Ates: Yes, the Jets really play in a college hockey rink in Arizona

It’s been 26 years since the original Winnipeg Jets moved to Arizona and became the Coyotes. Eleven years ago, the Jets returned to the city, the NHL giving Winnipeg a second chance.

On Friday night, the Jets and Coyotes face off in the highly anticipated opener at Mullett Arena, a situation that has been widely mocked in professional sports. There are second chances, and then there’s playing in a college hockey rink with a fan capacity just over 5,000.

That an NHL team was pulled from a hockey-crazed Canadian market due to financial hardship, just to be propped up at the league’s expense by much more financial difficulties bring no pleasure to Winnipeg.

Schadenfreude doesn’t come naturally to Manitobans, but an instinctive appreciation of the absurd is central to our shared existence. We know it is insane to live where the very air puts icicles on our faces and yet we plod along, boots against the falling snow.

No Jets fan unabashedly gloats about the Coyotes’ misery. But you better believe Friday’s game has plenty of Manitobans revisiting their own pain from more than two decades ago. Imagine growing up in Winnipeg and being told that your city couldn’t afford to keep its team…and history went so badly that the franchise went through multiple ownership groups, declared bankruptcy and saw his debts absorbed by the NHL.

Now it’s come down to this: The Coyotes will play home games at Arizona State University Rink in a plan that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman may increase club revenue.

For many Jets fans, that’s a lot to take in.

“I don’t blame Arizona, but I blame Winnipeg for not being treated the same,” subscriber Ken B. said in a recent request for an opinion. “When I heard about the 4,000-person stadium after the league was unhappy with the size and viability (of the Winnipeg arena in the 1990s), I turned red.”

“Arizona can’t seem to generate (their fanbase) but they keep getting bailed out by the league,” Mike W wrote. “Which didn’t happen for the Jets.”

Ali C’s rant showed a lot of empathy, while putting the hammer on the NHL’s hypocrisy.

“Arizona has been an unviable team for so long. It lost its owners, belonged to the NHL, and bled it money. It had issues with non-payment of taxes, foreclosure of his building, issues of respectful treatment of staff and now this year’s arena debacle This is not acceptable for an NHL team (and) how this is allowed is beyond me,” she wrote. “(But) I try not to comment or blame the fans. While it may be tempting to comment on the empty arenas or lack of momentum of the past 25+ years, I think of the 6-year-old girl who would be just as crushed as (I was) if the Coyotes were leaving. But I will blame Gary Bettman for his utter hypocrisy and failure to admit he was wrong (and) the NHL for allowing him to continue without a viable long-term solution.

The arguments made by fans like these seem to be representative of the Manitoba community as a whole. The NHL’s unwavering support for the Coyotes franchise isn’t in itself a problem for Jets fans. The problem for Jets fans is that the emotional sting of the Jets’ initial departure is inexorable from the Coyotes’ Manitoba perspective.

They’re not as upset that Winnipeg’s first love affair with the NHL ended as they’re hurt by how the NHL has shown so much more devotion to its newfound love than it ever has. done to his elder.

There’s a feeling in Winnipeg that the first iteration of the club failed for good reason. The Winnipeg arena held fewer than 15,400 people, many of whom had obstructed views, and it was difficult to sell any given game.

There were no luxury suites, which made it difficult to obtain lucrative sponsorship money. Corporate sponsorships, Winnipeg’s biggest source of game-day revenue, enabled corporations to secure 400 tickets, a private suite and a pre-game on-ice presentation. Even at prices between $5,000 and $7,500, there were a handful of games each season that Winnipeg couldn’t sell. By the mid-1990s, some of the Jets’ biggest partners were pulling out of Winnipeg; Safeway, for example, was much less interested in maintaining its lucrative sponsorship deal with Winnipeg when it moved its distribution offices and headquarters to Calgary. Combine all of this with the crash of the Canadian dollar in the mid-90s, the lack of a modern salary cap and the lack of a viable long-term arena and it’s easy to see why Winnipeg lost its team.

“I got a good look at it in 1996 and it was nobody’s fault,” said Mark Chipman, executive chairman of True North Sports & Entertainment. Athleticism in 2017. “Everyone was looking for someone to pin this on, but there was no blame to blame in 1996. It wasn’t Barry Shenkarow’s fault; it was not the fault of the City of Winnipeg; it wasn’t the NHL’s fault. You just couldn’t bring those interests together in a way that worked at the time. It was probably a good thing for our city that we sat down for a while and let things work themselves out.

This empathetic perspective is not limited to the Jets president, who was part of a group of businessmen who worked to buy the Jets from Shenkarow but were ultimately unable to strike a deal that satisfied the NHL.

The following is an excerpt from a May 3, 1995 Toronto Star article, previously quoted on Yahoo:

“It’s not an NHL decision, it’s really up to the people of Winnipeg and the potential owners. . . to see if there’s anything to be done to keep the team there,” Bettman said after an early morning speech at The Canadian Press annual meeting in Toronto.

“But the biggest problem is that there doesn’t seem to be anyone, in a serious way, who wants to own the franchise.”

A final decision on the status of the Jets in Winnipeg was postponed from Monday midnight, at the request of the federal government. After that deadline, Jets president Barry Shenkarow was to be free to sell the team to parties outside of Winnipeg. Minneapolis, which lost the North Stars in a move to Dallas two years ago, is considered a prime candidate to buy the Jets.

Bettman said a private consortium called the Manitoba Entertainment Complex told him on his flight to Winnipeg on Saturday that a group was ready to buy the team. However, Bettman was frustrated with the band’s insistence on making a low-risk deal.

The commissioner said the potential buyers want taxpayers to fund the construction of a new $140 million arena, but do not guarantee to keep the club in Winnipeg for long, even until the new arena is completed, because they don’t want to be stuck with long-term financial losses.

“There are certain things that any sports league demands of potential ownership and if you have owners who aren’t ready to support the franchise, then they’re not serious owners,” Bettman said. “And that would worry me if I lived in Winnipeg because they’re talking about handing over a $140 million building to these owners with no prospect of having the team in the building (for a fixed term) and that doesn’t makes no sense. ours.

“If this team is pre-ordained to move, then I think we should get it over with and not, at taxpayer expense, build a white elephant.”

AthleticismMark Lazerus has put together a comprehensive guide to what’s going on in Arizona and it would be easy to forgive a Jets fan a little contempt. Nearly 30 years later, the NHL seems to be sinking into a situation just as untenable as the one that cost its team in Winnipeg.

Please note that there are differences. The Mullett Arena is new and seemingly state of the art, albeit incomplete. Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo has reportedly invested at least $30 million to build an NHL-caliber locker room.

The hope is that Arizona will play at ASU for three seasons before a more ambitious 16,000-seat arena is completed nearby. Coyote attendance averaged 13,616 in the five years before the pandemic, while it fell to 11,601 last season. It’s capped at 5,206 per season for at least the next three years, implying the franchise will continue to lose money (to cover Arizona’s roughly $60 million in player salaries would require selling each home game at an average ticket price of $281.10).

It may well be that instead of remembering the Coyotes’ legacy as a cautionary tale of sunk costs, Arizona will survive until it gets the new arena that Winnipeg couldn’t. built in the 90s.

That said, I don’t think you’ll find the true feelings of Jets fans in the back of a napkin math or even more detailed facts and figures. The Coyotes could do it all by the end of their time at ASU, and Jets fans would still be upset. Of course, there are plenty of good people trying to make the best of a bad situation. I don’t think Jets fans need to do anything more than acknowledge that and move on. the best of a bad situation is still a bad situation.

That the Coyotes’ home opener is against the new, more economically viable Jets is poetic, if nothing else. Winnipeg is struggling through its own post-pandemic economic turmoil; years of sold-outs and huge waiting lists for season tickets after the team returned in 2011 gave way to an average attendance of 12,716 in 2021–22. Recovery appears to be on the way, whether in the form of improved game-day presentation, better promotions for season-seat holders, or Saturday’s sold-out sale against the Maple Leafs. But the Jets have their own path in mind — and it’s not automatically easy just because things in Arizona are tough.

So yes, I have no doubt that most Winnipeggers think the NHL’s attachment to Arizona is ridiculous, bordering on the absurd, and reflects mismanagement on many levels. Bettman can still be booed in this town.

But when the Jets and Coyotes play Friday at Mullett Arena, most of the negative feelings toward the opponent will be focused on the outcome of that night’s game. Jets fans will have too much empathy to be mad at the nearly 5,000 fans who show up to support their team.

(Illustration: John Bradford / Athleticism; Nevin Reid/Getty Images; Norm Hall/Getty Images; Jonathan Kozub/Getty Images; Sports Focus/Getty Images)