That’s what’s important to you in life?
- LeftCoaster

Exactamente

IMO, it’s just another example of “pay to win”. Buy a franchise for billions and we’ll make sure you are instantly competitive. Where’s the “sport” in that?
- bloatedmosquito

The conspiracy theories are out in full force today LOL!! Never go full retard.

Could you imagine?




- LordHumungous

I love that gif

Although I think Pavelski and Hintz are good players, they aren’t “stars”, they’re good 70 point players. If that’s a star then Miller and Kuzmenko are also stars. You’re right about Heiskanen though. I was thinking more of the forward groups.

Chandler Stephenson, playing really well for Vegas, you think Yager or Danielson can be that for the Canucks? I watched both the videos on them the Detroit blogger put out. I like Yager’s game.
- LeftCoaster

Yager can be as you think but his knock is inconsistency. Makes one wonder about his work ethic & self motivation. Danielson is maybe the opposite. All about 200’ hockey but less flashy but can be just what we need. Ignoring the D mess of course.

How? They wanted them to be competitive not wallow at the bottom of the league for ten years. They chose wisely! They deserve credit for that. Same with Seattle, no real super-star quality player but good depth.
- LeftCoaster

The Krak built a big D corp & surrounded it with speed up front.

Something we need to do more of.

The Krak built a big D corp & surrounded it with speed up front.

Something we need to do more of.
- Nighthawk

I would consider them "star" players. Maybe not elite players but definitely star players.

Stephenson is the type of player Canucks need to find somewhere. Same as Ryan Hartman in Minnesota or when Karlsson joined Vegas.

I think Yager is a possibility at 11. Danielson, I have further down more in the 15th range because I see less upside with him. I wouldn't call him Horvat but the same sort of very north-south with speed, not a very good playmaker. Better defensively and more physical than Bo is though.

Unless someone drops into that 11 spot, I don't think good value is going to be there, unless someone does reach their ceiling.

Definitely Yager>Danielson though, more facets to his game on both ends and considering they had the same points totals and everybody saying Yager was a bit disappointing this season. I'd say the upside is going to be quite a bit higher for Yager.
- manvanfan

Similar to my take but we could use Danielson’s speed & grit more. Yager on the other hand is ranked higher for a reason but I’m leery.

Still prefer a trade down so we can juggle our cap issues. 2 birds with one stone & still fill need if don’t drop too far down the 1st.

Crazy how if you don't have a bunch of insanely overpaid contracts and slow as (frank) soft wingers you can create a pretty good team
- manvanfan

Other than Kuz the other wingers don’t impact nearly enough on the games. As a group for the cap they eat up we need much more from them. Speed & tenacity.

I watched a couple games vs the Winnipeg Ice and he was fun to watch. Had a strong playoffs 16 points in 10 games. Your scouts blog said that his skating is near NHL ready. Good sign because he is only 165 lbs and that's a lot of room for growth in strength.

Your scouts blog seems to be real consensus that Reinbacher, ASP, Barlow, Moore, Danielson, Yager, Simashev, Wood are all just outside of the top 10 but no one really stands out and there's really no consensus on who should be pick other than who that teams scouts feel has the most upside still. There is 8 players there, I think that trading down to 15th or something would be a very good idea as to get better value
- manvanfan

👍👍

Button's new draft ranking...

https://www.tsn.ca/draftc...oves-into-top-5-1.1960662
- VanHockeyGuy

Vantel bang on with Dvorsky when I was apprehensive on him. At 11th we will get a good player if we keep it.

This is some pretty impressive golf!!

“J.T. Miller is even through nine holes and tied for sixth in local U.S. Open qualifying at Nevillewood, PA. Top four in a field of 78 in the 18-hole event advance to final qualifying. #Canucks”

There’s isn’t really any historical data on this group, imo, to say it’s likely or unlikely. They’ve had one draft in Vancouver together.

A couple trade scenarios. Both the Sabres and Predators are right behind the Canucks in the 13 and 15 spots, they both have two second round picks. Also, if the Blackhawks are looking to make a splash you could give them the 11th OV, take their #20 and TWO second round picks, because they have four I believe.
- LeftCoaster

Wtf is going on in here?

So many seeing my trade downs. 🤪👍

That’s what’s important to you in life?
- LeftCoaster

God gave man a brain & a dink & enough blood to run only 1. 😂😂

This is some pretty impressive golf!!

“J.T. Miller is even through nine holes and tied for sixth in local U.S. Open qualifying at Nevillewood, PA. Top four in a field of 78 in the 18-hole event advance to final qualifying. #Canucks”
- LeftCoaster

He has plenty of time for Golf playing for the Canucks!

Out of the final 5 teams who does anyone most want to see win the Stanley cup?

3 of the teams have ex Canucks defenders playing for them.
- manvanfan

Dallas, Benn bringing the cup to Victoria would be dope

There’s isn’t really any historical data on this group, imo, to say it’s likely or unlikely. They’ve had one draft in Vancouver together.

A couple trade scenarios. Both the Sabres and Predators are right behind the Canucks in the 13 and 15 spots, they both have two second round picks. Also, if the Blackhawks are looking to make a splash you could give them the 11th OV, take their #20 and TWO second round picks, because they have four I believe.
- LeftCoaster

This is an outcome I’d really like to see, it’s true we don’t really know if Allvin/JR would. I personally have liked quite a few of their moves and think they will create space and making draft day trades is very possible.

This is an outcome I’d really like to see, it’s true we don’t really know if Allvin/JR would. I personally have liked quite a few of their moves and think they will create space and making draft day trades is very possible.
- neem55

Hawks need to get to the floor.
We need cap flex.

11oa/Garland/Rathbone
for
20oa/2-2nds

Discuss

Out of the final 5 teams who does anyone most want to see win the Stanley cup?

3 of the teams have ex Canucks defenders playing for them.
- manvanfan

Florida. They have been underdogs the whole way, and Bobby Lu is in the press box for them.

Florida>Carolina>Dallas>Vegas>Seattle

This is some pretty impressive golf!!

“J.T. Miller is even through nine holes and tied for sixth in local U.S. Open qualifying at Nevillewood, PA. Top four in a field of 78 in the 18-hole event advance to final qualifying. #Canucks”
- LeftCoaster

He has lots of time to play & practise every year.

Hawks need to get to the floor.
We need cap flex.

11oa/Garland/Rathbone
for
20oa/2-2nds

Discuss
- Nighthawk

I don’t mind this deal at all. I’m not the biggest believe in Rathbone though, so that could be why

He has lots of time to play & practise every year.
- Marwood

I already said that a couple of posts ago jackass!

With favorable Tempe vote, Coyotes finally have opportunity to secure beneficial Valley location.

BY CRAIG MORGAN MAY 15, 2023

For 23 of the Coyotes’ 26 seasons in the Valley, arena location has been a crippling handicap to their financial and on-ice success. On Tuesday, the Coyotes may finally put those struggles to rest.

In a special election for propositions 301, 302 and 303, Tempe voters will decide the fate of the Coyotes’ proposed arena and entertainment district along the south bank of the Salt River. A simple majority yes-vote on all three propositions would grant the Coyotes license to clean up what is now a dump site at the northeast corner of Priest Drive and Rio Salado Parkway.

There is still pending legal action taken by the City of Phoenix against the City of Tempe, as well as a countersuit, but there is nothing currently in place that could prevent the Coyotes from breaking ground on a new home that sits at the core of the Phoenix metro area. The proposed location is mere blocks from Arizona State University, three miles from Sky Harbor International Airport, seven miles from Old Town Scottsdale and 10 miles from downtown Phoenix.

The location also sits at the core of the Coyotes’ premium season ticket holder base, at the core of the city’s wealth and population base, and within the corridor of corporate bases, stretching from north Scottsdale, through Phoenix and Tempe, down to Chandler along the 101 freeway.

“It puts us on the same playing field with everyone else,” said Coyotes icon and executive Shane Doan, who has a greater perspective on the franchise’s arena saga than anybody on the planet because he has been here for every year of it. “The Valley is event based. This is an event-based building that’s going to create events and give us the opportunity to put a winner on the ice that has been hard to do with everything that has gone on.”

The Coyotes have not treated their fans to enough on-ice success in their 26 seasons in Arizona. The team has made the playoffs nine times in that tenure and it has won just four postseason series. But it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. The team has had seven majority owners, preventing the sort of stability that filters down to all other aspects of the franchise. And it has never had the right location, save for those initial three seasons when fans turned out in big numbers and there was excitement surrounding the Valley’s newest entertainment option.

Before Tempe decides the Coyotes’ fate with vote results that should become public starting at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, here’s a look back at the Coyotes’ arena saga, which encompasses the entire 21st century.

The Coyotes played their first 7.5 seasons at then America West Arena.
The Coyotes played their first 7½ seasons at then-America West Arena in downtown Phoenix.(Getty Images)
America West Arena
Excerpts of this section first appeared in a story that I wrote on July 1, 2021 to mark 25 years of Coyotes hockey in the Valley.

America West Arena was a unique venue for NHL hockey. Because it was built solely for the Suns, it was (and is) small, intimate, loud and ill-designed for a 200-feet by 85-feet ice sheet. The north end of the arena could not accommodate anything more than makeshift metal bleachers under the first balcony, and that balcony hung right to the edge of the glass at the north end, preventing anyone but the first row of fans from seeing the goal below them.

To alleviate the latter problem, the team hung a large screen from the rafters so that fans in the balconies could see the action in the north zone. In those days — before Brittanie Cecil died when a puck struck her in the left temple at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, on March 16, 2002 — there were no nets attached to the top of the glass to protect fans. It was especially notable in that north end because of its proximity to the ice surface.

Despite the challenges, the players enjoyed playing in the atmosphere-charged arena.

“Those first few years at America West Arena, that place was rocking,” former Coyote Keith Tkachuk said. “Everybody talks about the Coyotes attendance problems now, but when we were downtown, that wasn’t a problem. The place was packed, it was loud and it was a lot of fun to play there.”

Unfortunately for the Coyotes, their new home became untenable after just three seasons due to rising payrolls, the inability to maximize revenue as a Suns tenant, and an arena configuration that forced the team to discount seat prices at the north end.

“When I bought the team, the average league salary was $17 million; when I sold it, it was $44 million,” former owner Richard Burke said via text message. “Our breakeven at America West Arena was $29 million, which we exceeded after three years.

“Hockey was and is an arena sport. Most of your revenue comes from what happens in your building; not like other major sports from television, radio, etc. It is tickets (the high-end ones), suites, concessions, building naming rights, sponsorships, et al. After the 1997-98 season we saw the handwriting on the proverbial wall. Superstar salaries started to balloon. Keith Tkachuk got $7 million per year and I let our goalie [Nikolai Khabibulin] sit [in a contract dispute] for 1½ years.”

The Coyotes hoped to build their own arena at the site of the former Los Arcos mall in south Scottsdale.
Los Arcos
Burke thought that the site of the old Los Arcos Mall in south Scottsdale would be the perfect footprint for a new arena that could provide the team with the additional revenue to survive. It was close to the vast majority of the team’s premium season-ticket holders, and it was close to the airport, Old Town Scottsdale and Arizona State University.

Everything looked like it was on track for completion. The team even held a groundbreaking ceremony in 1999 for which Doan still has the shovel.

Despite initial voter and city council approval, however, the Scottsdale deal remained in limbo and property owner Steve Ellman was mulling an offer from the City of Glendale, whose mayor, Elaine Scruggs, wanted to make a name for the city in what everyone thought was the next big growth area of the booming Valley. Eventually, Burke gave in to pressure and sold the team to Ellman.

“We had a pretty complete deal to build a new stadium at Los Arcos. The stadium deal was there. The state and local tax revenue were there and I was prepared to put up the difference,” Burke said. “The piece of property was owned by someone else and it came down to the fact that those people wanted to own the team as well as build the building. In the interest of getting it done, I put it straightforwardly: ‘Either you sell me the land or I’ll sell you the team but we have to put the two together so we can get this done.’

“It’s too bad with hindsight. If it had stayed on the east side, I guess we’d probably still own the team but going where it did, it was not in the cards. I was forthright with them in saying that my personal opinion was I didn’t think it would work out there. You need to stay over here. It didn’t happen and I think all that followed was just a consequence of the economics because it wasn’t working financially. It created ownership instability regularly because of the losses in trying to find someone capable of handling those losses at the magnitude they were. A followed B.”

The Coyotes moved to Glendale Arena in December 2003.
The Coyotes moved to Glendale Arena in December 2003. (Getty Images)
Glendale/Jobing.com/Gila River Arena
It’s impossible to say what might have happened in Glendale had the 2004-05 lockout not stalled the Coyotes’ momentum one season after moving. It’s impossible to say how much different the season ticket base might look if the Great Recession hadn’t stalled all of that expected growth in the West Valley. Twenty years later, however, it is undeniable that the West Valley, Glendale and the footprint at Westgate City Center look a lot different than the initial projections.

“I remember Ellman telling people at one point that if you looked at where the population center of the Valley would be between how many people would live north and south and east and west, it was going to be somewhere right around where the arena and the Westgate development were,” said Jeff Hecht, who was director of public affairs for the Ellman Companies until 2008. “But just because people moved there didn’t make it any closer for the people in Mesa or Tempe or Chandler or Scottsdale; those loyal season-ticket holders who had supported the team when it was in downtown Phoenix and now had to drive all those extra miles. It just meant that they were really going to try to attract people from the west side and when it opened there would be a huge population center to pull from, west of the arena.

“It never developed out on the level that it was expected to and if you look at Westgate to this day, it looks very similar to what it looked like when it opened in 2007 with the exception of a few other parcels like that outlet mall they built along the freeway. The initial plans called for far more. All the parking on either the east or the west side of that main center core of Westgate was all supposed to be developed out. It was all planned to be city blocks of residential or retail or different types of entertainment or little pocket parks and none of that stuff ever really came to be as it was planned.”

Over the years, the relationship between the city and the Coyotes soured to the point where you could only describe it as toxic. First, unwitting owner Jerry Moyes tried to put the team in bankruptcy and sell it to Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie to move it to Hamilton, Canada. The league blocked that move and won its case in court, eventually taking over control of the team until it sold to the IceArizona group in 2013.

The league and the new ownership group thought they had secured the franchise’s future in Glendale when the city agreed to a 15-year, $225 million arena-lease agreement, but the city ripped up that agreement two years later, citing a questionable conflict of interest with two employees. It was soon after that breach of a business relationship that commissioner Gary Bettman vowed the Coyotes “cannot and will not remain in Glendale.”

The team and city eventually agreed to a year-to-year lease agreement which the city infamously ended in the summer of 2021 when the Coyotes refused to sign a long-term lease and Glendale discovered that the team was courting Tempe as a potential new site. In nearly two decades in Glendale, the Coyotes never turned a profit and often lost tens of millions of dollars per season.

The Coyotes play at ASU's Mullett Arena.
If all goes according to plan in Tempe, Mullett Arena will be the home of the Coyotes for four full seasons. (Getty Images)
Homeless
Faced with the prospect of being homeless, the Coyotes explored multiple venues in the Valley to try to find a temporary solution, but everyone one of those had a litany of issues. Former Suns owner Robert Sarver wanted no part of the Coyotes at what became Footprint Center, and had the Coyotes moved back into their former home, they would have suffered the same financial issues that forced them to leave.

The team considered Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, but president and CEO Xavier A. Gutierrez said the cost to renovate the 55-year-old facility was astronomical and it has no suites. The franchise also considered Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, but there were too many logistical issues including available dates.

The Coyotes finally settled on ASU’s 5,000-seat Mullett Arena which will be their home for a full four seasons assuming everything goes according to plan — and despite its obvious financial shortcomings. The Coyotes chose the venue in part because it is in Tempe where they hope to forge a long-term relationship with the city and ASU, the city’s largest employer and most influential tenant.

This isn’t the first time that the franchise has explored a location near ASU. The Coyotes have known for a while that the location made sense for all of the aforementioned reasons. This is the first time, however, that a deal has made it to the very edge of success. With a favorable Tempe vote on Tuesday, the Coyotes may finally cross the finish line.

With favorable Tempe vote, Coyotes finally have opportunity to secure beneficial Valley location.

BY CRAIG MORGAN MAY 15, 2023

- LeftCoaster

Thanks for the blog /s. I hope they vote no and they can finally move that sad-sack franchise

Thanks for the blog /s. I hope they vote no and they can finally move that sad-sack franchise
- NewYorkNuck

not much going on so I thought I’d give Donna something to read….you’re welcome. Houston and Kansas City have nice arena’s.

not much going on so I thought I’d give Donna something to read….you’re welcome. Houston and Kansas City have nice arena’s.
- LeftCoaster

Ya lots of better places to move a team to, ones that would actually support a team