The first rumors that the Arizona Coyotes would relocate to Salt Lake City for the 2024-25 season raised a lot of questions: Why now, when team owner Alex Meruelo was just two months away from bidding on land for a new arena in Phoenix? Would the NHL really be happy with trading one of the larger NHL media markets (albeit with not much historic enthusiasm for the NHL) for a much smaller city that’s also not a hockey hotbed? Why would Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith be paying $1.2 billion (or maybe $1.3 billion; reports continue to vary) for the team, but Meruelo only receiving $1 billion, with the rest being shared among other NHL owners?
Over the weekend, more details emerged, and they only raise more questions:
- While all of the Coyotes’ assets, including its players and right to actually play NHL games, are being sold to Smith and transferred to Utah, Meruelo will retain the Coyotes name, logo, and trademarks, as well as the minor-league Tucson Roadrunners.
- Meruelo will have five years in which to finalize a new arena, in which case he’ll immediately be given the right to buy an expansion franchise for the same $1 billion he received for the Coyotes.
- Accordingly, Meruelo is going ahead with his Arizona land bid, and if he wins, he’ll presumably begin to pursue funding for an arena, likely using a state “theme park district” tax surcharge that remains murky exactly whether it should really be a public subsidy. (I asked three prominent sports economists and got back one “probably,” one “I don’t think so,” and one “let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”)
To help make sense of all this — none of which has been officially announced, mind you, with Meruelo himself issuing a “reply hazy, try again later” letter, though the Associated Press says a press conference is expected next week — let’s try conceptualizing what’s going on here in three ways:
- Meruelo is selling the Coyotes, and getting a replacement expansion franchise in Arizona once he gets an arena deal. This is how it’s mostly being framed in the media, and is strictly accurate. It sort of makes sense for everyone involved: Meruelo gets more time to negotiate an arena deal without racking up annual losses in Arizona; the NHL gets out of the embarrassment of a franchise playing in a college arena without having to worry about a legal battle with Meruelo, plus that $200 million it’s taking off the top of the sale price; Smith gets a team without having to go through expansion bidding wars; and commissioner Gary Bettman gets a new owner who, according to ESPN, has “spent several years building a level of trust” with him, read into that as you will. The main risk for the league seems to be that Meruelo could end up getting an expansion team at a bargain price if those bidding wars really take off, but the NHL may be fine with that if it means getting back into the Phoenix market with an acceptable arena deal.
- The Coyotes are going on hiatus to figure out their arena situation, while Utah gets an immediate expansion franchise to take its place. This is an equally valid way of looking at it, and makes the pros and cons even clearer: The NHL is solving its Arizona problem by putting the Coyotes on ice for a few years, while filling out the schedule by letting Smith jump to the head of the line for a new team in exchange for a 20% tip on the sale price. (Smith is also getting an established roster rather than having to pick players in an expansion draft, though given the current Coyotes roster that may not be that much of a benefit.)
- The Coyotes are going to be the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, where the team moves but the team’s name and identity stays. That’s Yardbarker’s take, but I’m not sure the parallel works: The NFL granted Cleveland a new Browns franchise in exchange for stadium funding, yes, but that was all sparked by lawsuits over Art Modell moving the old Browns to Baltimore. If the Coyotes re-emerge eventually, though, it’d be the same in terms of a team in one city being transferred to another one then being replaced, after a break, by a new team with the same name once a new venue has been built, so it kind of works if you squint.
There’s definitely lots of ways the Coyotes’ move to Utah can go wrong: As noted here previously, Salt Lake City would be by far the smallest market with two major-league winter pro sports teams, which will create a ton of competition for both ticket buys and TV eyeballs; and the Jazz’s Delta Center, while clearly a better NHL venue than the Coyotes’ current Mullett Arena if only because it has more than twice as many seats, is one of those NBA-optimized venues that sucks for hockey, at least until it gets the $500 million facelift that the state of Utah has promised it. But you can see where someone in the league offices could have made a good case for “So we want a team in Arizona but don’t have an arena there yet, and we have a guy in Utah who wants a team right now and has a marginally workable arena, maybe this can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Also, $200 million cash!” At least nobody here would be paying the purchase price by wiring a fraction of it and then claiming he’d left a bunch of zeroes off as a typo. Probably not, anyway. The NHL is always about trying new things.
As for the bigger picture: What, if anything, does the Coyotes’ sort-of move mean as far as how seriously cities should take relocation threats? The team is leaving Arizona after Tempe voted down $500 million in tax breaks for a new arena there, but that came less because either the team owner or the NHL wanted to leave so much as that Meruelo had painted himself into a corner by getting booted out of his old arena and moving to a 5,000-seat one. And Utah did apparently bump itself to the head of the new-NHL-team line by approving $500 million in arena spending, but only because the Coyotes situation called for an immediate solution and they were standing in the right place at the right time. Leagues and individual owners absolutely do shop around for stadium and arena subsidies when thinking about where to play, but that’s not all they think about — if it were, Arizona would now be getting the cold shoulder from the league, instead of an offer of an expansion slot in the next five years. The only truism here is that sports barons love leverage; how they then use it is up to them.
UPDATE: And The Athletic just dropped a tick-tock of what led to the current Coyotes resolution. Tl;dr: The NHL and NHLPA were both sick of the Mullett Arena situation, Meruelo didn’t want to sell but also couldn’t promise when he’d build a big-boy arena, and this was the compromise that was worked out. If that’s not how you think sports league franchise decisions should be made, go take it up with crony capitalism.
I think Malfeasant Meruelo will go down as the worst owner since “Dollar” Bill Wirtz or even Oakland A’s owner John Fisher, and that is saying something.
So I have this used couch. It’s pretty bad. Even my closest and oldest friends won’t sit on it when they come over. I would take it to the dump, but they charge you to throw furniture away now.
One of my old friends runs the preowned department at “Ted’s international house of couches’. He doesn’t want me giving it away or burning it in the backyard because it will could undermine his business if people get the idea that used couches are free.
So, I put it out on the curb with sign that says “used couch $2500” because the city won’t let us freecycle stuff on the street, but also with an asterisk that references fine print that says “$2450 rebate at point of sale – today only”.
Everybody wins in this except Smith (and he seems so keen on the NHL that he’ll probably think paying DOUBLE what Seattle ‘paid’* to get in was worth it… a fool and his money… $75m in debt service/ROI annually on the expansion fee alone for a team that is likely to struggle to break even on operations most years???).
I would say the league’s $2-300m vig in this is what the owners demanded to make themselves whole from the bankruptcy fiasco of ’08/’09 (which cost the owners $170m + $80-100m in losses + legal fees + 15yrs of interest plus a whole pile of embarrassment). Bettman has made them a pile of cash in other areas, but that is one where his stubborness cost them.
BTW, when the Oilers sold in 1998 they sold for about $85m. Just three years later when Burke sold the Coyotes to Gretzky & Ellman, they sold for $87m. Spano’s agreed price for the Islanders was about $85m, while a number of expansion franchises around the turn of the century sold for $100-125m.
* Seattle is paying in installments, like most other expansion franchises have done. Will Smith do the same?
The Kraken paid off the expansion fee in April 2021. I believe they and Vegas both paid their fees in three installments.
This is a good summary of the situation.
The 32 Thoughts podcast covered this well today.
On top of everything you wrote there, Friedman reported that the owners generally agreed that they wanted to keep this out of court, so they’ve made Mereulo an offer he couldn’t refuse.
However, some of the owners are, off-the-record, not happy about this. Either they think this is an unnecessarily sweet deal for Mereulo or they really just don’t want him to be the owner of Coyotes 2.0 or both.
I think the Browns comp is apt. In that case, it was forced by the lawsuits. In this case, they’re just trying to skip that step and get to a resolution that will avoid lawsuits. That is how a lot of business works and, to some extent, the legal system is designed to incentivize people to avoid court.
Again, I really don’t think Gary can take all the blame here. He’s the face of this fiasco, but that’s his job. If the rest of the league’s owners wanted to do something different 14 years ago or any time since then, they could have, but they didn’t. They could have fired Gary or just told him to do something else. They didn’t. They chose violence.
However, without doing a whole research project, I’m not sure what else really could have been done at that time the league owned the franchise.
The obvious answer seems to be that they could have moved the team to Vegas or Seattle, where they ended up anyway. But I’m not sure if either of those places had their ducks in a row for a team at that time.
Was Bill Foley in the picture back then? Vegas appears to now be lousy with arenas, but I’m not sure they were then. They probably could have found a place for them to play before they built T Mobile (or whatever it would have been called if it were built sooner) but I’m not sure. Was that obviously a better option than trying to keep them in Phoenix? It’s obvious it is now, but I don’t know if it was then.
Likewise, it took a lot of work for Seattle to get Climate Pledge (yes, that is what it is called. They should just call it Greenwash Arena) built using the roof of the old Sonics building. I’m not sure where they would have played if they’d moved instantly back then.
Quebec didn’t have Videotron Arena until 2012 and, of course, the rest of the owners don’t want to be in Quebec City anyway and the economy was still coming out of a recession back then so I doubt that could have worked.
As it is, they got a really sweet deal in Glendale. Not nearly enough people wanted to go to Glendale to see the Coyotes, for a variety of reasons, but I suspect the owners, and Gary Bettman, at that time thought “well, if it fails, I’ll probably be retired by the time the team has to move again.” They underestimated the Coyotes ownership’s ability to accelerate that timeline. In fairness, their ability to screw it up has been remarkable. MBA-types tend to overestimate the rationality of other businesspeople.
Ryan Smith will be fine. As this situation shows, this asset is likely to only going to go up in value so he doesn’t need the team to be very profitable to come out of it in the black. Besides, what he really wants out of this is not money, but legacy. He wants to bring cool stuff to Utah and be a legend and play golf with Wayne Gretzky and Joe Sakic, etc. He’s getting that.
Friedman also reported that the NHL owners are imagining a 36 team league with up to 29 of those teams being in the US. That would still leave them with fewer US teams than the other major leagues, but it would mean they’re in all the big ones.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. A league that is that big and still only has seven Canadian teams would be a shame. Besides, Montreal and Vancouver at least, are large, rich markets by any reasonable standard and the NBA and MLB are not in those markets.
But, as we’ve seen, the owners don’t care about which city has the most passionate fans or sepia-toned pictures of the Quebec Bulldogs or the Rat Portage Thistles or whatever. You don’t get to be a billionaire caring about people’s feelings.
And that means only accepting new owners that can pay their price, which is now a state-of-the-art arena – they don’t care whose paid for it – plus more than a billion expansion fee. It might be $2bn by the next round.
He also reported on Houston. Asked about an NHL team, Tilman Fertitta said “he’s working on it.” Previously, he’s said, at least OTR, that he doesn’t want to pay what the NHL is asking.
That’s got to be irritating to anyone in Houston that really wants a team, because it suggests that he might end up getting a team and not caring about it. That’s exactly what happened with the Atlanta Thrashers. But Friedman reported that he believes there may be other ownership groups in Houston looking into it, so Fertitta now has competition.
I’d be worried if I were a Jets fans. The possibility that it could lose its team to Arizona twice is non-zero.
Can Meruelo flip the option to someone else who has the ability to get a deal done in AZ?
Good question. According to the reports, nobody seems to know the answer to that yet quite yet.
The league board of governors would have to approve that new owner regardless, so I don’t see why they’d want to stop him Mereulo from selling his option or just selling the team soon after he gets the arena built (assuming he ever does).
I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect they could maybe put in a sell-on clause in the deal saying that if he sells the option within a certain period, the rest of the owners get X percent of the price.
They want a team in Arizona, but they don’t especially want him to be the owner of that team long term. So they probably don’t want to stand in the way of a better owner buying the franchise.
It’s irritating to them that he’s going to come out of all this having made a lot of money, but if he flips the Coyotes for more than a billion (if it comes with a new arena, it would probably be a lot more), that just helps their valuations too.
The story in The Athletic said he cannot flip the team on his own…..
Way too many teams already. If NHL owners are that desperate for expansion money, it’s a bad look for the league
Not really. The if it increases revenue and brings more markets and sponsors into the TV deal, they don’t care what pundits and people on the internet think about it.
“If” is the key word.
Vegas’ year one Neilson ratings: about 1.8 (and they were an inarguable success story for expansion). Seattle’s NHL ratings were about half that.
Of the four expansion franchises granted a little over 20 years ago (Atl, CBJ, Nash, Minn) only one has been successful (Minnesota) on it’s own.
Another died amidst a total absence of mourners. The other two are surviving on taxpayer largesse of one form or another. Just take a look at how the “deals” that brought the Predators and Blue Jackets into existence have been modified over the years. It’s not pretty (for taxpayers).
There is no evidence that having teams in Phoenix or Atlanta brought more tv money or sponsors to the NHL. Like many other experiments, those two markets created a net outflow of money for the league (that’s ok. You do have to try and see if your product can be sold “everywhere”. You also have to accept it when it can’t).
Could that fact change on the third or fifth good ‘ol college try? Can’t rule it out, but then, if you marketed your steakhouse chain to Vegans, maybe you’d experience growth as well.
And it’s not only an NHL problem. The world series last year (between two large market teams) was the lowest rated since WS broadcasts began.
Market size is important, but it’s not everything.
I think North American sports has reached an Endgame of sorts- the NFL and to a lesser degree college football matter, everything else is somewhat niche. The Tv money for NBA, MLB, NHL is going to plateau, and while it will likely be at a place where none of the owners go hungry, it’s clearly a small time product compared to the NFL.
The plus side to this is that good ownership will recognize the importance of asses in seats and putting out a good gameday experience. The downside to this is bad owners will just pursue tax breaks and threats to move.
In fairness, the Predators renegotiated their arena deal with Nashville and stopped receiving their subsidy from the city back in 2019:
https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2019/05/09/nashville-predators-bridgestone-arena-lease-deal/1152293001/
They also now have an operating income in the black, albeit this has only been in the last couple of years:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/374841/nashville-predators-operating-income/
The Preds seem like they got an ownership group who has their act together and have made inroads into middle Tennessee. Now, how long will the Predators need to be operating in the black for them to eventually be a net-positive for the league? I’m not sure, but it’ll take awhile and would mean it took 40 some-odd years for the NHL’s expansion in Nashville to have paid off.
For most major corporations, they can afford to invest in 1-2 new markets or products that are a “loss leader” for several years before eventually becoming profitable. But to do that with several markets concurrently? That’s what the NHL is doing, and most business experts would caution that it’s a very risky proposition. None of this even gets into the problem of potentially diluting the talent pool and worsening the overall product with a bunch of mediocre hockey teams.
The Predators stopped receiving their *operating subsidies* from Nashville in 2019, but at the same time got a 21-year extension on their tax breaks, so it was probably pretty much a wash:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2019/05/17/14915/friday-roundup-nashville-saves-75m-by-giving-predators-103m-south-carolina-offers-to-give-125m-to-panthers-practice-facility-oakland-as-shipping-cranes-are-multiplying/
The fact that the NHL is seriously considering Phoenix 2.0 before the original’s body is even cold, as well as at least mulling over a THIRD shot for Atlanta, tells you all you need to know about what a Mickey Mouse operation it really is.
I believe the NHL thinks they cracked the expansion code for modern sports fans- really vet the owner, make sure they elevate the league overall AND give up a lot of talent in the expansion draft. Expansion teams need to be competitive.
Now have the markets of Atlanta and Phoenix already been soured to the NHL experience due to decades of horrible hockey? Maybe! But they are both very still very attractive places to own a winning professional sports team.
The goss about a 36 team NHL seems a little wild but I think there’s enough professional hockey talent in the world to support that. The European leagues and the KHL would just get gutted.
Why are the Coyotes moving to Utah? We don’t care enough about hockey in Arizona
https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/nhl/coyotes/2024/04/15/coyotes-salt-lake-city-utah-arizona-nhl-arena/73333558007/
If you read the article, you’ll notice that he thinks the NHL will eventually succeed in Arizona.
He drags out the old canard about the NHL not promoting it’s “stars” enough, but that fails to explain why the NHL expansion has done just fine in Seattle and Vegas.
It also indulges the “economic impact” canard.
I love a good Kanar!
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kanar
It is exceptionally difficult to get an arena deal done anywhere without a team if you are a market that loses a team. People become less inclined to invest.
And given the number of years of trying to get an arena deal done in Arizona with what appears to be dwindling public support of the effort, even a five-year period to get it done doesn’t seem optimistic.
Ultimately, with the guarantee of a team, Meruelo might best be served by privately funding the project.
Well said. We can’t ‘know’, but it seems very unlikely that a guy who couldn’t get an arena deal done while he had a team can get one on the all-too-familiar “but we have an agreement for expansion and it will be great, if only we had an arena…” ham’n’eggs play. That usually works best if people don’t know who you are. The cities he might extract funding from most certainly already know who he is.
I look at the ‘expansion’ deal with Meruelo as just a way of getting rid of him (hopefully without a lawsuit). The NHL has no intention of selling him an expansion franchise and the ‘targets’ they set for his ‘ownership’ of a franchise in the Phx market will make that clear.
Barring a few (very few) thousand hockey supporters, nobody in Phoenix is interested. It’s not that they haven’t experienced hockey either. There have been teams in various leagues since the ’60s.
In 30 years of NHL hockey, there has not been enough interest to keep a franchise afloat. And all the discussion about ‘poor ownership’ is simply looking at this franchise through a convex mirror: If there was a business case for investing in hockey in Phoenix, there would not have been a shortage of billionaires interested in doing so.
I’d say it’s less likely Meruelo has a Coyotes 2.0 in Phoenix in 2030 than it is that Fisher has the A’s playing in a shiny new air conditioned ballpark by then.
‘…ballpark in Vegas by then…”.
“It is exceptionally difficult to get an arena deal done anywhere without a team if you are a market that loses a team. People become less inclined to invest.”
Examples? I can think of an absolute ton of counterexamples where new owners have stepped in to restore teams to cities that had lost them, especially if they’re able to get new stadium/arena deals.
NFL: Baltimore, Cleveland, St Louis, Houston, Los Angeles, Oakland (sort of)
Hockey: Ottawa, Minneapolis/St Paul, Denver, Atlanta (and it will probably happen again)
Baseball: Washington
NBA: probably Seattle soon
So the Coyotes kept and recognized the Jets history, although inconsistently (they initially kept the retired numbers but at some point considered them only a part of the Ring of Honor, not retired). The Jets are a continuation of the Thrashers history and have their own Ring of Honor that includes the old Jets even though that’s a different franchise, and now the Coyotes go into hibernation while the players go to Utah as a “new” franchise? I shouldn’t let this stuff bother me but I do, some consistency would be nice.
It hasn’t been consistent because it usually just depends on whatever the owners want to do.
It’s only been fairly recently that we’d generally expect moving teams to change their names. That’s why we have the LA Lakers, Utah Jazz, Arizona Cardinals, Indianapolis Colts, etc. It didn’t seem to matter that much to some owners.
But when the Browns became the Ravens, part of the deal Cleveland made with the NFL was that the future Browns 2.0 would get to keep all the branding and the history of the original Browns.
That wasn’t automatic. That was part of lawsuit.
I suspect that the overwhelming majority of fans would prefer that team brands and their history stay in the same city, but until Cleveland did that, nobody really pressed the issue, as far as I know.
The NHL and the new Utah group are trying to avoid a lawsuit with Mereulo, so they’ve offered a similar deal. It’s really not much of a concession. They’d probably want to rebrand the team anyway.
But, as we saw with the A’s, cities that try to make that deal don’t always succeed if the team owner is willing to do something stupid like put his team in a AAA park.
Rings of Honor etc are just up to the team. They can honor whomever they like and usually teams tend to view that remit expansively.
The Nationals for example, have a ring of honor with Washington Nationals, original Washington Senators (who became the Twins), expansion Washington Senators (who became the Rangers), Homestead Grays, and Montreal Expos like Tim Raines who’d never been to Washington before.
Joe: I think that the Kraken and Golden Knights really missed the boat by not retiring Gordie Howe and Maurice Richard’s numbers and unveiling statues of them on opening night. They would join a long line of players who have statues outside and/or jerseys in the rafters of buildings they never played in.
And while they are at it they should honor Bill Goldsworthy and Tim Horton as well.
As with Armed Forces nights at baseball games, tributes are just marketing opportunities in disguise. Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way….
As much as I criticize Bettman and Co, I actually see the logic in this move. Either Meruelo gets his shit together and gets an arena done, or he’s de facto forced out of the club. 5 years is more than enough time for the group in Forsyth County or someone in Houston to put together a competitive bid if Meruelo fails so the expansion gravy train keeps rolling. SEG gives them $1.3 billion in capital to get the league out of an untenable situation. Rather than risk Meruelo winning this auction and dragging this out, they give him enough rope to hang himself and no reason to sue them. With the playoffs looming and the auction set for June, they had to get this deal done now. This is the best possible move the league could do at this moment.
That said, this is the best deal possible because the NHL backed themselves into a corner. They should’ve been negotiating a move like this the day after Tempe voters shot down the arena proposal. SLC is an incredibly risky market, and they wouldn’t have had to rely on Ryan Smith to bail them out if they’d given themselves more runway and opened up a legitimate bidding process between prospective owners. I’m confident that better prospective markets than SLC would’ve emerged if they’d done so – be it Houston, Hamilton, Quebec City, or another market with an arena in place like Kansas City. For reasons unknown, the NHL and its owners dithered for almost a year after the failed Tempe gambit and then essentially put a gun to their heads to get this deal done in 2 weeks. It’s horrible management.
Remember: the Winnipeg Jets 1.0 were originally slated to move to Minnesota. When an arena deal with the Target Center fell apart and desperate to resolve an untenable situation, the owners decided to hastily move them to a far riskier market with a basketball-only arena. Cities like Hamilton, Waterloo and Denver were ignored, even though Hamilton had a relatively new hockey-ready arena and COMSAT had made it known they were serious about bringing a team to Colorado.
Don’t worry, they’ll get a new arena and make it work, they promised. History may not be repeating itself, but it sure as hell rhymes. It sure would be something if this franchise found itself in an ill-fitting market due to a hasty and impulsive move made at the last minute yet again.
Taxpayers may dodge a puck to the face if Arizona Coyotes skate north to Utah
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2024/04/15/arizona-coyotes-move-utah-taxpayer-hockey/73335828007/
People forget the enthusiasm in the Valley among fans and the media when the Coyotes made the Western Conference finals in 2012 against Los Angeles.
The team has been hamstrung by a bad lease downtown in the Suns arena built for basketball with too many obstructed view seats; a beautiful new arena in Glendale, too far from their customer base; underfunded owners, really bad owners, more underfunded owners; too few wins in the last decade to build their fan base; the collapse of their Bally Sports contract.
Meruelo gets criticized for what he did to lose the Glendale lease, but what owner doesn’t try to strong-arm to get a better deal? Leonsis just did it in DC. Reinsdorf wants a billion from Illinois for another new White Sox stadium. The Bears are at the trough too after their ruse of buying Arlington Park race track to build a stadium was exposed.
Bettman needs a team in the Valley for the national TV ad market, regardless of what ratings would be.
Even Utah’s Smith thinks downtown SLC is Ghost Town, and an “entertainment district” is the answer. With hundreds of millions of state money behind him, maybe it is.
Despite mistakes like in Glendale and others, Meruelo has put together a pretty good effort to build the team. He may actually be the best owner they’ve ever had.
Where he wants to build his arena is a perfect location in a high-income area. If he gets it done, I think people will end up with a different opinion of Phoenix as a hockey market.
Neil and the commenters here have presented some very reasoned analysis.
It’s not the league’s job to buy and sell existing franchises; the owners do not want the league to be messing with their business like that. The league does not own the Coyotes anymore, so they could not put them up for bid and they can’t just take the franchise away from Mereulo without a protracted legal battle.
The BOG has to approve new owners and they can try to recruit them for cities they really want to be in, but they can’t conjur them out of thin air. That is essentially what they tried to do with the Atlanta Thrashers and we know how that turned out.
To get the Coyotes out of their current situation, somebody had to make an offer that Mereulo and the other owners could accept. Ryan Smith is the *only* one doing that.
This did not just come together in the last few weeks. Mereulo might want the fans to believe that, but it is not true.
Ryan Smith came out publicly saying he wanted a team last year. That means he’d been talking to other owners for a while before that. At that time, he said he wanted an expansion team, but he was carefully noncommittal on the possibility of moving the Coyotes.
The reporters who know these things have reported that the league put Mereulo “on the clock” as soon as they lost the Tempe vote. So these negotiations have probably been going on for at least a few months.
Imaging that a better bidder could have emerged they’d just asked around a bit is almost certainly a fantasy.
All of those other places you mention have had *decades* to find an owner to come up with a legitimate proposal to move a team or get an expansion team and none of them have. Behind Utah, Atlanta is probably the closest now, and they are still far away.
Hamilton has an arena, but who is this magical owner with at least a billion dollars looking to put a team in Hamilton? Are they also willing to pay off Buffalo and Toronto? If they exist, they’re awfully quiet.
I don’t think Jim Balsille, who the other owners hate for reasons that have nothing to do with Hamilton, has the money now.
Same with Quebec. They have an arena and politicians who like to talk about it, but nobody with enough money has actually stepped forward with a billion-plus dollars to buy a team. The owners don’t really want to be in Quebec so they aren’t going to go out of their way to find somebody to put a team in Quebec. Quebec needs to make a strong offer. It hasn’t.
The notion that Quebec will get a team just comes from pundits and fans who think they own hockey and still imagine that somehow a collection of billionaires will ever give a shit about which fans “deserve” a team. That’s never ever going to happen until there is a revolution in how pro sports operate.
Pierre Karl Peladeau made an expansion bid for a team in Quebec in June of 2015. He most certainly has the money, as his deposit check showed. He also owns (among other things) the naming rights for the arena and the network on which the New-Diques games might have been shown.
His bid and Vegas’ went to the second phase and ultimately the third (review of owner’s financials). At an owners meeting in June 2016 the owners selected Vegas alone – according to Jeremy Jacobs “the address the geographic imbalance”.
https://www.cbssports.com/nhl/news/quebec-city-las-vegas-move-on-to-third-phase-of-expansion-process/
https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/quebec-city-ponders-options-after-nhl-defers-expansion-bid-001814431.html
You are perfectly entitled to hate on QC if you want, but please get the facts straight on their bid. PKP is a billionaire just as Foley is and not only can but did write a large check.
BTW, when the NHL opened up the “Seattle” expansion window, it was open for one franchise and one location only. No other bids or expressions of interest were allowed.
Well, then where is he now?
Since that quixotic bid in 2015, we’ve heard nothing of substance from them. If he’s trying to buy a team and gin-up local support, why is he so quiet about it? It’s hard to prove a negative, but I have tried to find some shred of evidence that Quebec is still trying and I cannot find one.
Salt Lake City pushed their chips into the middle. Atlanta 2.0 sort of has. Where is Quebec? I can only conclude their billionaires have given up.
They did not just pick Vegas over Quebec for geographical reasons. That article you linked even says that. At the time, the Loony was US$0.78. Las Vegas is at least twice as big and, importantly, represents new fans. And if they didn’t get new fans, they’d have no trouble filling the arena with tourists. It was an easy sell.
Their decision to only consider Seattle the next time just makes my point. There was no chance Quebec (or anywhere else, really) was going to beat their bid, so they didn’t bother asking.
But it wasn’t because of some nationalist insistence on US markets or stupidity. By some accounts, Seattle is on pace to be bigger than San Francisco by 2040. If anything, the stupidity was not pushing for Seattle 25 years ago. (I understand the politics of the arena were the issue, however).
But it’s not like these formal windows are the only time Gary Bettman or the owners will take a call from a billionaire. That’s not how it works, as we’re seeing with Ryan Smith.
I’m not hating on Quebec. I hope it gets a team.
But I follow an enormous amount of Canadian sports coverage and it follows a consistent pattern on this topic.
The call-in radio/pundit/ex-player types go on and on about how Quebec “deserves” a team, while the actual journalists repeatedly explain that the other owners have no interest in a team in Quebec for the same reasons they have no interest in putting a team in Rochester or Omaha.
(There is also a third group that fancies itself as media savvy and just sort of carries water for the owners.)
And in all of that reporting, there has been no mention of Dion or Quebecor or any specific potential owner in a long time.
It is very possible that owners in Quebec (or Hamilton) are still working on it but, for whatever reason, are not being at all public about that. I don’t know why they would do that. It would be good PR for their businesses to publicly be trying to get a team.
I hope I’m wrong about that. But that’s not really the point. My issue is not really about Quebec or Canada at all.
It’s about this frustrating narrative that the league or “Gary” ought to just “put a team” in Quebec or Hamilton or wherever just because they deserve it. Or that Quebec and Canada are being “overlooked.”
It’s irritating because it feeds the false narrative that somehow if we just had smarter or better people in charge of our institutions and monopolies, that all of this could be fair and make sense to us as average fans/consumers/citizens.
That’s not how it works and that’s not how it is ever going to work in our lifetimes.
Without a massive revolution in how pro sports work – which would probably require a massive revolution in how everything works – the “right people” are never going to be in charge.
Atlanta 3.0
Peledeau and Dion are still working on it. They continue to meet with the league to discuss their interest. Much like Chipman/Thomson did with Winnipeg. No-one beyond a handful of employees of their companies and league officials knew it was happening before it was announced (although I am not suggesting any announcement is imminent, or inevitable. It is neither). It is absolutely not good PR to be publicly pressuring Bettman and Daly.
If you read the articles linked, you know that Quebec City’s bid was not declined but deferred.
The difference is clear: The Peledeau bid met all the league’s criteria. The league just didn’t want a QC team at that time. They may never want one, for all anyone knows. (Or perhaps the NHL’s issue is with Peledeau himself, like the NFL and Trump…)
Jeremy Jacobs clearly stated the issue was geographic imbalance. The $0.78 dollar is no more an issue for Quebec City than it is for the other non-US based franchises (just like the so called ‘separatist’ movement… the NHL already operates across one international border, if it came to that a second would not be an issue). If a 78 cent dollar was a significant obstacle, the Canadian franchises wouldn’t be driving 35%+ of league revenue.
It is ludicrous to suggest that the reason the Kraken expansion window was open to “only one location” is because that bid was ‘so good\'”. This is a logical fallacy of the highest order.
How in the hell would they know how good other bids were if no other bids were allowed (or, therefore, reviewed)? It’s like interviewing one candidate for a job (the candidate happens to be your son or daughter) and sending everyone else home because you’ve “already got the best possible person hired”. On the one hand you are saying that the NHL has a process and Quebec didn’t meet it, while admitting on the other that Seattle and Salt Lake ‘didn’t need’ the process.
If the Seattle market is so great, btw, why are the TV numbers so terrible?
Why is a narrative (which is more or less non existent beyond a few homers who just want a team in ‘their’ town… a feeling that exists in the US and Canada) about Canadian franchises any more frustrating than one about sunbelt hockey or large CMA US expansion in areas where people don’t care?
The fact of the matter is that PKP’s Quebec bid was fully vetted and clearly qualified (hence its deferment rather than rejection). That sets it apart from some of the other pie in the sky proposals that prospective owners have made (which would include Salt Lake, given that all Smith has done is agree to write a big check for a market that is no more viable than many, many others in North America. Where was the infamous NHL vetting there? Did they spend more money doing homework on Smith than they did on the IceEdge frat boy clowns? How about Spano, Gosbee or Barroway? How about Rigas or McNall?)
If there’s one thing we have all learned, it is that the NHL’s process is whatever they want it to be at any given time. That’s why it is so interesting to me that they “deferred” the Quebec bid. They didn’t reject it.
If you are going to continue to make false or inaccurate representations regarding Quebec’s expansion bid in 2015/16, you should expect to continue to be called out on them. It simply isn’t true that QC ‘failed’ or did not have the funds etc.
*If* Meruelo is actually getting $1 billion in real American money out of this deal, then the question is, which of these two paths will Meruelo take: (1) Spend millions of his own money to try to get an NHL arena built in the desert, and then give the $1 billion back to the NHL, or (2) Keep the $1 billion and forget about owning an NHL team again.
Anyone who is not blinded by hockey fandom will say the obvious answer is (2). And that means that either the NHL isn’t really giving this guy $1 billion in cash, or they’re giving him $1 billion to go away and never show his face again.
The latter, presumably. Which may seem like a lot just to buy off a potential lawsuit, but getting $200-300m to split amongst themselves has got to take the sting out.
It’s really amazing how well you can make everyone come out feeling happy when you’re in the middle of a market bubble.