“Just because Venezuela, Japan, and Puerto Rico produce baseball players at a massive rate doesn’t mean they deserve teams in MLB. Just because Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii, and the Samoan Islands produce football players doesn’t mean they deserve NFL franchises. So what if Manitoba has homegrown stars? Russia, Sweden, and Finland produce just as many.”

True, but Venezuela, Japan and Puerto Rico don’t already have teams in the MLB. The NHL already has a number of Canadian teams, including the team with the most championships in history (Canadiens). It’s a league with roots in Canada, in a Canadian sport, playing for a trophy that originated in Canada, with over half of the players born in Canada. So it’s not as much of a stretch as giving Japan a team in a league that is entirely American but one team. Japan is not even on the same continent. That doesn’t make sense.

With the NHL, Canada still produces the largest fanbase for the sport and generates the most players. The southern expansion was a bad idea overall. Of course hockey is for everyone, and I’m glad to see there’s some interest in such unlikely places as the desert, but Bettman’s obsessive quest for TV dollars has resulted in a lot of dissatisfaction from the fanbase that has been loyal to the league for decades. I’m not just talking Canada, but the northern states as well.

Phoenix (and it’s surrounding areas) has a population of roughly 4.3 million, and it’s massively expanding. The team plays in Glendale, a suburb, with a population of over 200,000. Fewer are hockey fans, but you put up a billboard for the team with it’s sponsors on it, and more people are going to see it.

An expanding market that’s 12th in the US in population and is a huge TV market is seen as a wide open vat of potential earnings to a league. That, and it’s metropolitan population is greater than the entire provincial population times FOUR.

THAT’s what it’ll take? A billboard?!? Shit, the Coyotes could have saved themselves a lot of money if they’d thought of that years ago. It doesn’t matter how many people live in the city or the region or the state. Yes, it’s a much larger population than Winnipeg and most Canadian centres. Almost every city in the US has a larger population than we do, but population ISN’T what counts here. I understand that’s the league’s thinking…huge population, obvious market for a TV deal…but if only a small percentage of that population is going to watch hockey, whether in person or on TV, it’s not going to make a difference.

One, Hockey is for everyone. Two, yeah, the ‘Yotes have been in the desert for a decade, but don’t even act like they’ve had successful clubs until this year. Give them 2-3 years with successful management, and see what happens.

This is the problem right here. The team has NEVER had a successful season. If the Coyotes had been contenders (or even had good attendance numbers) for years and were only experiencing a drop recently, I don’t think any of these ownership issues would have arisen in the first place. What makes you think THIS year is going to be the year when everything turns around? Or next year? You’ve already had what…13 years to try to sort this shit out? Hasn’t worked yet. Obviously, as someone who went through the Jets thing, I’m well aware that you want to hold on as long as humanly possible, hoping that something works out (we did the same in Winnipeg).

I’m not in Phoenix, so I’m going by news reports from all over the place, but it definitely seems like you guys are in a situation that’s as bad as we were in back in 1995, when we played a “lame-duck” last season, with the full knowledge that we were going to be sold as soon as the season ended.

It’s probably time to look at a better way to get a team (personally, I’m in favor of expansion. Get Winnipeg and either Quebec City or Kansas City squads, and move to four divisions of eight teams each).

While I agree that Winnipeg and QC need teams ASAP (and I don’t know enough about the situation in Kansas), I don’t think expansion is the way to go. There are too many teams hemmorhaging money (not just the ’Yotes) and getting hideous attendance from the last couple of expansions that adding more is not going to solve any of the problems.

I think the NHL needs to cut their losses and instead of this “we’re going to do whatever we can to keep the franchises where they are” attitude — which is a huge lie, because they didn’t fight nearly as hard for Winnipeg, Quebec, Hartford or Minnesota —Bettman needs to admit that maybe his southern expansion was NOT such a hot idea (pun intended) and just let the dying teams just die. Do not resuscitate. Then start over in cities that will succeed, based on love of hockey and large fanbases, rather than a dream of TV dollars that has never really materialized.

Whether Phoenix is one of these dying teams that needs a DNR order…I’m not sure. They’re certainly portrayed that way by the international (not just Canadian) media, and I hope, for the sake of the fans out there, that they can be held on to…but for the sake of the league and hockey in general, I would hope that a team with no realistic chance of being saved or improving its attendance/revenue would get cut off before it bleeds any further.