When the original Jets were in the throes of the worst economic conditions the NHL had seen in some time, ownership warned that they may have to sell the team and move them. When luck finally ran out in 1996, they were sold to Jerry Colangelo, Steve Gluckstern, and Richard Burke. The original plan was to move them just south to Minneapolis and lease the Target Center, but they couldn't work that out with the Timberwolves. The Plan B was to move them in with Colangelo's NBA team: the Phoenix Suns. America West Arena (today's Phoenix Footprint Center) was...inadequate. One end could miss a whole power play with the obstruction of the balcony over the ice, the Coyotes received nothing but ticket sales from the arena, so no concessions, no parking, just raw ticket sales, and on the ice, they were a little less than the sum of their parts (remember, this team had some serious players, like Keith Tkachuk, Jeremy Roenick, Nikolai Khabibulin, Teppo Numminen, etc., but never made it past the first round). It didn't take long for the financial troubles to start, and the ownership carousel started in 1998 with Burke buying out Gluckstern and Colangelo, only to sell to local developer Steve Ellman, backed by minority owner Wayne Gretzky.
Ellman tried to rework AWA for hockey, but the city wasn't for it, so he looked to build the Coyotes their own arena. After the Los Arcos plan was attacked by the locals, Ellman looked to a patch of land of his own: Glendale. The city was in the middle of an ambitious plan to make Glendale the sporting center for the region, having built the NFL Cardinals' first real home since moving from St. Louis, plus spring training facilities for the Diamondbacks. The city figured they could build the Coyotes' arena and take a bigger chunk of the Phoenix market's entertainment options with them, and so the team moved west and into their new home, jobing.com arena, today's Gila River Arena, in 2004. The price, as it turns out, was putting Phoenix between the team and its fans, forcing ticket holders to cross the city to go to games. It didn't help that the team was at its least competitive in this stretch, having been perennial underachievers under Rick Bowness and Gretzky. In 2005, Ellman sold the team to Jerry Moyes, and this is where the real fun in the story begins.
After over a decade in Phoenix, the team had never been profitable. In fact, almost every year saw losses reach eight figures. When you're backed by a big player like Colangelo, you can withstand some of these. However, Moyes was no Colangelo, and it didn't take long before he realized how in over his head he was. By the 2008-09 season, Moyes was being subsidized by the NHL directly to cover player salaries. Knowing how much trouble Moyes was in, the NHL was helping him secure Jerry Reinsdorf as an investor, if not new majority owner, to try to reverse the tide. However, Jim Balsille was still looking for a team to move to Hamilton, and thought he had is way in without worrying about the approval of the Board of Governors. In 2009, Moyes puts the team into bankruptcy, and immediately coming to a deal with Balsille to satisfy all creditors above and beyond, on the condition that the team be allowed to move. The NHL and the City of Glendale were pretty strongly opposed to this and intervened in court. The judge for the case eventually sided with no one, but threw Balsille's deal out with prejudice, giving him no way to buy the team. The NHL eventually decided to buy the team, hoping to hold on to them long enough for Reinsdorf to line himself up, but Reinsdorf never did. In the meantime, knowing how poorly the Coyotes had performed financially to this point, the NHL also agreed to take over management of the arena for the small annual fee of $25 million US, which was an extortionist's rate, but the city paid up.
For the next two years, the NHL would trot charlatan after charlatan in front of the city, looking to secure an arena management deal that would essentially offset a good chunk of the team's losses. More often than not, though, the men the NHL trotted out couldn't get the money together, and nothing would get done. There's a well-known story that, after the 2009-10 season, with the team still an NHL ward and the city not really up for another $25 million payment to the league (the city was hit hard by the 2008 recession), the NHL threatened to move the team to...Winnipeg. With hours to go, the city ponied up and the NHL stayed, but nothing would really get done for years. A group led by Matthew Hulsizer was ready to buy the team and benefit from a sizeable Glendale subsidy, but the Goldwater Institute scared him off. Greg Jamison, former part-owner of the San Jose Sharks, had a swing, but couldn't get a deal done. It took until the summer of 2013 before a group that had previously tried to buy the team, now headed by a Calgary oil man, put together a bid to bamboozle Glendale and buy the team. For their part, Glendale was going to pay a $15 million arena management fee for 15 years, but the new owners could bail after 5 if they incurred losses over $50 million.
While the NHL stopped owning them, the Coyotes weren't out of trouble. Moody's actually downgraded their rating for municipal bonds from the city, pushing them dangerously close to junk territory. Tack on that, after reaching the Western Conference Final in 2012, the Coyotes would stop being in any way going forward, and the income streams the city had from the Coyotes (naming rights, parking fees) underperformed badly. It took only two years before the Coyotes had a new majority owner, Andrew Barroway, and despite plowing through financial troubles of his own, bought out the remainder of the ownership group in 2017. Between that, Glendale found a loophole: the Coyotes had hired two of the lawyers the city had used to draft the lease agreement for the arena, which, under Arizona law, gave them the right to terminate the deal. Eventually, the city and Coyotes worked out a two-year deal that wasn't so onerous on the city, and began a series of rolling one-year deals thereafter.
From here, we pretty much know the rest: Alex Meruelo takes over in 2019, treats his employees like dirt and his creditors even worse, forces the city to choose letting the arena go without an anchor tenant than put up with him, then finally sees the city sic the state Treasury on him. Glendale is truly salted earth for the Coyotes at this point, and it's no one's fault but theirs, really.
