Southern Arizona would be the primary home to the only professional hockey team in the state under a new financial deal approved Tuesday by the Rio Nuevo board aimed at keeping the Tucson Roadrunners playing here for at least three more years.
On Tuesday, the board voted to pay half of the rent and about 18 months of office costs — amounts that would come in annually at around $180,000 and $60,000, respectively — to entice the American Hockey League’s Roadrunners to keep playing the heavy majority of its games at the Tucson Convention Center for the next three years or longer.
Additionally, the $2 per ticket fee on Roadrunners hockey games collected by Rio Nuevo will be waived.
“We think Tucson is a hockey league town,” said Fletcher McCusker, chairman of the Rio Nuevo Board, “so we’re putting our money where our mouth is.”
A fan holds up a sign in April supporting a fan effort to keep the Roadrunners in Tucson. On Tuesday the Rio Nuevo board approved a financial package to do that. It still needs the approval of the American Hockey League and the city council.
Added Rio Nuevo board member Edmund Marquez: “This is the Tucson Roadrunners, not the Tempe Roadrunners.”
In a statement to the Star, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said she has “been working closely with the leadership of Rio Nuevo and the City of Tucson to keep the Roadrunners based right here in Tucson, and I am happy to see that our community is one step closer to ensuring that this will happen after the action taken by the Rio Nuevo Board today.”
In this May 2024 file photo Roadrunners center Curtis Douglas raises his stick to and acknowledge the crowd. A new deal could keep the team playing at Tucson Arena for at least three more years.
The team has “felt the love they have in Tucson,” Roadrunners president Bob Hoffman told the board Tuesday. He said the ownership of the team wants to “continue to call Tucson home.”
The deal may still need to be approved by the AHL’s Board of Governors, which meet Thursday, and will need sign off from the Tucson City Council, which will discuss the topic likely at a meeting in June, said city spokesman Andy Squire.
The Roadrunners have been playing at the 6,500-plus-seat Tucson Arena on the downtown TCC campus since 2016 and typically draw about 4,000 fans per game.
Hoffman said the owners of the team have agreed to a minimum of 30 games in Tucson moving forward. With AHL teams playing 36 home games per season, if the proposal passes all hurdles, as many as six games could be played elsewhere in the state.
Early last month, Alex Meruelo, owner of the Roadrunners and the National Hockey League’s Arizona Coyotes, sold the hockey operations elements of the Coyotes’ NHL franchise to a Utah-based ownership fronted by Ryan and Ashley Smith in a $1.2 billion deal. The Smiths also own the Utah Jazz of the National Basketball Association.
The Coyotes played their last two seasons at Mullett Arena, located on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus with seating for between 4,500 and 5,000 for hockey, and prior to the NHL-urged sale, were scheduled to play there at least through the 2024-25 season.
Because the Coyotes and Roadrunners were both owned by Meruelo, minor-league teams like the Roadrunners are normally included in any sale of its major-league counterpart. However, when Smith Entertainment Group purchased the Coyotes from Meruelo, that did not happen.
Instead, as the Associated Press reported, Meruelo maintained “his business operations in Arizona in an effort to secure and develop a tract of land for a new arena in north Phoenix,” retaining ownership of the Coyotes’ name, logos, trademarks and business operations, meaning that a return of the NHL to the Valley may still be possible.
In retaining ownership of the Roadrunners, Meruelo said at the time of the Coyotes’ sale the he hoped to move them to Tempe to play out of Mullett Arena.
A Roadrunners move to Tempe would have posed a number of logistical questions, including what ownership might owe Tucson to break the current 10-year arena lease two years early; believed to be between $3 and $4 million, that amount would likely be a combination of rent as well as a prorated payback of money spent to renovate the arena to bring it to AHL standards, the Star previously reported.
After learning of the Tempe consideration, the Rio Nuevo board put together the package to keep the Roadrunners in Southern Arizona.
“We are committed to creating the best experiences for fans and players at the Tucson Arena,” Romero, Tucson’s mayor, said in her statement to the Star. “We also see the value of the Roadrunners being able to play six games a year in Tempe which will help all of us keep hockey alive and thriving in the desert.”
Hoffman believes that with the Roadrunners as the only professional hockey team in Arizona, the new deal could help the Roadrunners bring in more fans from the Phoenix area.
The Roadrunners, formerly the Springfield (Mass.) Falcons, were purchased by the Coyotes and eventually moved to Tucson (and rebranded the Roadrunners) in 2016 to be geographically closer to the NHL club as it worked through ongoing efforts to solidify its own footprint in Arizona.
Rio Nuevo played a role in bringing the Roadrunners to Tucson at that time, investing millions into Tucson Arena upgrades to bring the facility to AHL standards.
