I know, I know. I can hear you. I can hear you say, “What does this guy know about the NHL?” I can hear you say, “This guy only follows the Senators.” I can even hear you say, “I’m not sure this guy’s even ever watched the Senators, unless they were in the 2004 Stanley Cup Playoffs, which he watched a lot of due to being sick with strep at the beginning of the first round,” and frankly, I’m a little scared by your knowledge of my viewing habits. Hear me out, though.
News broke today that the Arizona Coyotes, famously the most pointless team in professional sports (the Jaguars at least serve a purpose) and infamously unable to pay the bills at their own arena, are in negotiations to play on Arizona State’s home rink for a few years while they “work on a new one in Tempe” (please read that with a lot of winking). The rink at Arizona State, a school whose men’s ice hockey team played its first Division I season in 2015-16, only seats 5,000 spectators, less than a third the capacity of the current smallest arena in the NHL. To all of which I say:
Yes. This is perfect.
The Coyotes need to go. This is self-evident. The Coyotes can no longer be allowed to exist. At the same time, though, you can’t just vaporize ‘em. They’re human beings. They have bodies and souls and league-financed life insurance. Eventually, they’ll all retire, but for the time being, they’re here, and they’re the NHL’s responsibility.
Gary Bettman can’t just wave a magic wand and make the team, which was once NHL-owned, move somewhere that likes hockey, like Quebec City or Hartford or Anchorage or Edina. What he can do is hire a rotating cast of five thousand extras plus enough actors to pretend to be the rest of the NHL, sign all these people to NDA’s, and tell the Coyotes that they only have to play home games now because their attendance is too low to cover travel costs. Over time, as the Coyotes retire or “get traded” (yes, Bettman will probably kill some of them, we can’t help that), you replace them with more actors until eventually, whew, everyone’s an actor and we can drop the charade. Meanwhile, you set up an expansion franchise in Sacramento, realize that’s a bad idea, move it to Bermuda for tax reasons, realize that’s an even worse idea, and finally do the common-sense thing and bring back the Nordiques.
Boom.
Problems solved.
