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But even as LeBlanc insisted that there are positive signs of growth in what has been a moribund hockey market, he acknowledged that the team is “at the mercy of the court.” If council’s decision to break the lease is upheld — it decided that a state conflict-of-interest statute had been violated because IceArizona’s general counsel used to work for the city — LeBlanc said that the Coyotes would “have to figure out their Plan B.” There would only be two choices in that scenario: cut a new deal with Glendale, or giddy up. We would put our money on the latter.

This has always been where NHL hockey in Arizona seemed likely to end up: catastrophe. It has just taken longer than many expected, about 19 years since the Coyotes moved to Phoenix, and 12 since decamping to the suburb of Glendale. The team wasn’t a hit in Phoenix, but it has been a dumpster fire in Glendale, churning through owners, going into bankruptcy, and only being stabilized, in a relative sense, because the city signed a terrible deal in which it pays the team to not leave. The Coyotes get $15-million a year from the taxpayers to manage the arena, and while the city gets some of that money back in shared revenues, it still expects to lose something like $8-million annually just to keep the team around. If that sounds like an utterly baffling idea to you, even by the standards of dumb-as-rocks municipal politics, you are not wrong. The counter-argument is that Glendale would be even worse off without the Coyotes, as the owners of a large, empty arena. That might even be true. According to data compiled by the Arizona Republic, Gila River Arena had total attendance for non-hockey events of about 61,000 in the last full fiscal year, and about 90,000 in the year ending June 30. That’s staggeringly low: six dates of about 10,000 tickets sold in an entire year. (But up to nine dates in the new fiscal!) Apparently Glendale is not a hot ticket.