The Valley is the strangest NHL market in North America. For years, it’s been the only place where hockey fans cheered Gary Bettman and booed Wayne Gretzky.
We’ve had good reasons for both.
But the dynamics have changed almost overnight. Bettman’s three-page letter to the Arizona legislature is backfiring badly on the NHL’s snappish commissioner. His bold-faced remarks that the Coyotes “cannot and will not remain in Glendale” come off as heavy-handed threats that absolve a hockey team from its non-competitive past while chiding a local government for withdrawing hefty subsidies it can no longer afford.