Arizona Coyotes Are No More, Will Move to Salt Lake City

Arizona Coyotes Are No More, Will Move to Salt Lake City

The Arizona Coyotes are no more. They are being sold and relocated to Salt Lake City in time for the 2024-25 season.

In a complicated transaction, Alex Meruelo sold the NHL franchise to Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith. The team will temporarily play in the Delta Center while a new downtown hockey arena is being built in Salt Lake, the Coyotes players were told by general manager Bill Armstrong prior to a game in Edmonton Friday night, ESPN reported, confirming a local Phoenix report.

Meruelo bought the team in July 2019 for $425 million, and it was valued recently by Sportico at $675 million, by far the lowest of the NHL’s current 32 teams.

Wednesday night’s game at the Mullett against the same Oilers will be their last in the Valley.

Meruelo’s dream of building a $3 billion arena and retail complex in North Phoenix on the North Scottsdale border has perished despite plans for an auction June 27 so the club could buy a 95-acre parcel of untreated Arizona state trust land in North Phoenix.

The cost of the project, which would have included in excess of $100 million for infrastructure and $1 billion for the arena, training complex and theater in the first phase, proved to be prohibitive.

The team would have been in peril of moving anyway if the Coyotes lost the auction, which had been approved last month by the Arizona State Land Department Board of Appeals.

“If we are not the winning bidder, then we would more than likely have to entertain a relocation of the franchise,” Xavier Gutierrez, the club’s president, said recently in a telephone interview. “This would be our only option.”

If the Coyotes had won the auction and gone ahead with the project, the team would have to play another three seasons in the 4,600-seat Mullett Arena on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe.

The team has lost “a substantial” amount of money playing the past two seasons in the Mullet, Gutierrez said, declining to place a solid figure on it, although Sportico has been told those losses are in the mid-to-high eight-figure range.

They left an arena in Glendale, Ariz., in 2022 because of a lease dispute.

The franchise has been in and out of bankruptcy and has lost money every single season since it moved from Winnipeg in 1996. The Coyotes played their first seven seasons in what is now called Footprint Center in downtown Phoenix before moving to Glendale, and then on to Tempe, where the players were not happy with the subpar state of conditions at the Mullett. There they used makeshift locker rooms outside the main building that cost the Coyotes $30 million to build, and practiced off campus at a nearby facility in Scottsdale called the Ice Den.

The Coyotes had hoped to remain in Tempe.

Last year, they engaged with the City of Tempe on a plot of land to build a similar concept development. The $2.1 billion project had to go to a series of referenda after approval by the City Council. But this past May, Tempe voters rejected those three ballot initiatives by about 3,500 votes each.

In the case of the North Phoenix plan, there would have been no public vote, and the Coyotes weren’t seeking any public funds. But winning the auction was just the first of what would have been many difficult steps.

Now it’s no longer Meruelo’s problem, and the NHL’s 27-season run in the Valley of the Sun is over.

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