With the NHL regular season coming to an end and a few days before the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the ongoing story involving the relocation of the Arizona Coyotes to Utah (notably, Salt Lake City) is as close as it’s ever been to becoming a reality.
The speculation and reports that have been popping up for the past few days, it turns out, were all factual according to prospective new Coyotes owner Ryan Smith.
“There’s no secret on what’s out there online,” said Wednesday, April 17, at the World Congress of Sports according to Sports Business Journal’s Alex M. Silverman. “Normally, not everything on the internet is true, but in this case, it’s pretty true.”
Smith owns MLS’s Real Salt Lake and the NBA’s Utah Jazz franchise. Smith made a first approach to getting into NHL ownership when he submitted a letter to the NHL at the start of 2024 requesting the initiation of an expansion process so Salt Lake City could land a franchise, as reported by Elliotte Friedman on Jan. 24.
Truth be told, the relocation writing has been on the Coyotes’ wall for a while.
Adding more fuel to Arizona’s fire, NHL insider Elliotte Friedman reported on Wednesday, before the final game of the Coyes this season, that the sale will be approved on Thursday.
“There will be a Board of Governors meeting at 3 ET Thursday to approve the sale of the Coyotes to Utah,” Friedman reported on April 17.
Coyotes’ Owner Alex Meruelo Couldn’t Promise a New Arena
These two new pieces of information (Smith’s confirmation of the pending sale and Friedman’s timeline for its approval) came a few days after the Arizona Coyotes franchise published an official statement on April 13.
In the short letter released by the franchise, Coyotes’ chairman and owner Alex Meruelo didn’t say anything particularly remarkable, but he wrote that he “hope to address these issues as soon as I am able to speak on the topics.”
Meruelo gave fans his “commitment to speak on all of these issues and publicly address all of your concerns as promptly as possible.”
On Monday, April 15, NHL Insider Chris Johnston of The Athletic published a story in which he retold the story of how the league asked the Coyotes owner a question he didn’t have an answer for. After hearing it, according to Johnston, the NHL decided to move ahead with the relocation to Salt Lake City, as documented by Heavy’s Antonio Losada.
The question was simple but Meruelo couldn’t quite convince the commissioner with his answer. “Can you say with any certainty when a permanent arena will be completed to replace the temporary facilities at Mullett Arena?” the NHL asked Meruelo, per Johnston.
“Meruelo couldn’t.”
Following this, plans for the relocation were set into motion.
Timeline of the Coyotes’ Relocation to Utah’s Salt Lake City
The NHL set the wheels in motion for the sale of the Coyotes to Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith, the league had to come up with a fee to pay to current Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo as the NHL brokered the transaction from Arizona to Utah without Meruelo and Smith ever getting to discuss the deal face to face.
Elliotte Friedman reported on Saturday, April 13, that the NHL planned to purchase the Coyotes from Meruelo for $1 billion and subsequently sell them to Smith for $1.2 billion. The $200 million profit would be shared among all other 31 franchise owners across the NHL.
According to Friedman, the team’s hockey operations staff and players will move to Salt Lake City, and Meruelo will have five years to secure a new arena in Arizona, at which point he could be granted a new team via expansion.
One day before that report, on April 12, Friedman reported that Coyotes’ players had been finally informed about the move by the franchise brass before their game against the Edmonton Oilers that took place later that day.
According to Friedman, the transaction was already well-advanced but there was still “work to do.”
Two days earlier, on April 10, ESPN’s Emily Kaplan and Greg Wyshynski reported that the NHL was preparing “a contingency plan that could relocate the Arizona Coyotes to Utah as soon as next season.”
According to the ESPN report, the NHL was “skeptical about the Coyotes’ newest plan to build an arena in Phoenix,” and the league had prepared “a backup option that would sell the team to Ryan and Ashley Smith, owners of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, in a relocation move to Salt Lake City,” according to multiple sources.
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