The Arizona Coyotes were the NHL answer to McMansions: Wrong answers only
The Coyotes were never anything but a Long Con. Plus: dumb memes about WNBA salaries, discussion of bad actors, and what to waste money on if you are megarich are the queries du jour.
These are actual questions, if not from actual people, on the sporting and sport-adjacent topics of the day.
The worst response would be to take this fully seriously.
Before diving into this very legit Q&A, there was a hot take here regarding Jontay Porter, the self-disgraced former Toronto Raptor. How did it take two instances before he was caught, and banned from the NBA?
Okay, what are the odds the rest of this will be coherent? Read on.
What is the hockey history hipster response to the Arizona Coyotes moving to Utah?
— J.C., Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
The glee that the NHL’s most KHL franchise is Kaput should come from a different place than “good riddance.”
The franchise typified the sickness in North American sports, which are wired into the fast buck and the gospel that we can have endless growth without harming human health. That sickness is endemic throughout North America, where our business and political leadership carry on as if all our problems can be solved by building another highway and okaying more sprawl by building 3,000-sq-ft houses while good farmland is lost forever.1 Someone wants to talk about the legacy? That is the legacy of a team that was a Long Con from the time it started playing in an arena where thousands of seats were useless because they didn’t offer a view of the entire ice surface.
Sure, Auston Matthews and a few other players came from the state. That was a happy accident. To see hockey live is to want to try it. The Coyotes existed for two reasons, and neither involved nurturing a potential 70-goal scorer.
One, they were in Phoenix so the NHL could tell corporations they were courting to sign up as their latest Official (Product You Do Not Need) that they had a franchise in America’s 13th-largest city. Two, they were the wedge for the latest feral capitalist trying to suck some taxpayer dollars into his coffers. And every team governor — Steve Ellman, Jerry Moyes, the IceArizona gang, Andrew Barroway, and Alex Meruelo — sucked out loud at it. And, perhaps louder for the people in the back, Jim Balsillie would have been just as bad at it if he had succeeded in moving the team to Hamilton.
The hell of it is that Phoenix is not as much of a non-traditional hockey market as people in Canada and Québec might have you believe. It is just that hockey could never exist there without being caught up in every bit of quick-buck, snake-oil, semi-shady opportunism that runs that desert state.
Check HockeyDB. The first pro hockey team to put down roots was the Phoenix Roadrunners in 1967, in the old Western League that entertained fans before the NHL expanded west of the Mississippi. Then the World Hockey Association made incursions, and the Western league bit the dust. That resulted in the demise of two good leagues. The NHL, its baronial wisdom, stalled on a true merger with the WHA. So Phoenix was left with a string of minor pro teams for two decades. Then it got the Coyotes. In some alternate timeline, where one team is allowed to grow for generations, who knows?
That would fly in the face of the history of the place. It has always been about chasing the next boom. That’s made it just the worst. It comes off as a playground for charlatans and expat Canadians who think year-round golf is a cardinal virtue.
There is not much to add other than that Gary Bettman is a Goddamn Genius for squeezing the teats of this franchise that should have been left in Winnipeg. The commissioner may garner three fees for an Arizona team, divided among the existing clubs. First, Bettman got IceArizona to pay US$170 million for the team in 2013. The league will profit from the bookkeeping finesse; Meruelo sells the team to the NHL, who sell it to Ryan and Ashley Smith, the puck patrons for the Utah Unnamed-until-Laters. The NHL keeps the difference in the paper transaction. And Meruelo has been kept on the hook for a future Coyotes 2.0.
More like two-point-no. Phoenix Roadrunners forever.
Hypothetically, of course, what should a hockey beat writer post to social media when a player with a sex-related conviction is making his NHL début?
— S.F., Cherry Hill, N.J.
Mailloux live in interesting times, eh?
Show some understanding that any hoopla around a player with a dodgy past could be triggering. Is that too much to ask?
An entire section of fans chanting, “Logan’s Guilty!” is probably hard on a young and sheltered pro hockey player. But likely not as hard as starting over is for millions of others who can afford or access the same support.
What does the Venn diagram of people sharing memes about what Caitlin Clark will be paid in the WNBA and people who claim that pay inequality is exaggerated look like?
— D.P., Boston, Mass.
Something like this. That’s not important.
Women’s basketball and women’s pro sports are “finally at the starting line,” to quote Jane McManus.2 Being fair-minded, forgive a mansplain, rules out making comparisons between Clark earning under $80,000 for the 40-game WNBA season, which amounts to less than 15 percent of the NBA minimum salary on a per-game basis.
Those figures are largely a function of what Sarah Spain recently described as, “obstacles like country-wide bans, refusal of funds, pseudoscience-fueled imposed limitations and misogyny-inspired rejections & judgments that have held back women’s sports for centuries. This hasn’t been a fair fight (and) still isn’t.”3 Centre that, and then you can be in the game with salary discussions.
In a blue-skies scenario where none of that existed, it is possible the NBA would draw more ratings than the women’s league. At the same time, NCAA March Madness would have tilted toward the women’s game drawing more eyeballs than the men much sooner. The NBA reflects a certain domination culture; even if positionless basketball has shifted that model. College basketball skews more to the collective impulse, five players working as one unit; even if one goes for 35 points on the regular like Clark did at Iowa in NCAA D-1.
In a better world, both forms would have their fans. It feels good to trail off before getting into hunter-gatherer tropes.
It is also fair to wonder whether a spring-to-late summer league serves the players well. The NBA is the only one of the big four men’s leagues to sponsor a women’s league, but they put during the months when ratings fall because people are outside. They are on vacation.
Maybe there will be a day when every big basketball market will have a male and a female team playing concurrent schedules with doubleheaders — as is the style in the game’s grassroots.
Why has no MLB team signed sex pest Trevor Bauer amid all these pitching injuries? Is he being ostracized?
— H.T., Madoc, Ont.
And with cause! Bauer should be out of MLB for abusing women. Saying “he was never convicted of a crime” grants too much face value to a justice system that relies on re-traumatizing survivors to do a regrettable job of holding abusers to account.
The reason I subscribe to? Probably since 11 or 12 other pitchers would want to throttle him. Remember, in 2020 Bauer spilled trade secrets to HBO’s Real Sports about how “70 percent of the pitchers in the league use some sort of technically illegal substance on the ball.”
Since Major League Baseball runs (the entire sport into the ground) on 19th-century morality plays, that led to a crackdown. Pitchers getting hall-monitored after every half-inning. In 2021, Tyler Glasnow, now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, said the crackdown contributed to his season-ending elbow injury.
The pitching injury crisis has been overblown somewhat. As Glasnow said, the lack of sticky stuff means pitchers need to use certain small muscles more to grip baseballs.
This ain’t FanGraphs, and I don’t have time to listen to every 2½-hour episode of Effectively Wild. They might be able to prove pitchers are struggling. In 2019, the last completed season before Bauer finger-pointed, the average MLB team’s pitchers averaged 3.68 bases on balls and hit batters per game. In the early going of 2024, that has jumped to 3.87. A five-percent increase from five seasons ago might not be noticeable, but that’s big in a sport with such a large inventory of games.
Donald Trump has an aide “who uses a wireless printer to provide him with an ongoing stream of good news from the internet.” What would be your good use of being megarich?
— T.P., New Liskeard, Ont.
Glad that you asked.
Turning the horse barn on my estate into a Medieval Times restaurant holds the most appeal. It establishes man-of-the-people cred and creates part-time employment opportunities for young people living in the country. There would also be entertainment.
Running a commercial business in an area zoned residential would require getting abeyance from the municipality. That might seem like tedium. However, you have never seen a planning committee act faster than when someone in their boardroom is swinging a flail. Grant the waiver, or I may brain thee!
What is the most astounding aspect of the story about the “ninth-year college football player,” Miami Hurricanes tight end Cam McCormick?
— F.O., Frankford, Ont.
His fields of study. One clickbait site notes, “McCormick is enrolled in Miami's post-baccalaureate program and he earned a Bachelor's degree in Journalism and Communication and a Master's in Advertising and Brand Responsibility at Oregon.” So his college football days have lasted longer than any job in journalism, communication, or advertising ever does!
As well as longer than a playing career in the NFL, which does not offer guaranteed contracts, or lifetime health and medical coverage.
AITA if I expect a Boston Red Sox telecast on Jackie Robinson Day to acknowledge the team did not integrate until 3 years after he retired??
— D.B., Mount Pearl, N.L.
Not an A-hole, but naive. It has all been said about how. Major League Baseball treats April 15 slightly more as a celebration of itself than it does of the civil rights hero.
It remains grating. At home games last week, the Blue Jays had a public address announcement saying, “Join us in honouring the number 42,” instead of saying “Join us in honouring Jackie Robinson.”
Anyway, in case you did not know, Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1947 to ’56. Some good trolling fodder: The Red Sox, who had zero Black players during that time, scored zero runs on Jackie Robinson Day. The New York Yankees, who had one Black player in that period, scored one run on Jackie Robinson Day.4
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
To build the arena in Glendale in the early 2000s, “The city borrow(ed) $183 million to build a hockey and concert arena near Loop 101 and Glendale Avenue, which is then farm fields.” (Arizona Republic, Aug. 19, 2021) Within a decade, Jerry Moyes had taken the Coyotes into bankruptcy.
Elston Howard became the first Black American to play for the Yankees, in 1955. Pumpsie Green débuted with the Boston Red Sox in 1959, making them the last of the 16 American and National league teams to integrate.