It appears the Coyotes’ adventure in Arizona is coming to an end. The team’s general manager, Bill Armstrong, met with the players before their game in Edmonton on Friday.
The exact content of Armstrong’s remarks is unclear. According to Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet, the message was that the team would play in Salt Lake City next season.
However, journalist Craig Morgan, who covers the Coyotes for PHNX Sports, claims that the players were told that the relocation to Utah was “real”. For his part, Chris Johnston, of The Athletic, maintains that the message was that a move to Salt Lake City was “likely”.
Regardless, these developments add to the persistent rumor of recent days suggesting a move to Utah’s capital is imminent. The ESPN network notably mentioned a scenario where the Coyotes would be sold to the NHL for $1 billion, after which the NHL would sell them to Ryan Smith, owner of the Utah Jazz, for $1.3 billion.
After Wednesday’s game in Vancouver, the team refused to open its locker room to reporters, and only Logan Cooley came out to answer questions. Only the journalist hired by the team had the right to ask the rookie player questions. Before the game in Edmonton on Friday, veterans Lawson Crouse and Clayton Keller met with the media there, essentially to say that the players don’t really talk about the team’s future among themselves. After this game against the Oilers, only Coyotes head coach André Tourigny met with the media on site, according to TSN.
The Coyotes are currently in the midst of a trip to Western Canada. They faced the Oilers on Friday and conclude their trip on Sunday in Calgary. They will then play their final match of the season on Wednesday, in front of their fans at Mullett Arena.
The Coyotes have played in the 4,600-seat arena since the fall of 2022, after they were kicked out of Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale. Since then, they have explored two projects to build a new amphitheater.
The team first identified land located on a former landfill on the edge of downtown Tempe, but the project was rejected by citizens in a referendum in May 2023. Then, last week, it announced that They coveted land located in an outlying neighborhood of Phoenix. However, the land was to be sold at auction on June 27.
The Coyotes have played in the Phoenix area since 1996, after the Winnipeg Jets relocated there.
Ryan Smith has owned the Utah Jazz in the NBA since 2020. He is the co-founder of Quatrics, a cloud computing company. According to Forbeshis fortune is estimated at 2.2 billion dollars.