Glendale, Az coughs up 25 million bucks for Phoenix Coyotes
The situation for the Phoenix Coyotes seems like a never ending cycle of really bad news. This team struggles to turn a profit, several different groups have been interested in buying it, and yet the taxpayers of Arizona are continaully asked to shell out more and more money to keep their hockey team. The city of Glendale has now had to pay 25 million bucks to the NHL for operating losess of this team that equalled some 36 million dollars. The city promised its tax base that they would not have to pay, as they thought new ownership would be in place. However, each and every day it seems that is less likely to happen.
The first question has got to be why does this team lose so much money? In the past bad ownerhsip seemed to be to blame, but even in a year when they made the playoffs the Coyotes ranked second to last in NHL attendance. They went 43-26-13 and averaged just north of 12,000 fans per home game in2010-11. That is a number that has to come up however, to trully make money in today’s NHL a team must make a deep run in the playoffs.
Arizona taxpayers should be quite upset about having to eat this money, even thoug the NHL posted record breaking revenue with a nestiamted 2.9 billion dollars in revenue for the just concluded season. The city of Glendale has showed tremoudous good faith to make a deal with new ownership work, but for many reasons I have to wonder if the Coyotes in Phoenix will ever be econmically viable.
