Written by Kevin Schultz
| 08 May 2009
Hey everyone, my name is Steve and I normally write with Ryan “Enforcer” Henning over at The Victoria Times. Last month, I won the BMR NCAA Tournament pick ‘em pool on Yahoo, and my prize was a guest post on BMR. So with the playoffs going on in full force in lots of great cold weather cities like Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, and Vancouver, I’m going to be writing about….the Phoenix Coyotes. Why? I currently live in Phoenix, and yesterday the Coyotes were actually in the news in May for the first time since, well, maybe ever….
You may have heard yesterday that the Coyotes filed for bankruptcy and are more than likely going back to the country they came from, Canada. Even though I live in Phoenix, and it will definitely suck to not be able to go to NHL games anymore, it seems like this could potentially be one of the most logical moves in sports history.
So back in 1996, some businessmen thought it would be a great idea to go into hockey-crazed Winnipeg, steal their NHL team, and move them down to by far the warmest major city in America. The NHL was all about expanding into bizarre places back in those days as well, so Phoenix was a perfect fit for their push to elevate the popularity of their sport across all of North America. I was a teenager living in Chicago at the time, but it seemed like the fans really embraced their new team which made the playoffs 5 out of their first 6 years in town. I even became a fan of theirs for while after the Blackhawks traded them my favorite player growing up, Jeremy Roenick.
Hockey was nothing more than a novelty in Arizona though. The team has been pretty bad since 2002-03 and attendance took another big hit when they moved to a brand new stadium in suburban Glendale (how many teams can say that?). Hardly anybody in this town cares about them, and they get basically zero media coverage. I think when yesterday’s news broke it was one of the few times I’ve heard their name mentioned on TV in the past couple of months. Just look at the comments on the story I linked to…it seems like they won’t really be missed.
I think even if the Coyotes had stayed in downtown Phoenix and had won more games, hockey still would have failed here. The Suns seem to be the most popular local pro team in town, (I’m not being redundant…there are a lot of NFL and MLB fans, just not a lot of Cardinals and D-Backs fans because of all the transplants and Spring Training) so the Coyotes need to compete for attention with them. Also, Arizona State is in town and U of Arizona is just down the road so college basketball, another winter sport, is popular here too. Most importantly, unlike most cities, it’s absolutely beautiful here in the winter so people like to actually do things outside. There are plenty of attractive (especially to the casual sports fan) outdoor alternatives like golf, hiking, etc.
So even though I’ll miss them, let Canada have their 7th team. It seems like a waste to have a team in a town where no one cares about them when there are a lot of reasonably sized cities in Canada that would kill for their own NHL team. I guess if I want to see hockey, I’m going to have to take a road trip to Anaheim.
