Quote:
Originally Posted by dissentowner
Not given the right shot? The team has been failing since 1996, how many decades of trying and failing to draw a fan base is appropriate before we can decide if an area is a hockey market or not? Seems like 27 years should be a significant amount of time to tell the Coyotes are not going to work in Arizona. Do Florida? Florida has an NHL arena. Florida has never defaulted on rent. Florida's average attendance in the past 10 years has been between 14-16 thousand people. Last year Florida averaged over 16,000. Arizona averaged 4000. Before that in Glendale they averaged 11-12 thousand.
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Everything you are stating is more a symptom of the terrible management and ownership issues they had...less so that the market itself couldn't support a team if they actually had strong ownership and management.
This was their inaugural season, and it's funny because I remember the discussion around the time being about how successful the Coyotes first season in Phoenix was.
The initial issues with the market started when they could get an NHL Friendly rink in downtown Phoenix, and then it really bottomed out when Jerry Moyes declaired bankrupcy and tried to force the sale to Jim Basille to move them to Hamilton.
https://www.hockeydb.com/nhl-attenda...h.php?tmi=7450
They never recovered from that...and really it's tough when everything around the team has been so negative. Constant ownership changes, lawsuits, threat of relocation constantly hanging over the team.