Coyotes Sale Nearly Done, and the Team Stays in Glendale

Just what the folks in Seattle, Kansas City and Quebec City didn't want to hear. The report of the week had the Phoenix Coyotes sale nearly complete to Greg Jamison, with the NHL team staying in Glendale.

The headline three cities were dreading

For weeks the realignment project had been building scenarios around the Coyotes leaving the desert. Seattle, Kansas City and Quebec City were the destinations that kept coming up, and each of them came with an arena argument attached. A sale that kept the team in Arizona took the most likely mover off the board in a single sentence.

What the report actually said

The entry did not re-report the story. It pointed readers to the Puck Daddy report at Yahoo! Sports under a headline stating that the sale was nearly complete to Greg Jamison and that the team would stay in Glendale. The framing around the link was the whole post: a short, resigned note rather than an analysis.

The consolation prize

Hence the punchline. If Phoenix was no longer moving, the queue of unhappy cities would have to look elsewhere, and the post offered the only alternative it had: hey, there's always the Islanders.

That was not a throwaway. Long Island's arena standoff was already the second unsettled file in the project's notebook, and it would go on to carry several scenarios of its own in the weeks that followed.

Why it mattered to the project

A realignment project lives or dies on which teams actually move. Every map built on a Phoenix relocation was, for the moment, a map without a trigger. The post accepted that and moved on, which is roughly the honest position for a fan writing weekly scenarios while the news decides the variables.