On Wednesday night, the Coyotes’ fans got to chime in during the anthem one last time before — its options exhausted, for now — the team moves away. Arizona’s 5-2 win over the Edmonton Oilers was the last the team played in Arizona before it departs for Salt Lake City, a move the NHL’s board of governors approved Thursday.
The Utah version of the team, as yet nameless, will be owned by a group led by Ryan Smith, owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, and his wife, Ashley Smith. Akin to the way the Cleveland Browns left that identity behind when they moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, the Coyotes’ name, logo and other brand marks will lie dormant in Arizona as owner Alex Meruelo seeks to get a new facility — one “appropriate for an NHL team,” as the league put it in a news release — fully constructed within five years.
If Meruelo is successful, it appears the league would authorize an expansion to put a revived version of the Coyotes in his new arena. In the meantime, the Coyotes’ last game in Arizona was played at Mullett Arena, a 5,000-seat venue on the Arizona State University campus that is far smaller than any other NHL arena.
In 2021, the city of Glendale, Ariz., announced it would not extend the lease agreement it had with the franchise to play at what is now known as Desert Diamond Arena, the city-owned stadium that had been the team’s home since 2003. Before that, the Coyotes had played at America West Arena, a venue that had not been built with hockey in mind: Among its other deficiencies, some seats hung over one end of the ice, and fans sitting in those sections could not see the goal directly below.
The Coyotes tried to get a new stadium built in Tempe, near Phoenix’s airport, but a trio of ballot measures that would have cleared the way for construction failed at the polls in 2023, all but dooming the team to relocation.
Amid all that transience and all those owners — at one point, the NHL stepped in after the team’s owners declared bankruptcy — the Coyotes didn’t win a whole lot. Arizona reached the playoffs in four of its first five seasons in the desert but has been back only five times over the past 23 seasons. Since a surprising run to the Western Conference finals in 2012, the Coyotes have won a grand total of four playoff games.
Still, that didn’t preclude an emotional send-off for the team Wednesday night.
“This is absolutely gut-wrenching, heartbreaking,” Tyson Nash, a former Arizona player who has done color commentary for the Coyotes’ radio and television broadcasts since 2008, said in his pregame comments. “Best city in the world — I can’t say it enough. I’m absolutely in shock that possibly we have lost our hockey team. That was a gift. The NHL gave us a gift here in Arizona and we possibly just lost it. I’m on the brink of tears.”
Todd Walsh, who has been part of the Coyotes’ broadcasting team since the team moved to Arizona in 1996, was equally emotional:
“If you’re watching here tonight and haven’t watched in a few years and wanted to check it out, thank you. If you have been a longtime viewer, thank you,” he said. “Your investment in this sport and the people in it and our broadcast crew, I know, means the world to everybody in the hockey community. This is a family, and that’s one thing I learned over 2,000 games ago, I can tell you that.”
The fans, many of them wearing white in one last attempt to re-create the passion of the Coyotes’ early years in the desert, at one point took out their frustrations on the team’s future home, chanting, “Salt Lake sucks.”
After the final whistle, team employees joined the Coyotes’ players and coaches on the ice to salute the 4,600 fans who showed up one last time.
“The NHL’s belief in Arizona has never wavered,” Gary Bettman, the league’s commissioner, said Thursday in a statement. “We thank Alex Meruelo for his commitment to the franchise and Arizona, and we fully support his ongoing efforts to secure a new home in the desert for the Coyotes. We also want to acknowledge the loyal hockey fans of Arizona, who have supported their team with dedication for nearly three decades while growing the game.”
“I agree with Commissioner Gary Bettman and the National Hockey League, that it is simply unfair to continue to have our Players, coaches, hockey front office, and the NHL teams they compete against, spend several more years playing in an arena that is not suited for NHL hockey,” Meruelo said Thursday in a statement. “But this is not the end for NHL hockey in Arizona. … I remain committed to this community and to building a first-class sports arena and entertainment district without seeking financial support from the public.”
As for what’s to come for the franchise, Smith told NHL.com Thursday that while the team will be named for its new home state and not Salt Lake City, other details remain to be determined.
“It will 100 percent be ‘Utah,’ and then it will be ‘Utah Something,’ obviously,” said Smith, a technology mogul and Utah native who bought the Jazz in 2020. “I don’t think given this timeline that we’re going to have time — or nor should we rush with everything else that’s going on — to go force what that is in the next three months.”
Meruelo is trying to acquire a tract of state-owned land in northeast Phoenix that will be up for auction in June, but that possibility came too late to save this version of the Coyotes.
“I am sad,” Sally Wolfert, who attended the team’s first game in Phoenix in 1996 and had been a season-ticket holder for 27 years, told NHL.com after she took part in the ceremonial pregame faceoff. “I am on the verge of tears, because it’s like a death in the family. There’s a loss. … Something else will fill those evenings. But it’s like an end of something, and it’s always sad when something ends.”
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