Good on Glendale for standing up to Coyotes
Plus, Henrik Lundqvist a slam-dunk for Hall of Fame in 2023...Hockey Canada ignores youth at World Women's...More Power to Owen for going back to Michigan
So it has come to this, but the news that the Arizona Coyotes are potentially being kicked out of the Gila River Arena after next season should come as no surprise. Because in this scenario, the Coyotes are the equivalent of the unemployed 30-year-old who lives in his mother’s basement and spends his day playing video games. For the good of both the frustrated parents and the underachieving son, the arrangement has to end and the enabling has to stop.
Actually, it’s incredible that it has lasted this long. But the Coyotes have had a long line of enablers, from the good people of Glendale, who have poured millions of dollars of tax money into this venture, to the NHL, which continues to traipse aimlessly through the desert, continually fighting for the survival of an organization that has done almost nothing to help itself. Like the 30-year-old in the basement, the Coyotes have displayed very brief, very fleeting indications of promise for improvement, only to fall back into their old ways. They have a constant case of the shorts, they always have their hand out for money and they’re often late with their rent. And now, that 30-year-old is threatening to move into a swanky downtown apartment, but just needs a little more time to get his things in order.
Enough is enough. The City of Glendale has told the Coyotes that it is opting out of their year-to-year agreement and plans on having them out of the building after next season. And good on the city for doing this. Good for Glendale for finally realizing that having a hockey team in the suburbs was a terrible idea from Day 1. Consider the Ottawa Senators, who play in hockey-mad Canada. Their rink is almost 16 miles west of downtown on a busy thoroughfare and they have trouble getting people to come to their games. Gila River is about 12 miles west of downtown Phoenix on an even busier highway, where drivers are often required to drive into a blinding sun.
For all these years, we’ve been hearing about how Phoenix is not a hockey market. And that might be true. But in reality, how would we ever know? If you put a team with this kind of record and history in any Canadian city aside from Toronto, it would struggle to survive. The fact remains that we don’t know what kind of hockey market Phoenix is, and we may never know, because the Coyotes have been so bad and so unstable for so long that they aren’t even giving themselves a chance.
Consider that the Coyotes moved to their new arena in the middle of the 2003-04 season. They promptly went 5-14-9 in their new digs, fired their coach and missed the playoffs, months before a league-wide lockout wiped out the following season. Fans didn’t see a playoff game for the first five seasons in the building and the team has only made the post-season once in the past nine, and it would have been none if not for the expanded playoffs in 2020. Over their time in Gila River Arena, the Coyotes have finished, on average, in 21st place. They’ve had as many different owners (five) as they’ve had coaches. They’ve threatened to move, gone bankrupt, almost stiffed the greatest player in NHL history, had a recruiting scandal and had to renounce a draft pick who was convicted of bullying. For most of their existence, the Coyotes have been a farm team for the rest of the NHL, and it’s clear now that another complete teardown is on the horizon, with more lean years ahead before anything improves on the ice.
The Coyotes have occupied an inordinate amount of bandwidth for both the NHL and the hockey world, almost all of it from negative headlines. Given that, is it any wonder people have stayed away and tuned them out? In the 15 full seasons they’ve played at Gila River, they’ve averaged 13,738 fans, over 3,000 below capacity. And that represents tickets going out of the building, not paid attendance.
And the crutch that Phoenix is not a hockey market has to be kicked out from underneath this organization. The Coyotes have had more than 25 years to establish themselves. And there’s actually a surprising amount of hockey being played there. The Arizona State Sun Devils are one of the top programs in the NCAA and there are three club teams on campus. The fact that the Coyotes struggle in Phoenix is because of the historical incompetence of the team, plain and simple.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, as he is wont to do, has once again expressed the league’s support for the Coyotes. But there isn’t a lot the league can do. The Coyotes are on their own on this one. It’s up to them to find both short- and long-term solutions to this. And if they can’t, they should play somewhere else.
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KING HENRIK’S LEGACY
When a great player retires, as Henrik Lundqvist did on Friday, the conversation almost immediately turns to whether or not he qualifies as a Hall of Famer. In this case, it’s a very, very short conversation. Lundqvist is a slam-dunk, first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee. And because he didn’t play at any level this season, he’ll be eligible for induction in 2023.
Of the 15 seasons Lundqvist played, he was considered a top-five goalie in the NHL in seven of them and a top-10 goalie 10 times. He won one Vezina Trophy and was a first-team all-star once and a second-teamer once. He won an Olympic gold medal, was the face of a franchise and sits firmly in sixth on the NHL’s all-time wins list with 459. He was a prominent ambassador for the game, with his goaltending skill matched only by his character.
Not having a Stanley Cup won’t keep Lindqvist out of the Hall of Fame, nor will it prevent the Rangers from raising his No. 30 to the rafters of Madison Square Garden.
WHITHER CANADA’S WOMEN?
One of the silver linings to the low profile of women’s hockey has been that Hockey Canada has not been called to account for the subpar performance of its women’s teams over the past decade. If these kinds of results were produced by men’s Olympic teams or the World Junior program, there would be another hockey summit to navel gaze about what has gone so wrong.
So Canada enters the Women’s World Championship tonight looking to stop an American team that has won each of the past five tournaments. In fact, Canada enters this championship coming off a bronze medal performance in 2019. And if the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and looking for different results, well, then Hockey Canada is indeed insane.
The 25 players who will play for Canada in this year’s tournament have an average age of 26.7 years old. The players who will play for Team USA average just 24 years old. The Americans have two 19-year-olds and an 18-year-old on their roster and they’re not afraid to give them an opportunity to show what they can do on the world stage. Canada, on the other hand, continues to rely on the same veteran players, which it might be able to justify if not for the fact that these same players keep coming back from major competitions with silver medals.
Where is 22-year-old Daryl Watts? Unlike a good number of the players on the Canadian team, Watts actually played a meaningful season in 2020-21. You might remember her for scoring the overtime goal that gave Wisconsin the NCAA title this season. She’s a Patty Kazmaier Award winner who has scored 240 points in 134 games at the collegiate level. Where is 24-year-old Loren Gabel, another NCAA champion and Patty Kazmaier winner who scored six goals in seven games at the World Championship in 2019? They’re both sitting at home, told by Hockey Canada after a two-day camp that they didn’t make the cut for the World Championship team, nor will they be part of the group that is centralized for the Olympic team.
It’s clear that in women’s hockey, USA is pulling away from Canada. And much of it is because they know the value of having young, talented players on their roster. Over the past couple of years, people have made the mistake of saying there are two superpowers in women’s hockey. And they are wrong. There is only one.
MORE POWER TO HIM
It’s very, very difficult to turn down a golden opportunity to play in the best league in the world to go back for another season of college hockey, but that’s exactly what Owen Power has done. And it will be nothing but good for him and, ultimately, the Buffalo Sabres. And those who think Power is snubbing the Sabres could not be more wrong. It’s a pretty sure thing he would have done the same thing regardless of which team chose him.
Power is going back to a Michigan team that is loaded with NHL prospects and enters the season as a frontrunner to win the national championship. Power will also undoubtedly be an integral part of the Canadian World Junior team, a squad he missed out on last year when Michigan did not release him for the tournament. Chances are, he will be a dominant player at both of those levels and he’ll sign an NHL contract at the end of next season and get his career started.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is negative about this move. It takes a smart young man with foresight and good advisors to make it, and good on them for doing that.
Is Michigan the most loaded college hockey team of all-time? Having three guys that were just taken in the Top 5 of the NHL Draft is incredible. I live in Southern California but I'll make it a point to watch as many of their games as I can this season just to see the hockey equivalent of the Fab Four - once again wearing the Maize & Blue!