I think it's becoming more and more clear that the sale of the Coyotes wasn't about the NHL giving up on Arizona, it was about forcing Alex Meruelo out of the owner's club. We've seen the reports about how he couldn't pay his rent on his arena and had to be shamed into paying his hotel bills, and there may have been more behind the scenes, too.
He was an embarrassment to the league, and so Bettman and the rest of the owners twisted his arm into selling based on the promise that he could keep the rights to a franchise, gave him a very tight (but technically possible) deadline to do so, and now that he's missed it and given up all of his rights to ownership they're immediately turning around and pushing to get a team back in there without him.
No doubt the NHL lobbied hard on that local official to make that a priority. I wonder if there's more willingness to work with the NHL on a local government level now that Meruelo is out of the picture, too. He really was a travesty of an owner. I hope Bettman has learned his lesson about not rushing into a market without a plan for stability first.
