Time to tear down Glendale's nightmare arena?

Sometimes if you build it they don't come.

Just ask the city of Glendale.

What is now called the Gila River Arena is the right building in the wrong place. It has been from the beginning. The Valley can easily support a professional hockey team. And the Coyotes have been good enough to develop a loyal fan base.

But the building is in the wrong location.

It makes sense to put a football venue like University of Phoenix Stadium out on the west side. Pro football is a destination sport. There are only eight home games a year in the regular season. Fans travel far for football.

It isn't the same with baseball, basketball or hockey, where seasons are long and many of the games are played on weeknights.

There is no way a place like Gila River Arena is going to draw the kind of crowds on a regular basis than a more centralized location like US Airways Center in downtown Phoenix, where the Phoenix Suns play basketball (and which wasn't built to accommodate hockey.)

Still, Glendale got an arena and ever since, the city has had trouble with the different owners of the hockey team. Now according to an article by The Arizona Republic's Peter Corbett, the city might be trying to get out of its current contract.

The city leases the arena to the Coyotes and pays IceArizona, the team ownership group, $15 million annually to manage the arena. The deal is worth $225 million over 15 years.

But the city's been taking a financial beating.

It lost $8.1 million last fiscal year, and is projected to lose as much as $8.7 this year.

The simple but very expensive solution to this problem is clear.

There should be one combination hockey/basketball arena centrally located in downtown Phoenix. It works in a number of cities with pro teams in hockey and basketball. It would work here.

So, do we have to tear down two arenas to build one? Maybe, since we didn't have the common sense to do this correctly from the start. Perhaps because common sense often gives way to dreamers, or schemers, in Arizona.

The land out around 95th Avenue and Maryland might have looked like a field of dreams at one time.

So they built it.

And now it's a nightmare.