The Bouch bomb is locked and loaded

Arizona Coyotes purchase land for a new arena

The NHL’s biggest gongshow operating out of Arizona right now has taken a step closer to relevancy as owner Alex Meruelo has signed a letter of intent to purchase some land in Mesa, Arizona which is just east of Phoenix. I hope this is a better place for the Coyotes, but they’re not even committing to building in Mesa yet as they’re still considering sites within Phoenix itself as well as Scottsdale.

I am not optimistic that hockey can actually work in Arizona, as this may just be moving the problem to a different place within the state, but good for them if they can pull it off.

The Coyotes franchise has gone through a carousel of owners (including the NHL itself for a time), GMs, coaches, and players over the years as unlike in places like Tampa Bay, Dallas, and Nashville, there hasn’t been hope of a competitive team to draw anything resembling human beings to games. They’ve rarely made the playoffs since moving from Winnipeg, and the best they’ve done in their history is making it to the third round…..once. Mostly they’ve usually been in and gone in the first round with a whimper – and that’s when they make the playoffs in the first place.

They’ve actually got a pretty good young team with several players of relevance and a rich cache of draft picks – they have in the second round, for the next three years – three picks in 2024, four picks in 2025, and another three picks in 2026, plus three third-round picks in 2024, plus all of their own first-round picks for 2024-2026.

All of this hasn’t taken them back to the playoffs yet but perhaps this is another step towards that. The NHL should’ve moved this clown show to another place that already had a fan base in place for the franchise – like Seattle already had with the Kraken. That was a good hockey market.

So far the NHL hasn’t made hockey work in Arizona and all it’s done most years is drag down the NHL’s revenues. We’ll see, but Tempe already rejected their request for funding for a new arena there, and Glendale already kicked them out for not paying their rent – sorry “accounting errors (yeah, right….).”

I guess they’ve already tried west of Phoenix in Glendale, they might as well try east and see if that works better.

Ottawa is two weeks away from new majority ownership

The NHL’s executive committee officially approved the purchase of the Ottawa Senators from the estate of terrible now-deceased owner Eugene Melnyk, who’s probably hanging out with Harold Ballard in hell.

In the interim, his estate has owned the team, and the owners of his estate are his daughters, Anna and Olivia Melnyk. As part of the deal, they will both retain a 10% ownership stake in the team. According to Forbes Business of Hockey list, as of 2022, the Sens are the 24th most valuable franchise in the NHL (for the record the Oilers are seventh…..how times have changed financially for the NHL in the last 30 years) and if you take their total revenue and deduct the operating income from it, that means the Sens are showing a $110 million profit.

This means that in the coming weeks not only do Anna and Olivia split a payday of somewhere close to $1,000,000,000 but if the Sens balance sheet holds up they’ll still be bringing in 10% of a $110 million pie, which equals out to about $5.5 million apiece, $11 million total, all for an investment that they never paid a penny into and will require minimal work from them going forward.

Nice payday if you can get it. All they have to do is not screw it up by getting greedy and fighting each other over it.

But soon-to-be new majority owner Michael Andlauer will have other minority partners in his ownership group. Those will be:

• Local businessman Jeff York, a partner in Farm Boy, and his 20-plus local investors.
• The Malhotra family, owners of Ottawa home builder Claridge Homes.
• Paul and Michael Paletta of Burlington-based Alinea Group holdings, who have been partnered with Andlauer since he initially pursued the franchise last November.
• Oshawa Generals owner Rocco Tullio is also believed to be involved with Andlauer’s group.

Jeff Petry traded twice in less than two weeks

One-time Oilers defenseman Jeff Petry has had a somewhat amusing trip around the NHL this offseason. He was included as a piece in the crazy Erik Karlsson trade to Pittsburgh that was between the Penguins, the Habs, and the Sharks.

Petry was one of the warm bodies that went to Montreal in the trade. But lest Habs fans got nostalgic for a player coming back for a second tour of duty, nine days later Petry was traded to Detroit in exchange for a prospect and a fourth-round pick.

25% of Petry’s $6.25 million contract will be retained by the Penguins ($1.562500 million) while 50% of his now modified cap hit will be retained by Montreal in the Detroit trade ($2,343,750), which brings his cap hit in his new home in Detroit down to the same.

This means Petry will now be paid by three different teams for the remainder of his contract. I wonder if that’s some sort of NHL record….I couldn’t find any information on this when researching this piece.

In Detroit Petry will solidify the second pairing on the right side for the Wings with Ben Chiarot on port. Considering that Shayne Gostisbehere and Justin Holl are also new to the Wings for this upcoming season, that means the Wings have turned over literally half of their starting D corps. We’ll see if that works out for them.

Toronto Maple Laffs misinformation machine kicks into high gear

Just read this. I have no words. Toronto, stop drinking the stupid juice. And stop trying to make McDavid to Toronto happen. It’s not going to. This isn’t the first time Toronto has drank the stupid juice and I guarantee you it won’t be the last.