The NHL Board of Governors voted Thursday to approve the sale of the Arizona Coyotes to Ryan Smith, owner of the NBA's Utah Jazz, for approximately $1.2 billion. The franchise relocates to Salt Lake City for the 2024-25 season, ending a 28-year run in the Phoenix market that included five arena changes and $300 million in municipal losses.
The Coyotes will play at Delta Center—capacity 16,200 for hockey—while Smith pursues a permanent venue. The franchise spent its final season at 5,000-seat Mullett Arena on Arizona State's campus after Glendale terminated its lease in 2022. Former owner Alex Meruelo retains rights to reclaim an expansion franchise if he secures a new arena within five years, a window that closes in April 2029. No site has been identified.
Smith's ownership group includes Dwyane Wade, already a Jazz minority investor. The transaction marks the NHL's first relocation since Atlanta moved to Winnipeg in 2011 and its second Utah franchise bid in three years—commissioner Gary Bettman declined a $650 million expansion offer from a separate group in 2021. Smith's Jazz ownership, purchased for $1.66 billion in 2020, now anchors a two-franchise platform that controls Delta Center scheduling 330 nights annually, creating significant suite and sponsorship leverage.
The approval follows 18 months of private negotiations after the Coyotes defaulted on $1.3 million in state tax obligations and Tempe voters rejected a $2.1 billion arena proposal in May 2023. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly acknowledged the league subsidized Arizona operations during its final two seasons, though exact figures were not disclosed. The franchise has not made the playoffs since 2020 and posted operating losses in 23 of 28 Arizona seasons, per Forbes estimates.
For Smith, the purchase adds a second major-league property eight months after his $3.5 billion bid for an MLB expansion franchise fell through when Las Vegas was awarded the relocated Oakland Athletics. Utah becomes the NHL's 33rd market, sixth added since 2000. The franchise inherits Arizona's player contracts—$71 million in active cap commitments—and front-office staff, though general manager Bill Armstrong's status remains unconfirmed. Arizona's AHL affiliate, the Tucson Roadrunners, is expected to remain in place under new ownership.
Smith's timeline requires a rebrand by October, including jersey rollout and naming-rights finalization. Delta Center renovations—estimated at $125 million for NHL-grade ice systems and locker facilities—are already underway, with Mortenson Construction managing the build. The venue last hosted professional hockey in 1995 when the IHL's Golden Eagles drew 7,800 fans per game before folding.
Watch for Smith's head-coach hire within 30 days, likely from the Avalanche or Golden Knights systems, both deeply familiar with western travel logistics. Delta Center naming-rights renewal talks begin in June—current deal with Delta Air Lines expires in 2025 at $50 million over 20 years, well below current market rates. Meruelo's Arizona expansion path hinges on Scottsdale or Mesa land acquisitions; neither municipality has scheduled relevant zoning votes.
The takeaway
Ryan Smith adds NHL franchise for **$1.2B**, giving Utah two major leagues and ending the Coyotes' 28-year Arizona failure.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.