DEF: “chirp” v. To insult a person or group of people in a good or foul natured fashion.

One of the favorite chirp subjects leveled against the Phoenix Coyotes is the poor attendance for Coyotes home games. The Coyotes have been swapping the attendance basement with the NY Islanders, in the heavily populated New York City metropolitan area, for several years. Of note is the attendance increase at Coyotes home games, we’ll have more on that in a few days. So, there’s no arguing attendance is a problem for the Coyotes, owned by the absentee NHL and bankrupt with a skeletal budget for four years.

A popular chirp subset for unoriginal and uninformed trolls is the perception that Coyotes fans are outnumbered at the “rare” full barn by the fans of the opposing team. This is untrue, but there are admittedly a LOT of opposing team fans in “our house” on many nights.

And that’s just what we want.

Eighty Degree Resort Hockey

Right now (noon, March 24) it is 70 degrees Fahrenheit (none of that METRIC nonsense here, pal!), not a cloud in the sky sunny with a light breeze and zero chance of precipitation in Cave Creek. It will get a bit warmer later in the afternoon. Let’s look at the weather in some of the hotbeds of anti-Coyotes chirping:

• Winnipeg – 27F, “feels like” 21F, cloudy with a 20% chance of snow.
• Chicago – 34F, “feels like” 23F, cloudy and windy with a 60% chance of snow.
• Quebec City – 38F, “feels like” 33F, cloudy with a 20% chance of rain.
• Vancouver – 44F, “feels like” 42F, cloudy with a 20% chance of rain.
• Columbus – 34F, “feels like” 24F, raining and snowing, localized heavy snow.
• Los Angeles – 69F, “feels like” 69F, sunny with infestation of hipster snobs.
• Seattle – 53F, “smells like teen spirit”, cloudy with a 10% chance of rain.

The weather in “traditional hockey markets” is not nearly as nice while we have the windows open wide here. I threw in LA just because they’ve ramped up their chirping a LOT lately, but who wants to drive on those choked freeways in that nasty air in the midst of all those nipped and tucked posers? Nobody, of course.

Resort Destination

Because of the weather and natural terrain here, it’s a resort destination. The economy of the 4,000 square mile Valley of the Sun is bolstered heavily by tourist dollars. According to the Arizona Office of Tourism, 2011 brought $5.1 billion dollars to our wallets, thank you very much. Direct travel spending in Arizona was $18.3 billion dollars in 2011, compared to $1.7B for Quebec (click here) and a paltry $480M for Winnipeg (click here). By and large, people come here to escape the winter weather and we are happy to have them visit so they can enjoy what we are so proud of here.

We have mountains, rivers, a bazillion golf courses, boulders to climb, whitewater, skiing, we have the freakin’ Grand Canyon. You could take a morning dip in your pool here in Cave Creek and be skiing or snowboarding in a couple hours or fishing off the coast of Mexico in four hours. You can ride your motorcycle all year without heated grips and if you aren’t very bright you don’t even have to wear a helmet. You MIGHT have to put up the top on your convertible ten days of the year. Quite frankly, we have it made.

That’s why we live here.

So, we’re happy to welcome visitors, we’re even happy to welcome winter residents. While the real estate market in the Phoenix area is currently rebounding with a vengeance, the previous tanking of real estate values brought in a surge of Canadian people flushed with a strong dollar and money in their pockets. Welcome aboard, we say.

Most visitors are here during hockey season.

Transplanted Residents

For better or worse, many residents of the area are transplants from other areas of the country including areas with hockey teams. Some of these residents are hockey fans that will only buy tickets when “their” team is in town. As long as there’s room, and there will be until a new owner is found for the Coyotes and a new marketing strategy is implemented, they’re more than welcome to join us.

Some transplants even come to more than a few Coyotes games, yet will put on their Rangers or Blackhawks gear when that team is in town. That’s okay, we don’t care.

Anyone that buys a ticket to a Coyotes game is more than welcome in our barn. Some teams, of course, seem to magnetically attract heavy drinking boors that make asses of themselves. No problem, we can deal with those people as well, you’ll see them escorted out during nearly any Red Wings game. Whoops, did I point a finger there?

Chirp Away, Chuckles

Until attendance increases to where it should be, people will chirp, it’s to be expected. It’s a temporary problem that even “Original Six” teams like the Blackhawks have endured.

Offering annoying comments that points out there are a bunch of people at a Coyotes game that are supporting the opposing team is silly. It’s part of the marketing plan. The object is to sell tickets, it doesn’t matter who is buying them.

If the trolls would just use whatever logical horsepower they have remaining in their fevered brains after a long winter spent underground, they’d realize a professional marketing department would look at the influx of Canadian winter residents as a target market for hockey and design a campaign to capitalize on that. I don’t remember that ever taking place here.

The Wall Street Journal noticed the influx way back in 2011 (click here) and it hasn’t slowed down yet. Real estate outfits rent space in Jobing.com arena when a Canadian team is playing the Coyotes. While the lack of driving skills displayed by the snowbirds leaves something to be desired, we’ll live with having to negotiate the moving chicane of Canadian vehicles while collecting the money.

So we are aware there are opposing team supporters in our barn, we welcome them in and are happy to sell them our products including NHL hockey.

We’re business savvy people, that’s what we do. If you feel like chirping, that’s fine too, just leave your money first.

Thank you for your support!