Arizona Coyotes
The Arizona Coyotes are an inactive professional ice hockey team based in the Phoenix metropolitan area. They have competed in the National Hockey League as a member of the Central Division and the Pacific Division in the Western Conference, and the West Division. They played at America West Arena in downtown Phoenix from 1996 to 2003, at Glendale's Gila River Arena from 2003 to 2022, and at Mullett Arena in Tempe from 2022 to 2024. The organization was established on December 27, 1971, as the Winnipeg Jets, a charter franchise of the World Hockey Association.
After seven WHA seasons, they were one of four organizations enfranchised by the NHL on June 22, 1979, when the WHA ceased operations. Due to financial troubles, the Jets were sold to American owners, who moved the team to Phoenix on July 1, 1996, where they were renamed the Phoenix Coyotes. The franchise was renamed the Arizona Coyotes on June 27, 2014. Alex Meruelo became the majority owner on July 29, 2019, later becoming the franchise's sole owner following the arrest of minority owner Andrew Barroway.
The team failed to gain long-term stability despite the relocation to Arizona, enduring multiple changes in ownership and struggling for a profitable arena for home games. The NHL took over the Phoenix Coyotes franchise in 2009 when then-owner Jerry Moyes gave up the team after filing for bankruptcy. The NHL maintained control of the franchise until 2013, when they found new ownership willing to keep it in Arizona. Despite a difficult working relationship with the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, the Coyotes were able to secure a year-to-year arrangement to play in the Gila River Arena until the end of the 2021–22 season.
Negotiations with the city deteriorated, and the team subsequently signed an agreement to play their games at Mullett Arena on the campus of Arizona State University, starting with the 2022–23 season. The arrangement was intended to be brief, lasting only until a new arena was built in Tempe, but the arena proposal was rejected by the city's residents in May 2023.
Amid growing pressure to resolve the arena situation and to find an alternative to a college arena considered too small even for temporary usage, the Coyotes suspended hockey operations following the conclusion of the 2023–24 season. In a deal brokered by the NHL, the Coyotes were essentially split in half. The team's hockey assets were transferred to the Utah Hockey Club, an expansion franchise awarded at the same time to Ryan Smith and based in Salt Lake City. The Coyotes' name, history, and other intellectual property were initially retained by Meruelo, who had intended to build a new arena in Arizona by 2029.
Meruelo hoped to win a parcel of land at an auction in June 2024. When this auction was canceled by Arizona state authorities, Meruelo left the franchise and abandoned his efforts to revive the Coyotes, relinquishing the franchise rights and intellectual property to the NHL.
History
Original Winnipeg Jets (1972–1996)
The team began play as the Winnipeg Jets, one of the founding franchises in the World Hockey Association. The Jets were the most successful team in the short-lived WHA, winning the Avco World Trophy, the league's championship trophy, three times and making the finals five out of the WHA's seven seasons. It then became one of the four teams admitted to the NHL as part of a merger when the financially struggling WHA folded in 1979.However, the club was never able to translate its WHA success into the NHL after the merger. The merger's terms allowed the established NHL teams to reclaim most of the players that had jumped to the upstart league, and the Jets lost most of their best players in the ensuing reclamation draft. As a result, they finished last in the NHL during their first two seasons, including a nine-win season in 1980–81 that is still the worst in franchise history. However, they recovered fairly quickly, making the playoffs 11 times in the next 15 seasons, but the Jets only won two playoff series, largely because they were in the same division as the powerful Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames. Because of the way the playoffs were structured for much of their Winnipeg run, the team was all but assured of having to defeat either the Oilers or the Flames to reach the conference finals. In 1984–85, for instance, they finished with the fourth-best record in the NHL with 96 points, at the time their best as an NHL team. However, they were swept by the Oilers in the division finals. Two seasons later, they dispatched the Flames in the first round, only to be swept again by the Oilers in the division finals. The franchise did not win another playoff series for 25 years.
The Jets ran into financial trouble when player salaries began spiralling up in the 1990s; this hit the Canadian teams particularly hard. Winnipeg was the second-smallest market in the NHL for most of the Jets' existence and became the smallest after the Quebec Nordiques moved to Denver in 1995 to become the Colorado Avalanche. In addition, the club's home arena, Winnipeg Arena, was one of the smallest in the league, seating just under 15,400 people. It was over 40 years old and had no luxury suites. Despite strong fan support, owner Barry Shenkarow was forced to put the team on the market. Several attempts to keep the team in Winnipeg fell through.
Relocation to Phoenix
In October 1995, Minnesota businessmen Steven Gluckstern and Richard Burke purchased the team with plans to move it to Minneapolis–St. Paul, which had lost the Minnesota North Stars in 1993, for the 1996–97 season. However, in December, after they were unable to secure a lease at Minneapolis' Target Center, they opted to move the Jets to Phoenix, instead. Minnesota was ultimately awarded an expansion team in 1997, the Minnesota Wild.After the franchise considered "Mustangs", "Outlaws", "Wranglers", and "Freeze", a name-the-team contest yielded the official name "Coyotes". At the time, the name was largely seen as play on the Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, since Phoenix was home to several minor league teams and one short-lived WHA team called the Phoenix Roadrunners, including an International Hockey League team that was playing there in 1996. However, "Coyotes" was considered suitable in any case since the coyote is endemic to the whole of Arizona, unlike the roadrunner, which is only found in the southern and western regions of the state. The Roadrunners only played one more season before leaving Phoenix; however, the Coyotes later revived the "Roadrunners" nickname for their American Hockey League affiliate, the Tucson Roadrunners.
Early years in Phoenix (1996–2005)
In the summer, the team added established superstar Jeremy Roenick from the Chicago Blackhawks, in exchange for trading Alexei Zhamnov. Roenick teamed up with power wingers Keith Tkachuk and Rick Tocchet to form a dynamic 1–2–3 offensive punch that led the Coyotes through their first years in Arizona. Also impressive were young players like Shane Doan, Oleg Tverdovsky, and goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin, whom the fans nicknamed the "Bulin Wall".Another key addition to the squad was veteran forward Mike Gartner, who had joined from the Toronto Maple Leafs. Despite his experience and scoring his 700th career goal on December 15, 1997, Gartner battled injuries in the latter half of the 1997–98 season. The Coyotes did not renew his contract and he retired at the end of the season. After arriving in Phoenix, the team posted six consecutive.500 or better seasons, making the playoffs in every year but one. The one time they did not make the playoffs, in 2000–01, they became the first team to earn 90 points and miss the playoffs.
The Coyotes' original home, America West Arena, was suboptimal for hockey. Although considered a state-of-the-art arena when built for the Phoenix Suns, it was designed specifically as a basketball venue, with sight lines optimized for the smaller playing surface of that sport, and not with hockey in mind. The floor was just barely large enough to fit a standard NHL rink, forcing the Coyotes to hastily re-engineer it to accommodate the 200-foot rink. The configuration left a portion of one end of the upper deck hanging over the boards and ice, obscuring almost a third of the rink and one goal from several sections. As a result, listed capacity had to be cut down from over 18,000 seats to just over 16,000 – the second-smallest in the league at the time – after the first season.
Burke bought out Gluckstern in 1998 but was unable to attract more investors to alleviate the team's financial woes. In 2001, Burke sold the team to Phoenix-area developer Steve Ellman, with Wayne Gretzky as a part-owner and head of hockey operations.
The closest that they came to advancing past the first round during their first decade in Arizona was during the 1999 playoffs. After building a 3–1 series lead, the Coyotes fell in overtime of game 7 on a goal by Pierre Turgeon of the St. Louis Blues. In 2002, the Coyotes posted 95 points, one point behind their best total as an NHL team while in Winnipeg, but went down rather meekly to the San Jose Sharks in five games.
From then until the 2007–08 season, the Coyotes were barely competitive and managed to break the 80-point barrier only once during that time. Attendance levels dropped considerably, worrying many NHL executives. In addition, an unfavorable arena lease at city-owned America West Arena had the team suffering massive financial losses ; the Coyotes have yet to recover from the resulting financial problems.
Ellman put forward numerous proposals to improve the hockey sightlines in America West Arena in hopes of boosting capacity back over the 17,000 mark. However, none of these got beyond the planning stages, leading Ellman to commit to building a new arena. After nearly three years of proposals to build an arena on the former Los Arcos Mall in Scottsdale and having difficulty financing the purchase of the Coyotes and finishing demolition of Los Arcos, along with infighting in the Scottsdale City Council, Ellman looked toward the West Valley, and in December 2003, the team moved into Glendale Arena. Simultaneously, the team changed its logo and uniforms, moving from the multi-colored kit to a more streamlined look. In 2005, Ellman sold the Coyotes, the National Lacrosse League's Arizona Sting and the lease to Gila River Arena to trucking magnate Jerry Moyes, who was also a part-owner of Major League Baseball's Arizona Diamondbacks.