Local Politician Wants An NHL Return To Phoenix

But the market lacks an owner and a suitable arena.

The first step in returning a National Hockey League franchise to the Phoenix metropolitan area has been taken. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Tom Galvin has formed a committee of political and business leaders with the intention of bringing the NHL back to the Valley of the Sun market. Galvin said he has met with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman but that might be the easiest part of the process of the potential NHL return to Phoenix. Galvin has two problems. Phoenix doesn’t have a National Hockey League state-of-the-art venue and Galvin needs to find an owner. The demise of the Phoenix franchise started when the NHL approved the sale and relocation of the Winnipeg Jets franchise to Steven Gluckstern and Richard Burke in 1996. Gluckstern and Burke moved into an arena that was designed to accommodate basketball not hockey which meant that about one quarter of the Phoenix venue’s 16,000 or so seats were useless. The business could not function financially with 4,000 unusable seats.

The franchise was sold and the new owners were looking to build an arena somewhere within the market. The owners kicked the tires in Scottsdale and ended up in Glendale, which is west of Phoenix. There was a thought that Glendale would become a sports destination center as the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals franchise moved into a Glendale stadium and another Glendale stadium became the spring training home of Major League Baseball’s Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers franchises. It never worked for the hockey owners and there were a number of them who had financial woes and the NHL abandoned the market in April 2024. Could an NHL team work in Phoenix? Possibly but Galvin has a long way to go to bring an NHL team back to Phoenix. He has to find a willing owner and a venue.

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Tom Galvin