OT: Phoenix Coyotes to.....Seattle?
Bettman has had discussion with the mayor of Seattle on relocating the team.
Quebec City deserves a hockey team more than Seattle. Although, the Islanders look to be next with the Nordique fans invading their arena.
Key Arena is a craphole. Trust someone who's not only been in the main bowl/floor at least 10 times, but has also seen the infrastructure back stage. It's abhorrently bad.
And the biggest knock is indeed the layout (as someone posted above). It's too small, too outdated, has crappy parking and traffic scenarios, and is actually really cramped.
The parking is the biggest issue for me. It sucks ass. Once I'm in the arena there isn't anything that really bothers me. I've been in worse place. But I really don't care, I just want hockey to come here.
"To bridge that $8.5 million gap, the two parties have negotiated revenue streams that will theoretically benefit both sides. The city will get a cut of parking, which will no longer be free for Coyotes fans. It gets a cut of future naming rights, which expire in 2016. It gets a portion of ticket surcharge, and will oversee an escrow account that could pay the city even more money." - from AZCentral.com story
SI.com also threw some less than encouraging tweets from Nick Kypreos out there. From the sound of things, Glendale will not see it RSE's way and the City Council is concerned greatly about the debt load that the Coyotes have created. SI is predicting at least one more "lame duck season" in Phoenix, quite possibly the Coyotes' last there.
There won't be one more "lame duck" season in Phoenix -- the NHL has already said as much both publicly and privately. It''s either a done deal in the next few days or relocation, although a done deal isn't as far off as SI has made it seem.
I'm adding much more info in a separate comment at the bottom of this thread, if you're interested.
It's funny how many people that don't live in Phoenix and couldn't find Glendale on a map make the same snarky comment like that.
There's actually a fair number of hockey fans in the Phoenix metro area - a ton of white-collar middle class types that migrated from the Midwest. The problem is they built the arena basically as far away from their possible fans in the East Valley as possible. The Cardinals do okay out there, but that's a sport with 8 home games that are all on the weekend.
I'm in that 'wrong side of the valley' boat and work with a lot of people like me - a relatively casual hockey fan that enjoys going to games and has the income to do so without worrying too much about it - I only go when the Wings are in town, because the trip to the arena is way too long to make a habit out of on weeknights. If the team were in Scottsdale, or even still downtown, I'd probably go to at least a dozen games a year and might even consider season tickets.
exactly. Seattle is always the loser.
Big picture. It may not be great for the Wings, but I think it'd be good for the NHL and for Quebec City, to have the Nordiques back. (And given that the Wings have won four Cups since they moved west, it hasn't hurt them that much.)
Nate Silver recently wrote an article about why Canadian hockey teams have trouble winning the Stanley Cup. In the article he discussed the possibility of large-scale relocation and suggested Pheonix as a candidate with Seattle as a possible new location. It's an interesting read for those who care.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/why-cant-canada-win-the-stanley-cup/
...and came to the conclusion that the failure of the Coyotes is in no way an indictment of Phoenix as a hockey market. It's an indictment of the idiots who decided to build a hockey arena way out in the western suburbs when the mega growth and mega dollars were in the East Valley. They had a prospective location on Scottsdale Road (which is now occupied by new ASU buildings) that seriously could have made that franchise the envy of hockey. But they got cheap land in JV Glendale. Incredibly short-sighted and catastrophic set of decisions. Phoenix absolutely could have worked for hockey but unfortunately the rest is history (or soon to be history anyway). Hockey's demise there is a negative reflection on the idiots of the NHL and the idiots running the City of Glendale, not the sports fans of Phoenix.
15 minutes from downtown in your private helicopter maybe. On weeknights, with games at 7 or so, it's more like 45 minutes in traffic, from the center of town. And for those of us in the East Valley, it's easily twice that. I'd absolutely go to more games, several times more games, if the Coyotes were in Scottsdale.
I suppose that works if all you care about is making it to the game. I'd prefer to make an evening of it, but then that's tough at Jobing.com anyway because there aren't nearly enough barstools out there at Westgate to accomodate the pre-game crowd (and they can't support more, because no one goes there except for games).
At any rate, all I know is that whenever I try to talk a potential fan into going to a game with me, the complaint is always, "but that's so faaaaaaaar". And my point is that there may have been enough people like me and my friends to let the Coyotes survive if they had had a decent arena downtown (and put a reasonable product on the ice).
I don't think Phoenix ever was or really ever will be a prime locale for an NHL franchise, but I don't think they did the best they could with what they had.
I'll admit to not being terribly informed about Phoenix, but when people start blaming the location of the arena for not going to games, that doesn't hold a lot of water for me. If you're a diehard, you go to the games. There are many Red Wing fans who make a 45-60-minute trip (or longer) to go to the Joe.
Yeah, but unless you have 20,000 diehards, you've got to fill the rest of the seats. There are a lot of games in a hockey season, mostly on weeknights in the evenings. If you're anywhere in Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, etc, it's at least an hour and a half in traffic to get to the arena on a weeknight. That means leaving work early if you want to get something to eat before the game, and probably not getting home until well past 11.
That's tough to do, unless you're a diehard. And if you never go to games as a casual fan, you won't end up being a diehard in the first place.
26 of the 30 NHL teams filled their arenas to 90% of capacity this year, and 20 of them were over 99%. It seems that most franchises were able to build up a hard core of diehards to go to the games. If Phoenix can't do that after almost 20 years of existence in the market, it doesn't sound like a great hockey market, I'm sorry.
I'll agree that Phoenix was an odd place to start a franchise (though not as odd as you might think - lots of Canadian snowbirds and Midwest transplants), but my point is if you're trying to build a fanbase from scratch, you've got to take advantage of every chance you have. And locating the arena in a spot that's immensely inconvenient for over half of your potential fanbase is monumentally stupid.
... my point is if you're trying to build a fanbase from scratch, you've got to take advantage of every chance you have. And locating the arena in a spot that's immensely inconvenient for over half of your potential fanbase is monumentally stupid.
This is so, so right. Well said.
The market of hockey fans exists here, but it's never been converted to Coyotes fans, and the location of the arena has a lot to do with that (as does the lack of ownership, which has led to low payrolls, a lack of elite talent and a lack of success). Put a decently run organization in a major sport in a major city and you'd see some success. Unfortunately, the Coyotes haven't been decently run for most of their history and aren't really in a major city, hence many of their issues.
I've been here in Green Lake and Ballard the past 30 some years. I have my doubts how well an NHL team will draw here. Traffic a pita, $50 seats versus $15 WHL seats, very few kids/people here play the game. That all said, Seattle is more deserving than Phoenix but I'd put both Quebec City and Hamilton well above Seattle in the deserving column.
Do you think that Hamilton can really hold it's own market considering that Buffalo and Toronto are right there to compete with for fans?
I don't know about Buffalo, but Toronto has way more fans than it needs. It's really nuts that there aren't two franchises there. A lot of Torontonians would love a second franchise. The Leafs' monopoly of the market has bred complacency.
A team in Hamilton could easily siphon off fans from Toronto's western suburbs. Oakville and Milton, for instance, are about as close to downtown Hamilton as they are to downtown Toronto.
Hamilton itself is close enough to Toronto that I know a number of people who commute from there. It's a long commute, and most but not all of them use the GO train, but there are some who do it by car.
Seattle is still the 12th largest media market in the US. They would have no problem supprting a team.
13 12 +1 Seattle-Tacoma
Phoenix, with only 90 fewer TV households (out of 1.8 million). So not sure this proves much.
Seattle has a good track record of supporting teams. Its only partially about selling tickets. Its about media market. Quebec is roughly the size of Toledo.
Quebec may seem small, but it's in Canada and the people live and die for hockey in a way that not many Americans do. It's hard to compare a U.S. and Canadian market. The average Canadian is much more likely to be into hockey than the average American.
as the Wings are in the same divison as the Blues, near where I live in the St Louis area. But you and I will not get the same opportunities to see them once they move to the Eastern Conference. I haz a sad...
Seattle was the first American team to win the Stanley cup.
/ cue star rainbow music
The Islanders are moving to Brooklyn until their stadium situation is resolved. They've attempted to get approval (ie get the taxpayers money) to build a new stadium or renovated Nassau Colesium.
Its in limbo while they fight it out, the Islanders are moving to Brooklyn when their lease is up in 2015 "temporarily"
Portland makes more sense. Someone give Paul Allen a call and fire up the Zamboni at the Rose Gardeb
I think the advantage of Seattle is that (for now, at least) it has no NBA franchise to siphon off entertainment dollars. Also, it could have a pretty good rivalry with Vancouver.
The Seattle sports scene is pretty dead during Jan-March since there is no NBA team. So an NHL team would be the only thing going once the Seahawks got done.
I think Seattle should try to get an NHL team and then just forget about the NBA. Stern obviouly hates Seattle and has gone out of his way over and over to fuck over the city. Let someone else finance the NBA's next horrible expansion team. Sure, the NHL is more of a niche league than the NBA but after the crap Stern has pulled on Seattle I'm not sure why Seattle would even want an NBA team anymore.
Portland has a WHL team that averages about 6000/game. Seattle has a WHL team that averages 4000/game.
portlands WHL team is downtown. Seattles WHL plays in Kent. 20 miles out side the city. If portland moved their WHL team to Hillsboro Im sure the attendance would drop.
Did not know that, but that begs the question, why don't they play at Key Arena? Nothing else is going on there, is there a reason they can't make it work downtown?
Kent and Everett have WHL teams. Seattle does not.
I live in Phoenix/East Valley and know a couple of the people who are deeply involved in this Coyotes situation, which also means I know far more than I ever cared to know about the inner workings of a sports-versus-politics situation.
But for those who care, here are a few things:
1. The Coyotes will either have a deal with Glendale within the next 10 days or will move, almost certainly to Seattle to play in Key Arena until a new stadium is built. The NHL has specifically said that the league won't pay to run the Coyotes for another year, so it's either finalize this deal with RSE (the prospective ownership group) to stay in Glendale or GTFO immediately.
2. Quebec is considered a more attractive option for a team than Seattle is, but the NHL wants to make Quebec an expansion team because an expansion fee (some absurd amount like $300M or $400M) will net the league a lot more money, and there are plenty of Canadians who will pay to start up a team in QC. Also, Bettman has made it clear that he is "intrigued" by the Seattle market, so it's likely that a team will end up there eventually one way or another. That said, according to the various projections that have gone back and forth between the league and ownership groups (which one of my colleagues was made privy to), Phoenix is still considered the best market of any -- it's the sixth-largest market by population in the U.S., I believe -- hence the NHL's desire to keep the team here through four years of aggravation.
3. There will most likely be a finalized proposal for an arena lease on Tuesday, which will then be voted on by the City Council the following Tuesday, July 2. People who cover the council say it'll be a close vote -- there are a couple councilmembers who have supported keeping the team (mostly because paying for an empty arena and an abandoned development around it would be even worse than losing a little money on the team) and a couple councilmembers who have made it clear that they don't, mostly because they don't agree with subsidizing pro sports under any circumstances. It's a best-of-seven vote. From the sounds of things, they're close enough on a couple small revenue-stream issues that a few more days of negotiations will probably yield something that will pass, but I'm not super confident. And if it doesn't pass, the NHL already has a fallback deal with an investment group to move the team to Seattle. I wouldn't be surprised if a sale was announced with 48 hours of the Glendale vote failing (if that were to happen).
4. The comments above about the move to Glendale are, IMO, correct. Phoenix is a great hockey market in terms of the number of fans -- it's just that most of them are transplanted fans of the Wings, Blackhawks, Leafs, etc., and a lot of them never really get converted to Coyotes fans (unlike the situation with so many transplanted spring training/baseball fans out here turning into Diamondbacks fans) because it's just not worth it for casual fans to go to games. It also hasn't helped that under NHL ownership, the team has never been able to pay for any big-time players worth paying to watch (BTW, I go to about 10 games a year, so I still watch, but I'm again talking about the more casual fans here who could become diehard fans). The hockey market has never become a Coyotes market, and that's unfortunate. If the team leaves, it will be easy to write the book on why.
5. Regarding the comment above about a 15-minute drive from downtown to Glendale, HAHAHAHA. I work smack dab in the middle of downtown Phoenix in the Arizona Center area, and when I get off at 6 and go to Coyotes games, I typically get there right at or just after puck drop at 7. To get there from the East Valley (Gilbert) and be in my seat by puck drop, I have to leave around 5:15. That's an hour and 45 minutes to get there without getting dinner or anything beforehand. It's hard to make that commitment, and there is no doubt in my mind that this substantially limits the season-ticket base considering that a large majority of the metro population (especially the population with a lot of expendable money) resides in the East Valley.
Interesting thoughts. One little correction - the city proper of Phoenix is the 6th largest in the U.S., but the market as a whole is about 12th or 13th.
The big question: if the arena really is that big of a problem, will the proposed deal do anything about that? If not, won't the Coyotes probably just be in the situation again down the road?
You're probably correct about the market -- I just remember seeing something recently that said Phoenix was the sixth-largest in the U.S., and I was thinking it was metro market but it must have been Phoenix proper. Either way, it's plenty large enough in terms of population and available money to support all four pro sports teams.
Regarding the arena, that's a good question. Unfortunately, the answer is Glendale or bust -- the NHL briefly looked around at moving the Coyotes somewhere else in the Phoenix metro area, but given the situation Glendale is in, none of the other cities was too excited about ponying up a bunch of money for a new arena (understandably so).
That said, Jobing.com Arena is pretty poorly managed right now, and it's believed that by scheduling a few more events (they have THREE non-Coyotes events this year, which is crazy), doing a better job of organzing paid parking, getting a new naming-rights deal, etc., there's a lot more money to be had for an ownership group, and with the NHL's new revenue-sharing agreement, it's likely that the owners can at least break even and hopefully even make enough to pay for some talent upgrades.
Once all that happens, the team itself will be stable even if the ticket sales don't increase much ... and stability will almost certainly help in and of itself in that regard, as I know several people who have neglected to renew their season tickets the last year or two because they weren't sure the team would still be around.
BTW, it's believed that the new deal has an out clause after five years -- specifics aren't known, but basically, if the owners are still losing X amount of money after five years, they're free to relocate. All the deals the NHL has worked with to sell the Coyotes have included something similar with an approximate five-year commitment to Glendale.