – for several years he had a live one on the line with the City of Glendale and between getting money out of the city and it being a large market it was justifiable. At this point, yes I believe it’s a personal thing because he’s put so much time and effort into keeping the team in AZ. In the last 20 years they’ve been evicted, potentially setting a dangerous precedent that it’s more profitable to have an arena without an NHL tenant than with one, almost gotten evicted mid-season for lack of baying their rent, lost two arena votes, and play in a college rink. There’s no logical reason for this team not to be in Houston, Portland, or frankly anywhere else right now.
They guy sound like NHL executive gaslighting us in Arizona’. Move the the team to Canada or Kansas City
I thought Tempe was supposed to be the end-all-to-be-all. The magic puck that would make hockey bloom in the desert. The golden ticket to a new Canada among the Cacti. But sure, Tempe-Mesa, whatevs.
Thanks for this.
I was very frustrated to see that ESPN.com still has “Coyotes Buy Land” as their headline. I suspect they don’t let the journalists write their own headlines because the actual article did not say they bought land.
Craig Morgan – apparently the only reporter who covers the Coyotes – made it clear in his podcast that this really is just PR and that there will likely be more LOIs before this arena is built or not. He’s definitely a cheerleader for public money going to keep the Coyotes (it’s not his money, but it is his job) but he does get his basic facts right usually.
According to him, the site in Mesa is probably not the dead mall one that a lot of people had suggested but one that currently has a quarry on it. (If I recall correctly) The team didn’t specify where it is, but there are only so many available so they have a pretty good idea.
That would be closer to the team’s fanbase, such as it is.
Morgan specifically dismissed the criticism that Al just offered. On the map it may seem like Mesa is the “remote east side of The Valley” but as many Arizonans have pointed out, the center of gravity for fans and potential fans is not downtown, but in the eastern sprawl. That’s why the Dbacks are looking in that area too.
However, if any of these sites in the east valley were so great, they would have been Plan B before Tempe became Plan B. (I’m counting Glendale as plan A). And, as we saw, Tempe had a lot of challenges, so what are the odds that he can wrap this up any time soon.
Bettman said he expects to have a conclusive answer by, roughly, Christmas. If all he can say during the period break at the Winter Classic is “We’re still working on it,” the other owners and the players will be pretty pissed off.
But I’m not sure what they can do about it.
Again, I keep seeing the “just move the team!” comments, which completely misunderstand how the NHL is organized.
The NHL cannot just move a team like a game piece in Risk. It has to either convince the owner to move the team or to sell the team to an owner in a different city.
And the other owners are not interested in moving the team out of Arizona to another market – especially a smaller one – that might also have to go through years of uncertainty about a building. That actually makes a lot of sense.
Quebec is too small and too much not in the western US. The owners do not want another eastern market, let alone one with less than a million people, most of whom already watch hockey.
Right now, Meurolo has shown no interest in either selling or moving, even though anybody paying attention can see that, even if they stay in Arizona, it’s not in the interest of the league or the fans for him to still be their owner.
As we saw with the Dan Snyder saga in the NFL, owners are extremely reluctant to force another owner to do anything. Even the two NBA owners who were “pushed out” were never formally voted out.
If he wants to keep losing money by playing at ASU, there’s not much any of the other owners are going to do about it any time soon. The players would like to do something about it, but until the next CBA comes up, they’re not likely to.
And no other owner in any of the other prospective cities has really stepped forward either.
Apparently, the Utah group really would rather have an expansion team. It doesn’t have an arena yet, so there’s that, plus it would rather start from scratch.
And I suspect the other owners would rather that Atlanta, Houston, and/or Utah get an expansion team rather than move the Coyotes there, because the next expansion fee is likely to be about $1bn and yet I can’t imagine they could get nearly that much as a relocation fee from the Coyotes.
The NHL doesn’t want Quebec City because everything there is in French. Because the Montreal Canadiens have been mostly bad in recent years, a reincarnation of Le Nordiques can easily get a foothold in eastern Quebec and much of New Brunswick.
With all due respect, you just made that up based on no information at all.
French has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
They don’t want it there because Quebec is tiny. That’s it.
The entire population of metro Quebec City is about 850,000 people. If somehow they could convince the other owners that they could take half of the population of all of Quebec, that would be about 4 million people and that might work. However, that would entail taking fans away from Ottawa and Montreal, so not a net increase for the league.
The population of all of the Maritime Provinces is 1.8 million people.
It’s 10 hours from Halifax to QC. That cannot count as the same “market.”
And most of all the people in eastern Canada who could ever be convinced to like hockey already support the Habs, Leafs, Sens or Bruins.
Montreal is rebuilding but they still get 21k a night and are extremely successful and are consistently ranked as the third most valuable franchise behind Toronto and the Rangers.
Sorry Reed. We kind of said the same thing. Not aware of your post.
No need. You said that part much more succinctly than I did.
In other words, the NHL shouldn’t add any clubs up North, that Murica matters more than Canada where hockey is the national sport. That’s taking your primary support for granted and will leave you vulnerable should a culture warrior pounce.
Halifax is in Nova Scotia. I specifically cited New Brunswick because that province is officially bilingual and there are sections of New Brunswick where everything is in French — just like Quebec City. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is clueless if not xenophobic.
Demographics mortally wounded the NHL in Atlanta — twice. Demographics are what will keep the NHL out of Houston and drive the NHL out of Arizona.
Look, if it were up to me, there’d 20 teams in Canada and about 10 in the US. I’m a northerner and I have deep prejudices against anyone who ever complains about the cold.
And I agree that they can’t take “the base” for granted. In fact, I think that’s something that all the sports leagues need to worry about more than the do. But it’s especially important for hockey, because it is almost certainly a lot cheaper and easier to get more kids into hockey in towns that already have a rink than it is to build a new rink in some place that doesn’t know anything about hockey.
But I have come to accept that the NHL is still sorta trying to run a business and Quebec is still tiny. New Brunswick, French, English or otherwise, has fewer people in the whole province than the greater Quebec City area. That’s why the NHL doesn’t want to add those areas. It doesn’t matter what their language is.
I know where Halifax is, BTW. My point was just that, even if you counted all of the Maritimes as the Nordiques fanbase, it would still be too small and that it’s too big of an area to do that anyway.
As it is, the only reason Quebec City has an arena is because public money paid for it in a quixotic attempt to get the Nordiques back.
The NHL never wanted the Nordiques to begin with. They were part of the deal to help kill the WHA. It’s not a coincidence that three of those four teams moved and the Oilers only stayed because it lucked into a once in a century collection of talent and because the good people of Alberta opened the check book for their new arena.
If they want to do better in eastern Canada, they’d be better off putting another team in Montreal. Call them the Maroons, hopefully. Even if that could pull just a quarter of the market, it would be bigger than Quebec City.
And/or put another team in Southern Ontario.
America doesn’t matter more because it’s American. It “matters more” to the NHL because there is a lot more potential *new* fans there.
“Demographics?” Out of generosity, I’m going to assume you don’t mean “Hockey is for white people.” Because that is exactly what it sounds like.
Atlanta failed because it had terrible owners, a terrible building situation, and never won anything. It has nothing to do with Atlanta’s “demographics.” (Which includes about 2.5 million white people anyway, so even sticking with that racist assumption, Atlanta is big enough to support a team).
The most valuable franchises are in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. All extremely diverse cities.
And insofar as they’re failing to engage with the younger, more diverse generations in those places, they’re losing fans to sports perceived as more welcoming like soccer or basketball or football.
The NHL and the NHLPA is trying to grow. They want to make new fans. It is dumb to think it will ever be as popular as soccer or basketball, but if it doesn’t try to persuade at least some of those people, it will decline even faster, because North America is not getting any whiter.
The good folks in Eastern Quebec and the Maritime Provinces already watch hockey. The NHL wants to sell to the heathens. That’s where the money is apparently.
For the sort of people who own NHL teams, success means making more and more money every year. At some point, it’s not even about the money for them, it’s about growth for growth’s sake.
It’s possible that a team goes to Quebec if there is more expansion and three or four of the bigger potential options just don’t work out for whatever reason.
But they’ll likely have another team in Southern Ontario before they try to put another one in Quebec or the Maritimes.
Quebec City could probably get a CFL team, but it would have to a build a stadium. Halifax was going to do that but wanted public money that isn’t forthcoming. The CFL is barely a professional league, so it may be that the owners really cannot afford it.
Since Cheapskate Alex just ‘executed’ a Letter of Intent, maybe he didn’t even sign it.
I mean, if you are just going to strangle it or shoot it or hold it under water until the bubbles stop coming up, what difference does it make if you signed the LoI or not?
Nevertheless, this is a tremendously important step for the Coyotes. Just like the last 46 arena plans in 38 different locations have been.
I can’t wait to see how this turns out…
Just one question: Does this mean they aren’t committed to staying at the 4600 seat arena that they can’t sell out in Tempe after all???
The location would probably be good, but the downside is that it would turn a functioning, economically valuable gravel pit into a money pit: instead of extracting resources we would be shoveling them in.
Isn’t that what 21st century capitalism is all about????
I don’t know if it’s a functioning gravel pit. Maybe they’ve removed all of the gravel.
I’ve driven pit that gravel pit many times, and it seems to be used for equipment storage. The pit actually isn’t in Mesa, it’s in unincorporated Maricopa County. The Coyotes could go either way, stay unincorporated or be annexed to Mesa, giving them a few more options for how a deal is structured. The location is probably the best the Coyotes will find in the Valley, only 2 miles east of the 101 and the Cubs spring training park, and about 5 miles from Downtown Scottsdale. There are only 4 problems, cheapskate Meruelo doesn’t have the billions needed to develop the site, approval, design and construction will take at least 5 years. That makes at least 6 years in a 4,600 seat arena and the Coyotes will still be in a 50% Hispanic market that has failed to support hockey for almost 30 years, and continues to break excessive heat records almost every year.
For all their faults (and there are several in this article itself), Forbes puts matters in perspective here:
https://www.forbes.com/teams/arizona-coyotes/?sh=535cc03f6477
yeah.
Gate Receipts $23m
Local TV ratings: 0.16 (down 58% from the previous year… which would have made the previous year’s ratings under 0.3)
Total revenue: $127m (and take that one with a grain of salt…)
BASKETCASE
Alex Meruelo is welcome to light as much money on fire as he wants to. The other owners are not likely to tell him otherwise, because they don’t want anyone else telling them how to run their business and there is already cap on revenue sharing already.
People talk about the James Dolan, Dan Snyder and John Fisher as terrible owners – which they are – but the NHL’s tradition of tolerating terrible owners may be unmatched.
The most extreme somewhat recent example are the Blackhawks. Under Dollar Bill Wirtz, they aggressively alienated fans to the point where a rival IHL/AHL team set up shop a few miles a way and could get more fans on some nights.
Once he died, the franchise turned around almost immediately and became one of the most successful, on and off the ice.
So the hope is that somehow Arizona can execute a turnaround like that like that if it can secure a decent arena and start winning.
But Arizona is not Chicago. Even in the worst days, Blackhawk fans could remember better days in the past – even the fairly recent past – and hope that it would turn around once the old man died.
Arizona does not really have any good old days to look back on.
And Alex Meruelo is only 59.
Compare Chicago and Phoenix fans? Let’s take da Bears fans vs Cardinals (original 1920 Chicago Cardinals) fans who pass on $10 parking and $30 tickets as too expensive. Then there’s the ever hopeful (for 108 years) Cubs fans vs the ultra fickle Diamondbacks fans. If the Coyotes manage to win the Stanley Cup, the momentum will last about 3 games into the next season. Kitchener, Hamilton and Quebec are waiting.
A less apt comparison than Chicago Blackhawks fans and Phx/Glendale/Arz Coyotes fans I cannot imagine.
Mr. Meruelo is welcome to light as much of HIS OWN money on fire as he likes. He does not have the moral or legal right to inflict those losses on anyone else (which literally every owner of the Coyotes has done).
There is, literally, no hope of this franchise ‘turning around’ in the Phoenix metro area. None. The team has had winning seasons and made the playoffs on multiple occasions (9 times in their 26 years in the desert if I’m counting correctly).
The “well fans don’t come because they don’t win” trope is, frankly, laughable. They have won. Fans still don’t come. The problem is and always has been the same… there aren’t enough fans in this market willing to pay NHL prices to watch NHL hockey. There are some. But there are not enough of them.
I don’t know where they will move (unlikely to be to Canada for all the reasons that have been repeated in this forum many times), but they have to move.
Given that the Coyotes are STILL guaranteed a full RS share (or, to put it another way, they qualify for the max amount even if they don’t meet the targets that all other RS hopeful markets have to), it would be very easy for the NHL to compel a sale or move… just force them to qualify. They can’t and everyone knows it.
Anybody think Meruelo wants to see his losses balloon back into the $40m p/a range?
The geographical reality of The Valley is that there’s a lot of people spread out over this massive area, and even if there were a sizable number of
crazed hockey fans, there’s not a central location that would please enough of them.
At this point the Coyotes brand is so in the toilet I can’t imagine them rebuilding it.
Yeah Arizona is car centric decentralized region is terrible for a sports team. This not 1970s anymore. Sports fans want their teams in central location near the city with ample bars and restaurants for their fans experience . I see charlotte or Austin getting a team. Houston is too spread out and very hot for a cold weather sport
NHL in Houston? Rockets plan to make sure Toyota Center is ready
“While Toyota Center undergoes several years of renovations, an upgrade that will not be immediately seen could prove to be among the most important.
When listing plans for future phases of renovation, Rockets president of business operations Gretchen Sheirr included “making sure this building is ready for anything, which includes making sure it’s hockey ready.”
The Rockets plan to add the “ice machine” that would be needed for Toyota Center to become an NHL venue, though there are no immediate plans to bring the NHL to Houston.”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/texas-sports-nation/rockets/article/houston-rockets-nhl-ready-ice-toyota-center-18410402.php