The chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors says he’s formed an advisory committee to try to bring a pro hockey team back to the Valley. And Tom Galvin has named Andrea Doan, wife of former Arizona Coyotes captain Shane Doan to lead the committee.
The Coyotes came to the Valley from Winnipeg in 1996, and left after the 2023-24 season; they now play in Salt Lake City as the Utah Mammoth.
To learn more about how the committee might go about trying to bring the NHL back to the Valley, The Show spoke with Craig Morgan, longtime Coyotes beat writer.
MARK BRODIE: So what exactly is this committee going to be doing? How are they going to try to convince the NHL that the Valley is still a good place for a hockey team?
CRAIG MORGAN: Well, I don’t think that the NHL necessarily needs convincing that this is a good market. They believe in this market. They wouldn’t have been here all the years that they were if they didn’t believe in the market.
They just know the roadblocks, the issues that this market faced continually, and those are two pronged. You need stable, committed ownership, and you need an arena in the right location in town. Sorry to say it to those in the West Valley, but Glendale was not it. That was, as I’ve I think said to you previously, that was the original sin that this franchise made moving west, where they just couldn’t sustain things financially.
So until they have those two pieces in place: a committed, stable ownership — and we can talk more about what that should look like — until they have that in place, until they have an arena in a suitable location either downtown or in the East Valley, the NHL will not have any conversations about expansion in Arizona.
BRODIE: Well, so let’s talk about the arena first because that was, as you referenced, a huge issue for the Coyotes. They ended up their last couple of seasons playing at ASU in a 5,000 seat arena. How feasible is it that after all of these years, there could be a place, a good place, a place the NHL will be happy about to actually put a hockey arena?
MORGAN: Well, the honest answer is we don’t know yet. It’s too early in the process. But one of the stumbling blocks in the past had been galvanizing political and local support for an arena, and part of that was due to the people who are asking for that support.
Let’s be honest about the previous ownership groups that have come. Ever since Richard Burke moved it and then sold the team, ownership has been an issue. The ownership groups that had this team, whether it was Steve Ellman way back, whether it was Jerry Moyes, whether it was Ice Arizona or Andy Barroway, or most recently the Meruelos, people didn’t want to work with them, and quite frankly funding was an issue for a lot of those groups as well.
So there was concern on the part of politicians and local business leaders that they might be “getting into bed with someone they didn’t want to get into bed with.” So you need to find a group clearly that has deep pockets first of all, but if you have that in place, then maybe that makes things easier.
If you have political and local support, certainly that’s going to help move things forward, but it’s not going to be simple because the expansion cost is massive. Gary Bettman has floated the idea of a $2 billion expansion price, and then you have to construct an arena and a practice facility and all the other things that go with it. So we’re talking about a lot of money.
BRODIE: Have any potential owners or members of an ownership group been identified by anybody?
MORGAN: They have not been identified. There are groups certainly circling this. There are groups interested. I don’t think it’s any secret that people want to own sports franchises. It’s an ego thing, and then the valuation of sports franchises just continues to skyrocket. So there are those reasons, but you hope that it’s not just that from a Valley perspective, you hope it’s not a speculator, somebody banking on the valuation of a sports franchise, because that was part of the problem.
This has to be more than an investment for an ownership group. It has to be a commitment to the Valley, and that has many prongs, but most notably investing in youth hockey and investing in building more sheets of ice, which Ryan Smith is already doing in Salt Lake City.
BRODIE: It’s interesting you mention youth hockey because Lyndsey Fry, a former Olympian who lives here in the Valley and is very involved with youth hockey, is also sort of related with this committee. It seems like that is a concerted effort by Tom Galvin and others to try to incorporate the youth hockey element into this effort to bring the NHL back.
MORGAN: No question about that. Lyndsey’s the right person to be spearheading it. She is so passionate about it. And they’ve already, they launched the Shott Foundation a year ago in an effort to, as she has said, bridge the gap between the Coyotes’ departure and the next NHL franchise. I don’t think they have any illusions that this is going to be a 50-year program. Maybe it could be, but usually when a team comes in, they take over all those aspects.
But she wants to make sure, and the Shott Foundation wants to make sure that youth hockey continues to grow, that the numbers remain strong here in Arizona because that is one of the things that the league will look at. There has to be more investment than previous ownership groups have made on that front.
When you look at the totality of ownership for the Coyotes, two rinks were built in their entire tenure here. The Ice Den two years in by the Burkes, and then 20 years later, a single ice sheet in Mesa. That’s all that the Coyotes got done in terms of building ice sheets. The last I checked with USA Hockey, Arizona has the highest per capita rate of players per ice sheets in the nation. Clearly we need more ice sheets.
BRODIE: Yeah. Has the NHL said anything about when it might be looking to expand? What time frame might this committee be looking at to try to find an ownership group, to try to find a spot for an arena before they might be under consideration by the NHL?
MORGAN: It’s very speculative at this point. If you ever try to pin Gary Bettman and Bill Daly down on this, good luck to you, my friend. That won’t happen.
Now that the new collective bargaining agreement is in place — that happened this past summer — I think they’ll be ready to entertain discussions, but they haven’t launched a formal process.
We know that Atlanta is pursuing a team and has made great strides. We’ve heard other cities like Houston, of course, being mentioned as well. But Gary Bettman and Bill Daly have not come out and said this is our time frame, these are the cities we’re considering. I don’t know when that’s going to happen or if that’s going to happen, but there’s been some speculation that this could maybe, if all things go well, this could happen in say five to six years.
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