Before this devolves into another pissing contest between the east and west factions, I feel I should reiterate a point here, and that is that no matter where you live in the Phoenix Metro area, the odds of you paying a premium price to go see a crappy sports product are dismally low.
It's that way with hockey, baseball, football, basketball, soccer, auto racing, golf, lacrosse (remember the Sting?), etc. The only sports that have a truly devoted-at-all-costs built-in audience in Arizona are ASU and U of A athletics. For everything else, there's just too much other stuff to do in this town, which makes inconveniencing oneself and one's wallet around a terrible product very unsatisfactory. Why would
@azcanuck drive all the way out to GRA to see a game like the one against Calgary? Why would I drive 1.5 hours to Tempe to see them do something similar should the new barn go in there?
Fact is, part of the reason why Canadian franchises do so well is that they've had a century of hockey being the only damn thing to do in all that ice and snow during the late fall, winter, and early spring. During those same months, Arizona has the best weather in North America - so the incentive to stuff yourself into a hockey arena to watch a bunch of twenty-something pro athletes making multiples of your annual salary putzing around lackadaisically just isn't there like it might be in, say, Minneapolis, Chicago, or Winnipeg.
The incremental gains of an arena closer to a specific knot of die-hard hockey fans won't be enough to change this franchise's fortunes if the ownership remains as parsimonious and raggedy as it has been since the bankruptcy. Even if the team were to break even, Barroway doesn't have enough discretionary income to free up to do anything major. So what we should be doing - rather than putting our hopes and dreams on the head of a pin stuck in a map - is crossing our fingers that whoever buys out Barroway has a war chest that can help drag this benighted franchise out of the wallow it's been stuck in for a decade.