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 will face off in the much-anticipated first game at Mullett Arena, a situation that has been largely mocked across professional sports. There are second chances, and then there’s playing in a college hockey rink with a fan capacity a shade over 5,000.
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That an NHL team was taken from a hockey-mad Canadian market due to financial trouble just to be propped up at the league’s expense through far more financial trouble yields no pleasure in Winnipeg.
Schadenfreude doesn’t come naturally to Manitobans, but an instinctive appreciation of the absurd sits at the heart of our shared existence. We know it is foolish to live where the very air puts icicles on our faces and yet we trudge on, boots against the snowfall.
No Jets fan is taking unabashed joy from the Coyotes’ misery. But you’d better believe that Friday’s game has a lot of Manitobans revisiting their own pain from more than two decades ago. Just imagine growing up in Winnipeg and being told your city can’t afford to keep its team … and then watching the story go so badly the franchise has gone through multiple ownership groups, declared bankruptcy and had its debts absorbed by the NHL.
Now, it’s come to this: the Coyotes will play home games at Arizona State University’s rink in a plan NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says could increase the club’s revenue.
For many Jets fans, it’s a lot to take in.
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The Coyotes at ASU's Mullett Arena explained: How and why?
“I don’t begrudge Arizona but I do resent Winnipeg not being treated the same,” subscriber Ken B. said in a recent callout for opinions. “When I heard about the 4,000-person stadium after the league being unhappy with the size and viability (of Winnipeg Arena in the 1990s), I turned red.”
“Arizona can’t seem to generate (their fan base) but they keep getting bailed out by the league,” wrote Mike W. “Which did not happen for the Jets.”
Ali C’s rant showed a lot of empathy, while also putting the hammer down on the NHL’s hypocrisy.
“Arizona has been an unviable team for so long. It’s lost owners, been owned by and bled the NHL of money. It has had issues upon issues from not paying taxes, being locked out of its building, issues with treating staff respectfully and now this year’s arena debacle. It’s not acceptable for an NHL team (and) how it is being allowed is beyond me,” she writes. “(But) I try not to comment or place any blame on the fans. While it may be tempting to make comments on empty arenas or the lack of momentum from the last 25-plus years, I think of the 6-year-old girl that would be just as crushed as (I was) if the Coyotes left. But I will blame Gary Bettman for his absolute hypocrisy and failure to admit he was wrong (and) the NHL for allowing it to continue without a long-term, viable solution.”
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Arguments made by fans such as these ones appear to be representative of the Manitoban community at large. The NHL’s undying support of the Coyotes franchise isn’t an issue to Jets fans in and of itself. The problem for Jets fans is that the emotional sting of the Jets’ initial departure is inexorable from Manitoban perspectives of the Coyotes.
They aren’t as upset that Winnipeg’s initial NHL romance ended as they are hurt by the way the NHL has shown so much more devotion to its new love than it ever did to its old one.
There is a sense in Winnipeg that the first iteration of the club failed for good reason. The Winnipeg Arena sat fewer than 15,400 people, many of them with obstructed views, and it was a struggle to sell out any given game.
There were no luxury suites, making lucrative sponsorship money difficult to come by. Corporate sponsorship, Winnipeg’s biggest source of game day revenue, got companies 400 tickets, a private suite and an on-ice presentation prior to the game. Even at prices between $5,000 and $7,500, there were a handful of games each season that Winnipeg could not sell. By the mid-90s, some of the Jets’ biggest partners were pulling out of Winnipeg; Safeway, for example, was far less interested in maintaining its lucrative sponsorship deal with Winnipeg when it moved its distribution and head offices to Calgary. Combine all of this with the plummeting mid-90s Canadian dollar, the lack of a modern salary cap and the absence of a viable long-term arena and it’s easy to understand why Winnipeg lost its team.
“I had a good look at it in 1996 and it was nobody’s fault,” True North Sports & Entertainment executive chairman Mark Chipman told The Athletic in 2017. “Everybody was looking for someone to pin this on but there was no blame to be had in 1996. It wasn’t Barry Shenkarow’s fault; it wasn’t the city of Winnipeg’s fault; it wasn’t the NHL’s fault. You just couldn’t bring those interests together in a way that worked back then. It was probably a good thing for our city that we sat it out awhile and let things correct themselves.”
This empathetic perspective isn’t limited to the Jets chairman, who was part of a group of businesspeople who worked toward purchasing the Jets from Shenkarow but ultimately could not establish an agreement that satisfied the NHL.
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Down Goes Brown: Welcoming Mullett Arena with a history of the NHL in weird places
The following is excerpted from a May 3, 1995, article from the Toronto Star, previously cited at Yahoo:
“This is not an NHL decision, this is really up to the people in Winnipeg and the prospective owners . . . to see if there’s something to be done to keep the team there,” Bettman said following a morning speech to the annual meeting of The Canadian Press in Toronto.
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“But the biggest problem is there doesn’t seem to be anybody, in a serious fashion, who wants to own the franchise.”
A final decision on the Jets’ status in Winnipeg was postponed from midnight Monday, 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 leading contender to buy the Jets.
Bettman said a private consortium called the Manitoba Entertainment Complex told him when he flew to Winnipeg on Saturday that a group was ready to buy the team. However, Bettman was frustrated by the group’s insistence on swinging a low-risk deal.
The commissioner said the potential buyers want taxpayers to fund the construction of a new $ 140 million arena but won’t guarantee to keep the club in Winnipeg for any length of time, even through the completion of the new arena, because it doesn’t want to be stuck with long-term financial losses.
“There are certain things any sports league requires of prospective ownership and if you have owners who are not prepared to stand behind the franchise, then they are not serious owners,” Bettman said. “And that would concern me if I lived in Winnipeg, because they are talking about turning over a $ 140 million building to these owners with no prospect of having the team in the building (for a set length of time) and that makes no sense to us.
“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.”
The Athletic’s Mark Lazerus put together a complete guide to what’s happening in Arizona and it would be easy to forgive a Jets fan for a little bit of contempt. Nearly 30 years down the road, the NHL appears to be digging its heels into a similarly untenable situation to the one that cost Winnipeg its team.
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Mind you, there are differences. Mullett Arena is new and apparently state-of-the-art, even incomplete as it is. Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is reported to have invested at least $30 million to build NHL-caliber dressing rooms.
The hope is that Arizona plays at ASU for three seasons before the completion of a more ambitious 16,000-seat arena nearby. Coyotes attendance averaged 13,616 in the five years prior to the pandemic, while dropping to 11,601 last season. It is capped at 5,206 per season for at least the next three years, implying that the franchise will continue to lose money (to cover Arizona’s approximately $60 million in player salaries, it would need to sell out every home game at an average ticket price of $281.10).
It may well be that, instead of the Coyotes’ legacy being remembered as a cautionary tale about sunk costs, Arizona survives until it gets the new arena that Winnipeg could not construct in the ‘90s.
That said, I don’t think you’ll find Jets fans’ true feelings in back-of-a-napkin math or even more detailed facts and figures. The Coyotes could do everything right from here through the end of their time at ASU and Jets fans would still have the right to be miffed. Sure, there are plenty of good people trying to make the best of a bad situation. I don’t think that 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 and more economically viable Jets is poetic, if nothing else. Winnipeg is trudging through its own post-pandemic economic tumult; years of sellouts and enormous season ticket waitlists after the team returned in 2011 have given way to an average 2021-22 attendance of 12,716. Recovery appears to be in the works, whether in the form of improved game day presentation, better season seat holder promotions or Saturday’s sellout against the Maple Leafs. But the Jets have their own path to mind — and it’s not automatically easy just because things in Arizona are hard.
So yes, I don’t doubt that most of Winnipeg thinks that the NHL’s devotion to Arizona is ridiculous, bordering on absurd and a reflection of poor management at many levels. Bettman may forever be booed in this city.
But when the Jets and Coyotes play Friday at Mullett Arena, most negative feelings toward the opponent will be focused on the result of that night’s game. Jets fans will have too much empathy to be angry at the 5,000 or so fans who do show up to support their team.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Nevin Reid / Getty Images; Norm Hall / Getty Images; Jonathan Kozub / Getty Images; Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
