While I mainly agree with everything you're saying, it turned out there was no "geographic center" to their fanbase. They could barely sell out at Mullett. The TV ratings were atrocious. The market just had no appetite for hockey. Sure there were diehards, but not nearly enough to support an NHL team.
There is a geographic center of the fans, but it's a topography issue. For example, Tampa can't build in the geographic center of their fan base, because that's water. They'd need to make an island with like six bridges.
"Barely sell out Mullet" is absurd. Their average attendance was the exact amount of seats sold for NHL games. (College games can sell another 400 seats because college teams don't appropriate the space for visiting team media, staff and comp tickets).
The east valley-west valley location was always irrelevant. Half the valley would always be bitching, even if the team was still downtown.
That's not true because again, you are ignoring topography. You're acting like "Half the valley" is west of Phoenix and half is east of Phoenix. It's TWO VALLEYS and to get from one to the other, you have to go through one of two routes through Tempe.
You're over-simplifying something that's big, complex, sloppy and messy.
Tempe isn't "The East Valley" and anyone west of it is gonna have just as hard of a time getting there as the East Valley folks have getting to the West. It's a bowtie shape, with Tempe as the knot.
The TV numbers told the real story...even when the team stinks there still should be some fans tuning in. I posted the ratings for either 22-23 or 21-22 in an earlier version of the megathread & it showed they were only drawing 1200 fans per game on TV! That's untenable in a market of 5+ million people.
This is more over-simplifying something that's big, complex, sloppy and messy. Local TV numbers are pretty stupid. Local TV ratings don't reveal anything about the size of a fan base.
#1 - It's a methodology problem. My buddy was a Nielsen rater for a while. We got him into watching Premier League on NBC Sports. And from another friend who worked at a local TV affiliate and was able to provide ratings reports, we mathed out that our friend represented 13,500 people. I'm sure tech has advanced (somewhat) since then, but so has cord cutting and illegal streaming.
Because the TV ratings baed on a cross section of the general population in each market, the local TV ratings are always skewed in favor of places that are more single-male head of household vs family households. That's why the Buffalo Sabres trounce the Islanders in local TV ratings even though the Sabres sucked and the Islanders were good from 2020-2022. Buffalo is like 11% SMHH and Long Island is 3%.
#2 - It's just logically absurd that more people are willing to pay for tickets, travel to the venue (pay for parking? Pay for beer and food) and watch in person than to just click on their TV. But you're suggesting this is accurate for the Coyotes, and therefore the Devils, who also have a lower TV viewership than home attendance.
If local TV ratings are anywhere near the size of a fan base, you'd see road games would be nearly double the viewers of home games to account for the fact that 16,000 people are going to NHL home games.
Hell, you can use the Flyers and Devils average local TV viewership per game, math out to the fact that IF local TV viewership is an accurate measure of a fan base, then the Flyers and Devils have less total fans than the number of people who bought tickets to see them play each other at MetLife Stadium.
So the only logical conclusion is that everyone's fan bases are a lot bigger than their TV numbers, which are a methodological nightmare for hundreds of different reasons and it all adds up to "You can't really tell anything from this information other than 'more is better.'"
So there are two issues with that:
1) If there were hockey fans out east that couldn't get to the games on a regular basis why aren't they tuning in on TV?
2) The theory behind the Southern Expansion was that that the presence of teams in these new markets would create new hockey fans. So why didn't West Valley people become hockey fans in the 19 years they had an NHL team there?
1) They do, it's just how many cannot be adequately measured and fans use data to back up what they believe, and not use data for form their opinions.
2) They did. Which is why there were 13,000+ people in the arena in Glendale even though 3/8ths of the market can't get out there very often.
But if there's only 1200 Coyotes fans in all of Phoenix as the TV ratings have you believe, then who were those other 11,500 people every night for 20+ years?
I don't believe any data coming from the Coyotes. They were fine in Glendale until the subsidy was yanked, then Bettman began screaming that there was no path forward in Glendale & the East Valley was the only solution for the franchise. The NHL just wanted someone else to pay the freight, plain & simple. It all came down to their economics, not the reality of the market.
They were "fine" in Glendale. They were "fine" in a college rink. It's just opportunity cost: It's less than an ideal situation which puts them further behind everyone else.
If only we could do some kind of experiment to see just how few tickets you can sell and remain in business in modern pro sports. Like if some kind of global pandemic prevented leagues from selling tickets, or more than 25% of tickets, for like almost an entire calendar year. I wonder what would happen if any team just sold no tickets for an entire year. How many teams would go bankrupt? Could you imagine? Oh wait. The Blue Jays not only sold no tickets in 2020, but also paid $40m to upgrade Buffalo's stadium so they could play in front of zero fans, and it crushed them financially so much they jacked up their payroll by $109 million over the next two seasons! I wonder where they're going to relocate to?
Fans use data to cherry pick the best argument for their beliefs. Like TV data to say there's no hockey fans in Arizona. Which is just dumb.