The Arizona Coyotes might move to Salt Lake City, but that doesn't make the franchise a failure. Its growth of hockey in the region led to stars like Auston Matthews playing the sport.
The Arizona Coyotes might move to Salt Lake City, but that doesn't make the franchise a failure. Its growth of hockey in the region led to stars like Auston Matthews playing the sport.
Gary Bettman didn’t want the Arizona Coyotes to fail. He and the NHL did everything they could to prevent his desert rose from shriveling up. He constantly pitched the team’s merits, even when ownership changes and arena space marred its reputation. The league tried to build a plan that could keep hockey in the desert.
Those plans didn’t seem to work. Now, the Coyotes are pondering a move to Salt Lake City, going so far as to prepare two schedules including one in Utah. The potential move offers a new market with the allure and momentum that Arizona once held. Through 27 years and despite Bettman’s doting, the Coyotes could never quite make it all work.
This doesn’t make the Coyotes a failure.
As much as the Arizona experiment didn’t lead to a long-lasting and successful hockey team — as much as they were the punching bag of the NHL in their time — it made an impact on hockey in the region. More NHL interest exists in Arizona since the day they arrived. Sixty-goal scorer Auston Matthews hails from there, and Tage Thompson was born there among other exports.
When it comes to sports takes, though, we tend to dwell in absolutes. The sports world reads more like poetry than math, but we make sense of what happens by calling players busts, or franchises failures. That’s why Arizona, if this move happens, will always be remembered as a failure for its lack of notable success.
But make sense of this: Arizona is in fact an NHL team playing multiple years in a college rink, located in a city that has shut down its arena attempts; but, this can’t be considered without factoring the overall growth of Arizona hockey into the equation. Hockey enrollment has nearly doubled in the past 10 years. Matthews headlines the hometown stars, while young guns like Matthew Knies and Josh Doan are also growing into the league. It’s also hard to believe that the NCAA’s Arizona State Sun Devils would exist at their current level, either. They’re slated to join one of the sport’s best conferences in the NCHC next season and have grown considerably since their 2014 inception.
Arizona isn’t simply a black hole, a franchise that failed over and over and over again despite how much investment it received. Its desert sky is one painted in brushstrokes of varied grays, an area where a lot of good came out of the franchise if the results never manifested.
The Arizona experiment is messy. One playoff series in 12 years — made possible by a pandemic-spawned play-in round — shows the laughable misery that the franchise has muddled in. If Arizona packs up its bags and moves north, the NHL will have failed to create a lasting market for its league. But that doesn’t mean hockey — the sport — is a failure there. It might not be an NHL-friendly market. At the very least it’s not a permanent one. But the sport also grows as a result of the Coyotes being there.
How much is that growth worth? Probably not the millions that this franchise lost over the years. But sports teams are hardly if ever profitable, even if this Coyotes team really struggled.
Similar critiques have befallen other non-traditional hockey markets, too. Think of Florida, whom pundits once lambasted for low attendance. How those critiques have faded fresh off a Stanley Cup Final run and a President’s Trophy before that changed the narrative. That’s without considering the Floridians who’ve made the NHL — including Red Wings and former Coyotes defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere. In Atlanta, poor ownership killed its team twice before relocating to the Canadian Plains. Now, the NHL is being pitched for re-expansion there, too. And even in a traditional hockey market like Winnipeg, success has proven fleeting for owners; the Jets are facing relocation narratives, though they seem unlikely to happen. When it comes to the success of hockey markets, it's easy to punch down on teams that are trying to build up.
Don't make that mistake with the Arizona Coyotes. Recognize that as uncompetitive as this franchise has been recently, it's also a team that made progress in growing the sport for its region. It might not have been a rousing success, but that doesn't make it a total failure.
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