Search Results for “utah coyotes” – Page 2

“Are the Coyotes moving to Utah?” enters its ninth month

February 5, 2024 Neil deMause

It was NHL All-Star Weekend this weekend, and in addition to somebody beating somebody in the game itself (non-hockey fans, please try to guess the current format without looking), lots of people took the opportunity to say things about the fate of the Arizona Coyotes:

Coyotes CEO Xavier Gutierrez: “I can confirm that we have submitted an application [for state-owned land in northeast Phoenix near Scottsdale]. But … I’m confirming with you that, as I’ve made very clear on a number of occasions, we are looking at multiple sites and we are not yet ready to announce which is the one that we are going to pursue as the primary one.”
NHL Players Association director Marty Walsh: “If there’s no plan in Arizona, I would encourage a move to another location, absolutely. I think the league feels that Arizona is a good market and I can understand that. The issue I have, and the players have, is how long do you wait to get a home? They’re playing in a college arena and they’re the second tenant in that arena. This is not the way to run a business.”
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman: “[Coyotes owner] Alex Meruelo, as recently as last week, told me he was certain he was going to get [a new arena] done, and I don’t make it a practice of contradicting owners unless I have hard facts to the contrary, and I am both hopeful and reasonably [long pause] reasonably confident that he’s going to do what he says.”

Same as it ever was.

Meanwhile, talk of the Coyotes moving to Utah continues, though there’s no real evidence that this is imminent either, beyond unsourced rumors that have been rumoring ever since Meruelo lost his arena-funding vote in Tempe last spring. Also still no word on what a new hockey arena in Salt Lake City — which Jazz owner Ryan Smith said he would need in order to bring the NHL to town — would cost or who would pay for it. So while the NHL players union is undoubtably peevish that one-32nd of his members have to play in a college rink, there are still lots of reasons to expect this drama to drag on a bit longer, not least that it’s already been dragging on pretty much ever since the Coyotes moved to Arizona in 1996, what’s another few months or years or decades?

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Friday roundup: More shouting about Virginia arena traffic, plus rumors of A’s (temporary) death and Coyotes-to-Utah

February 2, 2024 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! (Happiness provided separately.) While I have you here, is it a good time to remind you that Field of Schemes is on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Post, and whatever Elon Musk is calling his thing these days? And that by following FoS in any or all of those places, you can get notifications of new posts as soon as they happen — and not only that, by reacting to posts on those sites, you can help get more attention for Field of Schemes, because that’s how social media likes work, it’s a popularity contest where your votes make the things you like more popular? No, that isn’t what you want to hear right now, you just to read the weekly news recap? Okay, ignore all that for now, you can always come back to it later.

Alexandria held a public meeting last night on traffic and transit plans for its proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, and people came with all sorts of questions about the traffic and transit plans, who’da thunk it? The teams’ owner and the Virginia Department of Transportation issued a new “concept plan” for traffic and transit that mostly seems to be about how arenas generate traffic mostly at peak times (duh) and the state would be spending $200 million to mitigate this through various stuff (okay) — though honestly it’s hard to get much out of the plan beyond its dedication to all-caps type, seriously don’t do that unless you want to make it harder for readers to comprehend what you’re saying … oh.
Former D.C. councilmember Jack Evans wrote a whole op-ed for the Washington Business Journal saying that the Alexandria arena deal would be a terrible one because it involves “extremely risky” TIFs, which isn’t necessarily wrong but is hilarious if you remember who Jack Evans is and why he’s now a former councilmember. (If you don’t remember Evans, just luxuriate in the part where he cites the more than 20 TIF deals he consummated while on the council as evidence that he knows how awful they can be.)
Slate’s David Faris, meanwhile, thinks D.C. should let the Wizards and Capitals leave and let Virginia stick itself with the arena costs, because the teams and their limited economic impact aren’t worth it. Mostly I want to call attention to Faris’s suggestion that stadium and arena deals are subject to “a sports version of Fenno’s paradox — the political science finding that people generally like their own representative while disapproving of the job Congress is doing” — which I’m not sure is actually the case, since in my experience people tend to get the maddest about their own cities’ sports subsidies, but it’s an interesting concept.
Could the Oakland A’s disband for three seasons, leaving MLB with only 29 teams, then emerge fully formed in Las Vegas as a beautiful expansion butterfly? You could take my word for it (hahaha no), or you could read Awful Announcing’s lengthier consideration of the possibility (the players’ union would have to sign off on losing 40 major-league jobs for three years, fewer teams would mean fewer games and would affect TV contracts, hahaha no).
The actual likeliest locations of the A’s until their Vegas stadium is ready (if their Vegas stadium is ever ready, add Ken Rosenthal to the list of doubters) is thought to be either Salt Lake City or Sacramento, but either would require temporarily rejiggering the A’s TV rights situation, which “is gumming up a resolution,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan. I know A’s owner John Fisher claims he fell in love with Las Vegas and really wants to move there, but it does seem more and more like he stumbled into committing to a move through his stadium czar Dave Kaval’s loose lips and is only now trying to figure out how it will actually work.
Could the Arizona Coyotes move to Salt Lake City as soon as “immediately”? Rumors say so, and just because the same rumors said so last summer and nothing happened then doesn’t mean they couldn’t be right now, right?
“Levi’s to pay 49ers, Santa Clara $170M to make stadium signs slightly bigger” is a funny headline, but it’s not actually true, since Levi’s will be paying the San Francisco 49ers and Santa Clara $170 million for a ten-year extension of their naming rights deal, which is only partly motivated by wanting to make their stadium signs bigger before the 2026 Super Bowl and World Cup. Good on the city for getting at least a share of the naming rights money when many cities don’t, that’ll help make up for the money they’re losing from the team owners winning their case that they only have to pay half of the property taxes on the stadium.
State Treasurer Dereck Davis said, “I feel lied to,” after learning that Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos had agreed to sell his team just weeks after promising he wasn’t going to sell his team in order to get a new sweetheart lease deal from the state, that seems a very valid feeling to have. Maybe the state should have put a poison pill clause in the lease making it null and void if Angelos went back on his word? Oh well, too late now, maybe next time.
The people who want to bring an MLB expansion team to Portland, Oregon might buy a golf course to use for a stadium that would be paid for somehow for a team that only exists in their dreams. At least they’ll always have their outfield tram renderings.
A bill to lure the Chicago Bears across state lines to Indiana now has two sponsors in the state house instead of one. Further updates as events warrant.

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Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

January 12, 2024January 15, 2024 Neil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
“The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
“[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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Friday roundup: Vegas A’s stadium in limbo; so are Coyotes’ future, maybe Mets’ casino?

June 9, 2023 Neil deMause

First things first: The Nevada legislature never got around to holding its second day of Oakland A’s stadium hearings yesterday, and while there was no announcement of why, the obvious conclusion is that it’s because they don’t have the votes to pass anything. The current plan is to reconvene on Monday, with the time until then used to see if amending the bill will turn any legislators’ heads: Rumored changes include removing the A’s exemption from the state’s live entertainment tax (which could save the state about $100 million in tax breaks, though that’s a subsidy I didn’t include in my latest estimate, so it would still leave the total public cost at around $500 million) and improving the team’s community benefits agreement to include things like donations to a local food bank (which wouldn’t amount to much at all), so my question stands.

At least A’s owner John Fisher has one friend in the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board, which helpfully asserted yesterday that though the economic benefits of a stadium are questionable, this is about “making the region a more attractive place to work, live, invest in and visit,” which Las Vegas desperately needs because nobody visits there, it’s too crowded, or something? Maybe Fisher could actually use some more persuasive friends, though presumably that’s who he has in behind-closed-doors meetings with state legislators between now and Monday.

But that’s not all that’s happening, not by a long shot:

NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly says Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith “has an interest in bringing the NHL to Salt Lake City,” and “obviously, what happened in Arizona created this talk of potential need for relocation,” jeez, does the guy need to spell his move threats out to you? (Whoever “you” is, since nobody in the Phoenix area seems that worked up about whether the Arizona Coyotes stay or go, and for good reason, but league execs gotta do their thing.)
You know how much I hate repeating New York Post “reporting,” let alone New York Post “exclusives,” so take this one with the usual grain of salt: The Post says, citing “City Hall and other sources,” that New York Mayor Eric Adams, Mets owner Steve Cohen, and Queens city councilmember Francisco Moya engaged in a “spirited” phone call about tying Cohen’s casino bid to progress on an NYC F.C. soccer stadium, possibly by rolling the two into one land-use bid in exchange for Cohen letting the soccer team use his stadium lots for parking during matches. To make things even spicier, “Sources said Moya claimed after the meeting that Cohen threatened to back ex-con Hiram Monserrate, a former councilman and state senator who previously represented the area, in a Democratic primary if he didn’t get on board with his redevelopment plan.” Moya’s been pretty close-mouthed on the whole casino thing, letting state senator Jessica Ramos take the lead on stalling approval for it so far; Cohen denies this, and Monserrate says he opposes the casino plans, so who the hell knows, it’s a Post story, after all.
Philadelphia Chinatown residents and supporters will march on City Hall tomorrow to protest plans for a 76ers arena on the neighborhood’s doorstep, arguing that it will create economic and traffic havoc that would destroy the community just as the Washington Wizards‘ arena did to D.C.’s Chinatown. A public meeting on Wednesday revealed some very watercolory renderings of the arena but not much about the public response given that the only reporting on it I can find is from a real estate company, oh journalism.
Having more professional sports teams may not bring measurable economic benefits, but it does bring more influenza deaths. It’s science!

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Friday roundup: Utah enters MLB expansion sweepstakes, Bettman’s mouth issues more checks Coyotes can’t cover

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 Neil deMause

It was 89 degrees in New York yesterday, which made me think about how the cities most threatened by climate change are only going to be threatened sooner and sooner. It may be too soon for team owners to start thinking about threatening to move to Duluth, but, you know, is it ever really too soon to threaten to move anywhere? Food for thought.

News roundup time!

Former Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller, who owns the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees, says she wants to bid for an MLB expansion team when and if MLB starts taking bids. “We believe that as a top-30 media market in the fastest-growing state in the country with the youngest population, that’s where our attention should be,” said Miller Company CEO Steve Starks, and while he’s right about those things — Salt Lake sits at 29th, just behind Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Baltimore — it also could soon be the site of arsenic-mercury dust storms, which may not be the best selling point. Salt Lake City also doesn’t have a major-league stadium, and Gov. Spencer Cox has already declared that he’s opposed to public funding of one … except for tax-increment financing kickbacks, which he’d be just fine with.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has visited Tempe, Arizona to take in an Arizona Coyotes game and promise that “once this [arena] project is built, this team is never going anywhere. It’s going to be here forever.” So Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is going to sign a 999-year lease? That’s the only thing he can mean. Hey, everybody, Alex Meruelo is signing a forever lease, Gary Bettman promised, this is great news, Gary Bettman would never lie to us!
Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris, who is already wrapped up in seeking a Philadelphia arena that all the neighbors hate and for which he’s been accused of illegally funneling money to a mayoral candidate, may be about to buy the Washington Commanders for $6 billion — at which point he will presumably begin lobbying for all the legislators who stopped pursuing stadium bills because they hated Commanders owner Daniel Snyder to resume their subsidy efforts. Here, let’s listen to effusive pro-stadium remarks in the Washington Post from Jack Evans, who was forced off the D.C. council after accepting tons of money from private businesses whose projects he was voting on. Old bribe-takers never die, they just end up becoming pundits.
Did I say last month that “the Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies“? Turns out the actual figure could be as high as $1.8 billion, according to figures compiled by Bridge Detroit, which quotes me as saying, “Once you get your foot in the door and shovels in the ground then you have the city on the hook. That’s how this becomes a gift that keeps on giving for developers, and it’s ‘In for a dime, in for a billion dollars.” (Okay, I got it right at least one of those times.)
Kansas City is going to cancel all in-person K-12 classes for two days at the end of the month to avoid traffic created by the NFL draft being held in the city, this is fine and normal.
Finally, enjoy some raves from the Globe and Mail about renovations to the Toronto Blue Jays‘ stadium, if pointing out that the Jays are charging $1 just to be admitted to a new liquor automat where you can pay $70 for a drink “reminiscent of Black Forest cake” counts as a rave. The paper also calls the stadium formerly known as Skydome “ancient,” which may be alarming to any readers born before it opened in 1989, apologies for not adding a trigger warning to the top of this post, my bad.

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Friday roundup: Trying to make democracy without a responsible media really isn’t going all that well, plus: cardboard stadiums!

November 12, 2021 Neil deMause

Things I learned this week: Dogs don’t have eyebrows, but they did evolve special facial muscles so they could look cuter to humans. Synanthropic evolution is weird, and that’s even before getting into how rats in Central Park evolved the ability to metabolize rancid peanuts.

And with that palate cleanser out of the way, on to the stadium and arena news:

The Buffalo city council held some public hearings on the possibly–$1.4 billion–or-more Bills stadium proposal this week, and most of those testifying said they would rather it be built in Buffalo than in suburban Orchard Park, though some in the Old First Ward neighborhood where it might be built said they don’t want a stadium on their doorstep. From what I can tell, nothing was actually discussed about who would pay how much to build the thing, or about whether a new stadium is even needed in the first place, or at least if it was none of the local news outlets reported on it, despite this being what WGRZ-TV called “a fact-gathering session to help the community better understand what the idea would entail, cost, and how challenges, including displacement, would be dealt with.” Mission not accomplished!
Meanwhile, the Buffalo News ran an article outright declaring that “the prospects of renovating Highmark Stadium … have been effectively put to rest by a state study that recommended against it.” Buffalo really needs some better journalism outlets, stat.
The city of Knoxville and Knox County are set to vote on issuing $65 million in bonds for a new Tennessee Smokies stadium next week, something that would cost the city and county about $42 million to pay off after all the moving parts stop moving. Some labor groups are calling for the votes to be delayed while they hash out a community benefits agreement with developer Randy Boyd, who insists he doesn’t need to put anything in writing about paying stadium workers a living wage because he’s a local guy. If the bonds are approved, according to WATE-TV, “city and county leaders would still have to approve certain incentives to ensure the private development surrounding the stadium,” no more details on what that would cost, what do you expect of us, people, we have a TV station to run here.
Tired of stories about sports team owners who threaten to move out of town without subsidies, then admit they weren’t going anywhere regardless, but thanks anyway for the subsidies, suckers? Then perhaps you will enjoy this story from Pat Garafolo’s Boondoggle newsletter about how a tech CEO got $23 million in subsidies from Utah by threatening to take his company elsewhere, then admitted that he wasn’t going anywhere regardless, setting off a state investigation of whether he had scammed taxpayers. As Pat notes, this isn’t uncommon — Toyota once got $40 million in “incentives” to keep jobs in Texas, then admitted that they would have done so anyway, then got to keep the money regardless — so the real news will be if Utah actually tries to get its money back.
The owner of the Wilmington Blue Rocks says his team was almost eliminated in the minor-league baseball contraction, and still could be if he doesn’t get a Ferris wheel like the Quad City River Bandits have. “To be up on a Ferris wheel, or to be up on those Yo-Yos, and to be overtop of 95 looking down on the cars … how cool for our kids,” said Blue Rocks owner Dave Heller. I can hear the screams of the children already!
Wondering if anything’s been resolved over whether the cut-rate sale of stadium land to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno was illegal and could need to be overturned? Answer: Nope. “Conversations continue,” said Anaheim spokesperson Mike Lyster, and a state spokesperson said an investigation is still ongoing.
Wondering if the Arizona Coyotes and Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport are still fighting over whether the Coyotes’ wished-for Tempe arena would be too tall and get in the way of arriving planes? Answer: Yep.
A guy in Georgia has responded to the Toronto Blue Jays‘ alleged desire to tear down and replace the Rogers Centre — you will perhaps remember that rumor from last year, when it was called “a trial balloon wrapped in a beta test” — by designing one himself and building it out of cardboard. That will certainly keep costs down, but the Jays may have to spend extra to find free agent signings who can help their club despite being only half an inch tall.

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