The Save The Coyotes Coalition

Do you have $217.5 million in expendable income? Are you interested in being the savior of 14,000 people who have wandered through the desert for 13 years? Want to own a key piece of the up and coming Phoenix suburb of Glendale? Well you’re in luck, the NHL and the Phoenix Coyotes need you! Act by June 30th and the City of Glendale will throw in a great lease at the beautiful Jobing.com arena and other perks! Hurry before the moving trucks head to Glendale and the team heads north of the border.

That’s the want ad that Jerry Moyes, Garry Bettman, Wayne Gretzky, Steve Ellman and anyone else who has been involved in the debacle that is the Phoenix Coyotes, should have to post. It should be required to be run anywhere rich Arizonans may read.

Some will tell you that hockey in the desert just doesn’t work. Others will say that Phoenix just isn’t a good enough sports town to support the amount of teams that call the city home. The problem is neither assumption is correct.

While both Moyes and Ellman are quality businessmen in their respective fields they had no clue how to run a sports franchise. It was a fact that showed on and off the ice throughout the last thirteen years the two owned the team.

They mismanaged the original building of their arena by selecting an area in Scottsdale where residents would never approve of it. They then moved the team to the far West Valley with a plan more based on the entertainment district they could build around the arena than the fans they could attract to it, thanks Ellman. They brought in Wayne Gretzky as the poster boy of the franchise and hired him as head coach with no experience (didn’t they see how well that worked out for Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, Ted Williams…you get the idea). They failed to stick to a consistent plan on how to develop talent and most of all they haven’t put a winning product on the ice since 2002.

No matter what pro sports team you are, what market you call home or what league you play in, if you don’t have winning seasons, you are going to lose money. Plain and simple.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman seems to agree as he told ESPN Radio:

“We’re gonna fix [the Coyotes]. That’s what we do when we have franchises in trouble. We have a pretty strong record of being supportive of franchises where they are, fixing them and making them work.”

That’s right fix them. Not move them. Not give up but fix them. That starts with getting an ownership group in place that understands the business framework in which they are operating.

If the fans in Phoenix want hockey to remain in the desert they have until June 30th to find their savior. That savior better have deep pockets. Deep enough to secure a $217.5 million selling price in full.

Where is the phone number for Jerry- Colangelo, Reinsdorf or hell even Lewis will do.