Arizona, the return? Seriously?

Arizona, the return? Seriously?

There are ideas that deserve to be debated, and there are those that smell so bad you wonder how they keep coming back to the table. A return of the Coyotes to Arizona, after everything this market has already demonstrated, clearly belongs to the second category. We're talking about a franchise that had years, tens of millions of dollars, owners, concessions, delays, second chances, then even more second chances, and still managed to prove the obvious: this market was never able to sustainably support an NHL team.

The problem was never simply a matter of bad luck. The problem is the accumulation of red flags. A franchise that arrived in 1996 and, nearly three decades later, still hasn't found serious stability, is not a project temporarily in difficulty. It's a structural failure. When an organization has to survive bankruptcy, years of league control, emergency relocations, inadequate arena drama and chronic lack of local roots, you're no longer talking about a "special case." You're talking about a textbook case of failure.

And yet, the idea of a return keeps resurfacing. As if the simple fact that Arizona is a major television market was enough to erase the real history. Except professional hockey doesn't feed on demographic fantasies. It feeds on ticket sales, stability, local engagement, solid infrastructure and a product that can breathe normally. Arizona had its chance, and it squandered it in the most spectacular way possible.

What makes the situation even more ridiculous is that we're not talking about a market unfairly deprived of sports success. The Coyotes had respectable seasons, they even won a division in 2012 and made a real playoff run that year. But even those rare moments of credibility on the ice never managed to fix the rest. Hockey in that corner has always looked like a survival operation rather than a normal business. You can win a few games, but you can't hide thirty years of fundamental problems behind a good six-week streak.

What's most striking is the extent of the improvisation. An NHL franchise shouldn't spend that many years fighting for decent facilities. It shouldn't have to operate like a team in permanent transit. It shouldn't be forced to cling to temporary solutions, endless negotiations and plans that change faster than fan hopes. At some point, stubbornness stops being a virtue. It becomes a joke.

And what a joke it is. Because the pro-Arizona narrative always rests on the same sleight of hand: "Yes, but it's a big market." Of course it's big. So what? A city can be large on the map and disastrous in league reality. If market size was a guarantee of success, the NHL would never have needed to save, reorganize and eventually relocate this franchise. The truth is the proof has already been made, and it's been made repeatedly. The idea didn't just fail once. It failed enough times to become embarrassing.

An eventual return to Arizona would therefore be less a sports project than a nostalgic, almost ideological bet. It's the kind of project you sell with words like "potential," "growth" and "opportunity," because you can't sell it with results, a stable base or a credible track record. It sounds nice in a press release. It's embarrassing in real life. It looks like an idea conceived by people who love population curves but never learned to read a franchise's history.

And the Coyotes' history is there, brutal, persistent, impossible to cover up. It tells the story of a market that received years of patience and funding, then was replaced anyway. It tells of a league that tried to save a project for too long. It tells of a failure that was dragged out to the point of absurdity, as if delaying the conclusion could change its nature. But no: a bad idea remains a bad idea, even when you repaint it in blue and silver.

What's most ironic is that we already know how it ends. We know because it's already ended. Not in a grand renaissance, not in a commercial miracle, not in a sports redemption, but in a dry conclusion: after all this time, the market still hadn't passed the test. And when a league of this size decides that the best way forward is to move the club elsewhere, it's rarely a prelude to a glorious return.

So yes, you can always dream of an Arizona 2.0. You can always cling to the idea that with a new setup, a new owner, a new arena and a new narrative, everything would magically become different. But that would mostly mean ignoring what the numbers, the years and the complete file have already demonstrated. A return of the Coyotes to Arizona wouldn't be a symbol of renaissance. It would be a pointless repeat of an already-known fiasco.

And hockey, frankly, deserves better than to replay a show that reality has already booed off the stage.