More to the point, the league may not actually agree to the assignment, and there may be nothing the court can do about it.
There is a common misperception among non-lawyers that bankruptcy courts can simply step in and re-write contracts willy-nilly. Such is not the case. What they CAN do is allow the bankrupt party to repudiate (cancel, or terminate without penalty, in other words) certain contracts. In the US, the types of contracts are defined by both case law and statute. The types of contracts are union collective agreements (by statute) and what are called "executory contracts". Executory contracts are essentially contracts where the performance of obligations are as yet unfulfilled and which obligations by their nature are extended. The classic example, of course, is a lease (which fits the criteria that I just mentioned). A franchise agreement would be another one, although certainly Phoenix would not be seeking to repudiate THAT one!
What the courts cannot do is to rewrite the terms of a contract so as to give more value to it than it has. For example, they cannot take a contract that a bankrupt company has with a third party to manufacture and sell 100 widgets a year for the next five years and decide to unilaterally extend it for ten more years, in order to allow the company to sell that contract for money to pay its creditors. A bankrupt estate cannot take a lease (such as Glendale's lease) and unilaterally reduce the term of the lease from thirty years to two (for example) to increase the value of the team (although they can terminate it, as noted above).
And, unless my reading of bankruptcy law is all wrong and US bankruptcy law has no sense, the bankruptcy court cannot maintain the franchise agreement but rewrite the terms of the agreement by unilaterally deleting the contractual rights of a non-bankrupt party (the NHL) to approve of an assignment of the franchise agreement.
