“It may be built into the culture and value of the organization that they can wear a creditor down and negotiate a better deal.” “It’s not just by happenstance,” Phelps said. Phelps came to believe, like others who did business with Meruelo and his company executives, that their style was to refuse to pay a bill and dare the creditor to sue. “We hadn’t met more than two minutes when he looked at me and said, ‘We’re not going to pay you one more dollar to use that arena,’” Phelps said.Īt a meeting shortly after that with ASM, the arena management company, Phelps said Meruelo used much the same statement. Phelps said that his first meeting with Meruelo, several months after he bought the team, was prescient.
In February, The Athletic detailed Meruelo’s ownership style, including cases of late contract payments to players, unpaid bills to vendors and strained relationships with corporate sponsors. The city also let Ellman establish an entertainment district around the arena with sales-tax revenues supposedly paying down the arena cost.īut unpaid bills and other financial disputes piled up. He instead went to the West Valley and Glendale, on the other side of Phoenix, and the small city of 250,000 paid most of the $220 million it cost to build the arena, which opened in December 2003. The team was also saddled with Ellman’s decision to reject an arena deal with the City of Scottsdale, next to Phoenix in the East Valley, where many of its wealthy fans lived. carried the team financially and then purchased it out of bankruptcy before selling it to another group with precarious finances. This included a stretch from 2009 to 2013 when the N.H.L. The Vegas Golden Knights paid $500 million in 2017, and it cost the Seattle Kraken $650 million to join the league this season.īut relocation has long been seen as a solution to the Coyotes’ problems, since Richard Burke, the Coyotes’ original owner who moved the Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix in 1996, sold the franchise to the Phoenix real-estate developer Steve Ellman in 2001.Įllman was the first in a long line of underfinanced owners whose misadventures kept the team in the headlines for years. The Nashville Predators paid $80 million to join the league as an expansion team in 1998. team has increased substantially since the Coyotes arrived in the desert for the 1996-97 season.
RECORD PLAYERS FOR SALE IN GLENDALE TV
The Phoenix metropolitan population of almost five million is the 10th-largest in the United States, and the 11th-largest Nielsen TV market. “Other than scheduling the meeting, I don’t know what the specifics are of what they want to talk about other than at 10,000 feet we can all figure that out,” he said. However, Bettman, who has long been intransigent on the subject, also said that he planned to meet with representatives of the Quebec government in January, but brushed aside questions. “They’re going somewhere else other than Glendale, but they’re not leaving the greater Phoenix area.” “The Coyotes aren’t going anywhere,” Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., said last week after the league’s annual board of governors’ meeting wrapped up in Palm Beach, Fla. In Houston, the Toyota Center is owned by Tilman Fertitta, who also owns the Rockets of the N.B.A. Both cities have arenas fit for the purpose. Quebec City and Houston have both been floated before as potential homes for the Coyotes.
Relocation is a notion more than a practical solution. “We decided we weren’t going to wait until the kids were out of high school to get the divorce,” he added.