What Was the Arizona Coyotes’ Legacy?
What Was the Arizona Coyotes’ Legacy?
After nearly 30 years in the Arizona desert, the franchise is leaving for Utah. How will its time be remembered?
The Phoenix Coyotes were on borrowed time from the moment they arrived from Winnipeg, Manitoba — with their transformation from the original Jets marking the biggest southbound change in latitude ever for a relocating NHL franchise:
Other teams from the NHL’s Sun Belt experiment proved hockey could work in places where ice seldom occurs naturally — just look at the Dallas Stars, who arrived from Minnesota three years before the Coyotes and continue to thrive today. But winning quickly seems to have been necessary. Of the other teams who headed south on the list above, the Colorado Avalanche won a Stanley Cup instantly in Denver; the Stars won six seasons into their move; even the Carolina Hurricanes won the Cup within a decade of moving.
Add in the expansion teams from Tampa (3 Cups), Anaheim (1 Cup) and Las Vegas (1 Cup), plus Florida, Nashville and San Jose (no Cups but a handful of Finals appearances), and most of the NHL’s Sun Belt squads have seen enough success to build a fan base and keep the team humming in a nontraditional market.
The Coyotes, though, never found their stride on the ice, or off.
In 27 seasons, Phoenix (later rebranded as Arizona) won just 23 playoff games1 and finished last in attendance more times than the team won a postseason series. After the franchise went bankrupt, somehow avoided being moved back to Canada — instead being owned by the league for years on end in the early 2010s — and then, more recently, was forced to play home games at a college rink that holds 69% fewer fans than any other building in the league, the latest in a string of dysfunctional Coyotes owners appear to have reached the end of the line.
It was reported last week that the Coyotes will be moving to Utah next season, part of a sale transferring the franchise from Alex Meruelo to Ryan and Ashley Smith, who own the Utah Jazz. Meruelo is reportedly guaranteed an expansion team that would be a reborn version of the Coyotes if he is able to get a new Phoenix arena built within five years. But for now, the team has already told players to prepare for a move.
If this is the end in Arizona, it represents a rare Sun Belt miss in the NHL’s Gary Bettman era. The geographic center of Stanley Cup teams has been shifting south (and west) for a long time, reaching a new milestone with last year’s Final Four: Teams hailing from Las Vegas, NV (36.2 latitude), Raleigh, NC (35.8), Dallas, TX (32.8) and Sunrise, FL (26.2), by far the southernmost group of conference finalists in NHL history. By and large, Bettman’s push to dramatically expand the NHL’s reach has worked, with only a few exceptions.
The only other team in our chart above to move north since 1983 was the Atlanta Thrashers, a franchise spiritually connected to the Coyotes both because their warm-weather financial troubles had overlapped in the late 2000s, and because the Thrashers were ultimately relocated to Winnipeg to fill the void left when the Jets became the Coyotes 15 years earlier.
(Paradoxically, Atlanta lost its franchise in part because the Thrashers were easier to sell in the summer of 2011 than the Coyotes, though they also lacked the local backing the city of Glendale provided the Coyotes at the time.)
The Jets had arrived in Phoenix with no shortage of promise. The 1995-96 team said goodbye to Winnipeg with a white-out-filled first-round series against the record-setting Red Wings, giving Detroit a surprising fight despite carrying one of the league’s youngest rosters.
Though they ultimately fell in six games, the roster Arizona was inheriting had four cornerstones aged 27 or younger: LW Keith Tkachuk (23), G Nikolai Khabibulin (23), D Teppo Numminen (27) and C Alex Zhamnov (25). It would have been five if the Jets hadn’t dealt 25-year-old Teemu Selänne to the Ducks for 19-year-old prospects Oleg Tverdovsky and Chad Kilger — a horrendous trade in retrospect — but the pieces were still in place to build a winner in the desert.
And the Coyotes were indeed a playoff fixture at first, making it in each of their first four seasons after relocating (and five of their first six). Tkachuk was a 50-goal power forward, Khabibulin was one of the league’s top netminders and the team kept adding talent, such as former Blackhawk Jeremy Roenick and rugged winger Rick Tocchet. Draftees Shane Doan and Daniel Briere were beginning to develop as well.
But there was a ceiling on the team’s potential. All five times they made the playoffs between 1997 and 2002, the Coyotes lost in Round 1 — to five different teams, no less. (Anaheim — with Selänne — then Detroit, St. Louis, Colorado and San Jose — also with Selänne, coincidentally.) Coming off what was the best season in Coyotes history, the team collapsed in 2002-03 and wouldn’t make the playoffs again for eight years, with all of the key parts of the Coyotes’ early era (save for Doan)2 being scattered across the league.
There were a few brief highs to follow.
People are always shocked, for instance, to learn that Wayne Gretzky — the greatest player in NHL history — coached the Coyotes for four full seasons in the mid-to-late 2000s. But not even the Great One could muster a winning record there. (He finished with 143 wins against 185 losses; his most memorable moments were his tantrums and that gambling scandal we never talk about.) The team also won 50 games in 2009-10 with Ilya Bryzgalov in net, pushing Detroit to 7 games in the first round before (of course) losing.
And just a couple of seasons later, 2011-12 provided the most successful campaign in Coyotes history. Despite barely breaking even on wins and losses (42 versus 40, respectively), Arizona won the Pacific division and entered the playoffs as the No. 3 seed in the West. They then beat a Chicago Blackhawks team that, in retrospect, was in the middle of a dynasty to advance past Round 1, and handled a Predators team that would make the Finals within 5 years with relative ease. While the eventual champion L.A. Kings would ultimately make short work of Arizona in the conference finals, the Coyotes could finally feel like they had some measure of postseason success to build on.
Sadly, they would win zero series (and just 1 postseason game) in the next 12 seasons, making the playoffs only once more in their history before moving.
In the end, the team’s struggles to find stable ownership and (perhaps even more importantly) a viable arena led the team to playing in a tiny college arena — putting the Coyotes in a situation that the league increasingly saw as untenable. When Salt Lake City offered an ownership group with money, a passion for hockey and a history of owning pro teams —plus their own arena in the Delta Center — the NHL seems to have decided the time was right.
Perhaps the saddest part of Arizona losing pro hockey is that the Coyotes’ legacy extended far beyond their on-ice record. With their father playing for the team, the Tkachuk brothers (Matthew and Brady) were born in Arizona, as were Sean Couturier, Tage Thompson, Matthew Knies and others. And while he was technically born in California, Auston Matthews grew up in Scottsdale and (as he chases 70 goals) is probably the region’s greatest product. The Coyotes can be directly tied to a generation of players making it to the sport’s highest level from a place nobody expected to yield hockey talent.
"It's pretty unfortunate,” Knies said when asked of the move. “The Coyotes did a lot for me growing up and loved going to the games. And it was a kind of big reason as to why I got into hockey.”
Filed under: NHL
Excluding the qualifying round from the 2020 bubble.
Doan played all 21 years of his NHL career with the Coyotes/Jets franchise (including 20 specifically in Arizona), which is INCREDIBLE.