Just had a few thoughts on the Phoenix situation that I wanted to see if anybody had an opinion on. I figured I'd post here instead of my usual unintelligible rants over at Second City Hockey. I figured this would be a more appropriate place is the more diverse crowd James seems to have over here.

A theory I've heard tossed out there is that the NHL wanted a franchise in Phoenix to take advantage of some of the transplants to Phoenix from other hockey markets, whether as snowbirds or retirees. This seems to make some sense to me. I was in Glendale over my spring break for the NCAA basketball tournament. The Jobing.com arena shares a parking lot with University of Phoenix Stadium, and it just happened that the hockey and basketball games ended at the exact same time (I mean, what are the odds?). What I saw leaving the arena appeared to be about a 5:1 ratio of of Oilers jerseys to Coyotes jerseys. I'm sure this view is a little skewed by my bad memory, or maybe Coyotes fans walked out the other direction or something. And it's certainly possible that maybe the increase in Oilers fans was just a sign that you're never too old for a little spring break. But is it possible that the NHL was planning on non-Coyotes fans being a big draw in Phoenix?

I know very little geographically about Phoenix. I know that you have to travel just shy of forever from the hotel I stayed at to make it to The Job (do Yotes fans call it The Job? It'd be easier to feel sorry for them if they did), but I have no idea if that's a problem a lot of Phoenix fans would face, as I don't know where the majority of them would be coming from. I feel as though it might be a bit of a hinderance to a casual fan, though the diehards would still make it to the rink regardless.

Just another note- at a Blackhawks game against the Blue Jackets in 07, my dad and I ran into a man and his young daughter from Toronto. He told us that it was so much easier and cheaper to get game tickets and a flight to an American city than to a game in Toronto, and every year he and his daughter would do a similar trip to this. I don't know how representative this is of a typical Maple Leafs fan or the fan base in general, but I feel like if any market deserves another team, that would be it. I know how much trouble the Hawks had filling their stadium simply because games weren't on television, so it's almost difficult for me to wrap my head around the kind of devotion to the sport it would take to fly to a different city to see a game I had no rooting interest in just because it was too hard to get tickets to see my hometown team play.