Not much arena news coming out of the Phoenix market.
Marty Walsh wants some answers about the future of the National Hockey League’s Arizona franchise and if an arena will ever be built for the business in the Phoenix area. Who is Marty Walsh? Marty Walsh is the Executive Director of the National Hockey League Players Association and he claimed he is in the dark about the future of the team in the Phoenix market. “A lot of time has gone by,” Walsh told Joe Smith of The Athletic. “I was in Arizona probably a year ago now. We were talking about ballot questions at that point. They felt positive about that. That didn’t happen. They were talking about, ‘Oh, we’re going to find a new place pretty quickly.’ The year has gone by and they haven’t found anything, at least to my knowledge. So the clock is ticking on Arizona, in my opinion.”
There has been little news since the Arizona franchise’s president Xavier Gutierrez said in a January 5th radio interview that arena plans were progressing. Walsh did say that he is in touch with the National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman about the Phoenix situation. Walsh who was a Boston mayor and left his job as the United States Secretary of Labor in 2023 to take the players association job knows that all interested parties should be kept in the loop. “They have not had conversations with me at all. I believe they’ve been talking to the league, but they’ve not talked to me about it, which I think is a little strange. You would think they’d want to keep us up to date because we’ve been pretty vocal about it. I’m sticking to what I said at the very beginning. The players deserve and will play in a better arena. They have to.” The arena plan was supposed to be announced by December 31st, 2023.
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