The new Arizona Coyotes stadium is so embarrassing for the team that it might just be genius.
The Coyotes were literally evicted from their previous arena because of unpaid expenses and a delinquent tax bill. Just let that sink in for a moment: an NHL franchise was kicked out of its playing facility because it fell behind on rent. It's one of the most fundamentally odd things to happen in American professional sports in a while. The Coyotes were thrown a bone by Arizona State University, who is letting the NHL franchise play in their home stadium for at least the next three seasons provided ASU always has priority in scheduling and the Coyotes don't include any other on-ice branding outside a logo at center ice next to the ASU logo.
This is an NHL franchise we're talking about.
There is so much wrong about this situation that it's really not worth belaboring that point and listing all the reasons why an NHL franchise shouldn't be squatting in a 5,000-capacity college hockey arena. What I find much more interesting is that it seems like the players are kind of excited about playing in this venue. Forward Christian Fischer recently talked about how the small size of ASU's arena will create a serious "home atmosphere" for the team, while forward Clayton Keller nostalgically noted, "It's definitely that college feel with the rink size and the bleachers behind us." From a fan's perspective, I'm sure it will be super tough to get a ticket to some games, but if you get in the door, you've got virtually a front-row seat to the action no matter where you sit. I would be stoked to attend one of these games. The quality of the experience surely goes way up even if the quantity of people who get to experience that is much lower.
And in some ways isn't this the future of live sports? With the number and quality of video streaming options now, it seems likely live sports attendance will continue to slowly fall as fans increasingly decide to forgo 300-level seating and just watch the game on their couches instead. I don't think we're at that critical juncture yet where falling attendance becomes an epidemic too large to ignore, but I think it's a completely reasonable strategy for teams to jump this trend altogether and lean into the "lower attendance, but more intimate" live sports experience that the Arizona Coyotes have mistakenly face-planted into. In many ways, I think live sports attendance will be similar to movie theater attendance: most of the time you'll stay home and not be bothered, but on the choice occasion that you do leave your house to go to the AMC, you're going to expect a lot more from that live experience. Live sports seem poised to follow a similar trajectory, and making smaller arena to help foster this more intimate atmosphere is a really interesting lever to pull.
So we'll see how this ASU train wreck goes. I don't think 5,000-person venues will ever become the norm in the NHL, but there are a ton of learnings we can surely get from this to find out how important venue size is to the overall fan experience and how other American sports teams might want to adjust their stadium plans accordingly.
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