Tempe vote a complete indictment of the Coyotes and NHL

The people have spoken and they've made a very clear and unambiguous statement that they aren't buying what the Coyotes are selling and that it's time to go

Right up until the results were announced Tuesday night, the Arizona Coyotes felt as though they were going into the third period with a five-goal lead. Their pollsters were telling them that the good people of Tempe would endorse the three propositions that would lead to a $2.1 billion monument to the rich known as the Tempe Entertainment District. The Coyotes were being told they’d probably win the vote by 10 points, maybe more. Tempe Wins, a lobby group funded by Coyotes’ owner Alex Meruelo’s development company, secured a venue for a victory party.

But that’s why they play the games and that’s why they hold the votes. In the end, as they have so many times on the ice during their tenure in the desert, the Coyotes were trounced. The vote wasn’t even close, with all three propositions defeated by about the same margin as the Coyotes thought would go in their favour. The Coyotes said they were “very disappointed.” The NHL went one further by being, “terribly disappointed.” That’s because this vote hit them like a ton of bricks. But when you really think about it, should either of them have been all that surprised?

The realists must be thinking that, finally, mercifully, this is the end of the Arizona Coyotes, that there is no possible way this team that the NHL has battled to keep in its city could ever get an arena built and keep its team. But the league has spent untold millions of dollars roaming through the desert, continually battling for this franchise, probably at times wondering exactly for what it was fighting. There will undoubtedly be last-ditch attempts to do something, anything, to keep the Coyotes in the Phoenix area.

But it’s time to go.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has often been the tail wagging the dog when it comes to his relationship with the owners, and he has been the central figure in the fight to keep the Coyotes in Phoenix. But one would have to think that members of the board of governors who have grown tired of both the constant drama and the stroking of revenue sharing cheques have had enough of this nonsense.

So now we’ll hear all sorts of speculation about places such as Kansas City, Portland, Quebec City, Houston and Salt Lake City as both the Coyotes and the NHL regroup and determine the future of the franchise. This is a team that has been turfed out of a suburban arena, one in which it was losing tens of millions of dollars, and has been forced to be a tenant in a college rink that has about the same number of seats something called the Centre Slush Puppie in Gatineau. One of the owners basically threw the keys to the franchise on the NHL’s desk. Others were woefully under-financed and in over their heads. You literally cannot make this stuff up.

This was not a close vote. More importantly, this was a complete indictment of the Coyotes and Meruelo, along with the string of owners who have come before him. Given his personal interest and the amount of bandwidth it has occupied, it’s also a repudiation of Bettman. This is a team that was actually pretty good once, but have not given the 15^th biggest market in the United States any reason to pay attention to it for the better part of two decades. It has essentially become a farm team for the rest of the league, taking on dead-money contracts in order to get more prospects and work its way up to the salary cap floor. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know whether Phoenix could ever be a good hockey market because the Coyotes have been so bad for so long that they never gave sports fans there a chance to love them.

There are those who believe the Coyotes were the victims of a campaign of disinformation from a well-funded Tempe 1st lobby group, which opposed the project. That might be true. But the Coyotes seemed so sure of themselves that they waited too long to get mobilized and didn’t do enough to win the hearts and minds of the voters. The bottom line is that there were too many lawsuits, too many unpaid bills, too many broken relationships, too much losing, too much drama, too much collateral damage for people to do anything but think of the worst when it came to entering an agreement with the Coyotes. All people had there had to hear was that there was a better project waiting for them, even if there probably wasn’t. People can sometimes be gullible. This project was not going to cost the taxpayers of Tempe, but the clean-up, the infrastructure to make the project a reality and the massive tax breaks were going to. They aren’t that gullible.

Probably the most telling thing in all of this is that people voted against what was hailed by local politicians as a legitimate project. In fact, the mayor of Tempe called it, “the best arena deal in the history of Arizona.” It was the best deal out there and the land that is filled with industrial waste is not going to be used for anything else. There appears to be no Plan B for that area and people will drive by it years from now and it will probably still be abandoned. A former mayor, who is 67, predicted he will die before that land is ever developed. And people still rejected it. Think about that.

Perhaps the Coyotes will be able to come to some sort of agreement with the Phoenix Suns. Maybe someone will step up and save the day, again. But it really feels as though the time has come for the Coyotes and the NHL to read the room.