hockeyboy1923
Registered User
- Apr 18, 2023
- 23
- 28
I think you can be fairly confident that the Players were never fine with it, they just tolerated it to get to a better place. And you say one year yet just last year it was Tempe getting done and now 12 months later there really isn't any concrete plan??
Edit: remember Jakey as some of us starting hearing the PA get a little more vocal and Mureulo giving them no updates folks like yourself wanted Mureulo to tell them to pound sand as it's none of their business. That's not looking like such a smart business decision now is it.
It really depends on the players. I am sure most of them with families have no desire to uproot and move to SLC because Scottsdale is a nice place to live. I also doubt the young players are excited about a city with no nightlife. Then you also wonder how players that went up through the Coyotes system feel about everyone trashing the city of Phoenix as a failed hockey experiment. Some players may be upset about the arena situation enough that they like the move, but I think this was mostly driven by Bettman and the other NHL owners.
Phoenix is a market the NHL needs to be in due to growth, size and demographics in the city. What the NHL needed to do was flex muscle to get a good ownership group in place - force AM to sell the team publically. Maybe the team would have moved to somewhere else like Houston but at least that would have made more sense for hockey than SLC. A secret, rushed sale to the commissioner's buddy, moving the team to a tier 2 city may be good or ok for the NHL in the short term but is definitely bad for hockey the sport in the long-term. The NHL is already doing a poor job of promoting the sport and making it more popular.