Bettman: “the Goldwater Institute killed the deal”
Apr 20, 2011, 4:40 PM | Updated: 5:47 pm
The Goldwater Institute and the City of Glendale will finally sit down and discuss the future of the Phoenix Coyotes. The question is, is it too little, too late?
According to the Phoenix Business Journal, the two sides have agreed to meet this Thursday. They hope to try and iron out their differences on the issue of the city selling $100 million worth of bonds to fund the sale of the Coyotes to Chicago business man Matthew Hulsizer.
The news comes at about the same time as NHL commissioner Gary Bettman appeared on the Fan 590 in Toronto and discussed the Coyotes ownership situation and had some interesting words about the Goldwater Institutes’s involvement in the entire process.
“It’s not really a fair question,” he said. “And the speculation that we’ve been holding some announcement waiting for them to stop playing is absolutely wrong. We’re still focused on trying to make it work in Phoenix.
“And I hope we’re successful. Obviously when the Goldwater Institute killed the deal, it was a huge setback. Nobody expected them to do that. We didn’t think it was right that they did it, but the focus is still on making it work.”
Wait, what was that? The Goldwater Institute ‘killed the deal’? It was probably a slip of the tongue, but it may prove to be a telling one.
If the commissioner of the league, the man who has kept the team in Glendale the past two years, says that the institute has killed the deal that doesn’t exactly leave much hope for the negotiations on Thursday.
Can the Coyotes hope for continued life in the Valley be revived or is Bettman and the NHL just waiting to call the time of death for the franchise? We’ll probably know a lot more after Thursday’s meeting.
