The Arizona Coyotes Cement Themselves As One Of The Most Storied Franchises In Hockey By Sweeping This Year’s Hall Of Fame Class
It's been a rather….tumultuous year for the Arizona Coyotes. First up they got kicked out of their arena and had to play their games on a college campus. Just a homeless team bumming on somebody else's couch for a few weeks until they can get back on their feet. But when they couldn't come up with a plan to find a new home in Arizona, the team was sold and shipped off to Utah. There was still some hope out there that the Arizona Coyotes could be "back" as an expansion team in the next few years, but after an unsuccessful bidding process on new land in Arizona to bring back the 'Yotes, Alex Meruelo has officially stepped away from the Coyotes ownership.
Needless to say, the Coyotes have been taking a ton of L's lately and just need to get one in the win column again. Yesterday's Hockey Hall of Fame inductee announcement should do the trick.
3 men are set to be inducted into the Hall this year as players. All 3 of them proudly wore the desert dog on the chest of their sweaters. Jeremy Roenick spent 6 seasons in Arizona. That 1998-99 Phoenix Coyotes team was actually pretty loaded. You had Jeremy Roenick, Keith Tkachuk, Rick Tocchet, a young Shane Doan, a young Daniel Briere, Nikolai Khabibulin between the pipes. That team was loaded with stars.
But not nearly to the same degree the Coyotes eventually got to when they went star hunting in the mid-to-late-2010s. Legends and Stanley Cup Champions like Chris Pronger and Marian Hossa. They picked up Pavel Datsyuk in the summer of 2016 and it completely flipped the trajectory of this organization.
Landing Shea Weber to patrol the blueline with Chris Pronger was a defensive pairing the Philadelphia Flyers could only dream about in 2012, and somehow the Coyotes made that dream a reality 2023.
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All of these guys are in the Hall now.
Say what you want about the Coyotes being a complete joke of a franchise that had to file for bankruptcy, always behind on their payments, forfeited draft picks due to combine testing violations, kicked out of their home arena, and forced to relocate to Utah. Name another franchise who has had more Hall of Fame inductees over the past decade. You can't.
Sidenote: Welcome back to another year where Alexander Mogilny inexplicably gets snubbed from the Hall. There's no Datsyuk without Alexander Mogilny. There's no Fedorov or Zubov. First NHL draftee to defect from the Soviet Union, member of the Triple Gold Club, only Russian to score 70+ in a single NHL season, somehow not a Hall of Famer.