from Josh Cooper of PuckDaddy,
We talked to Coyotes CEO Anthony LeBlanc about the Coyotes. Their future in the desert – either in Glendale or maybe Phoenix – and how he sees the team moving forward, now that the lease stuff is behind them for at least two years.
Q: With all the issues you’ve had with the City of Glendale, can it indeed work there?
LeBlanc: It’s been a difficult summer. It was a tough summer. We’re through it. We’re past it.
I think we’ve come through this fine. There’s the mending of the relationship that needs to happen, but that began on the day of the vote a couple of weeks ago. I do think it works here, but look, it’s only a two-year deal. It would be foolish for us to not listen to expressions of interest of other potential spots in the Valley, but we do believe in Glendale. We always have. We think it’s a tremendous hockey arena. This is a great development. The Westgate development, most people don’t understand unless you’ve been here. It’s a little bit of a drive outside of Scottsdale or Phoenix, but it’s not to the level people think it is. I made a joke yesterday (at an event at Arizona State) that the arena is not on Pluto. It took me 20 minutes to drive from my office in the arena to Arizona State, which is on the other end of the Valley in Tempe. We’re in Glendale. It’s not that far.
People always talk about North Scottsdale and the wealth of North Scottsdale, there’s really no difference in the drive to Glendale vs. downtown Phoenix. It’s just a perception. I’ve said this all along that people look for excuses to not go when the team is not playing particularly well. I experienced this in Ottawa. My house was in downtown Ottawa. There were nights when that drive from downtown Ottawa to the Corel Centre, that drive felt like it took three hours on certain nights when the team wasn’t playing particularly well.
But it zipped by when I was going to playoff games.
Our issues, I really don’t think are geography. It affects us more when we have a season like last season. But when this team plays well, look at that four years ago when the team went to the Western Conference Final. You couldn’t get a seat in the building in the playoffs. Nobody had a problem driving out to Glendale. It’s fodder, it’s stuff people talk about and it is what it is.
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