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Matthew Knies was 9 the last time the Arizona Coyotes were a real playoff team, but, boy, did that run to the 2012 Western Conference final leave a mark. His favorite player growing up wasn’t Sidney Crosby or Alex Ovechkin or Patrick Kane, it was Mikkel Boedker, who scored two overtime winners in a three-day span in Chicago in the first round. Knies even wore Boedker’s No. 89 throughout his childhood. The traffic-choked schlep out to Glendale didn’t deter any hockey fans that spring, as Jobing.com Arena was rocking and the Coyotes dispatched the Blackhawks and Predators before falling to the charmed Kings.

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Shane Doan, Mike Smith, Antoine Vermette, Boedker — those were Knies’ guys. That was Knies’ team.

And frankly, Knies is kind of sick of hearing everyone talk about moving his team to Salt Lake City, or Houston, or Hamilton, or Quebec City, or — good grief — Atlanta.

“Yeah, it’s frustrating,” said Knies, a Phoenix native and Maple Leafs rookie. “But I know what hockey means to that community first-hand. It is a little frustrating to see that people don’t really see it as too big of a hockey spot, or a hockey community. But I know first-hand that it is, and I think they deserve a lot of encouragement rather than punishment for how it’s been looking.”

How it’s been looking is … well, you know how it’s been looking. The empty seats in Glendale. The 11 straight seasons finishing the regular season outside of the playoff picture. The comical city council meetings. The money-laundering role they played for years, taking on dead contracts from cap-strapped contenders every summer (think of Coyotes legends such as Chris Pronger, Pavel Datsyuk, Marian Hossa and Shea Weber). The ownership debacles. The move to 4,600-seat Mullett Arena, a lifeboat provided by Arizona State. The failed referendum for the franchise-saving arena in Tempe. The endlessly uncertain future.

It’s bleak stuff. Embarrassing, really.

But on the ice? Well, things are looking up for the first time in a long time. On the back end, they traded for 24-year-old offensive-minded Sean Durzi and signed veteran Wild defenseman Matt Dumba. Up front, they brought in 27-goal-scorer Jason Zucker from Pittsburgh. Clayton Keller’s eyebrow-raising $7.15 million cap hit now looks like a bargain after a sensational 37-goal, 86-point season. And, now, in walks Logan Cooley, the 19-year-old center who tore up the Big Ten to the tune of 22 goals and 38 assists in 39 games — trailing only Adam Fantilli in the men’s NCAA scoring race — and took Minnesota to the national championship game.

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Throw in a little Mullett Magic — the Coyotes, expected to contend with the tanking Blackhawks in the race for Connor Bedard, were 21-15-5 in their cozy little college rink last season — and the vibes are pretty darn good in the desert.

“People are excited about coming to Arizona,” general manager Bill Armstrong said. “It’s a fun place to play.”

All that skepticism you felt reading all that? All the eye-rolling and hand-waves and dismissive feelings? Yeah, NHL players feel that, too. Look, nobody wants to play in a 4,600-seat arena, no matter how many upgrades the Coyotes make to the joint. And nobody wants to face an uncertain future, either. When a player signs a contract with a team, he’s committing not just to the franchise, but to a city, a place to live, a place for his family to live. The threat of being uprooted and moved in the middle of a contract is not terribly appealing.

So players are skeptical, too.

But Armstrong doesn’t have to sell players too hard on coming to Arizona and setting up shop in the Scottsdale area.

“It’s the best place to live in the winter,” he said. “And there’s stuff behind the scenes that you can’t see until you play here. The plane is 15 minutes from the practice rink, and most of our players live 10 or 15 minutes from the practice rink, and there’s no traffic. There’s a lot of bonuses to living in Arizona. The funny thing is, it’s the No. 1-rated place to play in the NHL by the wives.”

The real recruiting doesn’t come from Armstrong, anyway. As is the case in most NHL cities, it comes from the players — the players who’ve lived that golf-and-pool-in-January lifestyle.

And so it was Keller who lured Cooley out of Minnesota, mere months after Cooley said he was going back to college for his sophomore year. It was Nick Bjugstad who persuaded Dumba that a one-year deal in Arizona was worth the risk. And it wasn’t just because of the weather. It was because they believed the Coyotes were building something real and lasting for once, and were on the verge of breaking through in a Western Conference that has a large, mediocre middle class.

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“We’re headed in the right direction with some of the guys that they got this year, like Zucker, (Alex) Kerfoot, guys with experience,” Cooley said. “A guy like Dumba, too, can run a power play. The rink — obviously that’s not the best situation, but they’re figuring it out. I know they’re going to figure it out. They have a bright future and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

OK, the arena. Let’s talk about the arena. It’s a cool place to see a game. It’s intimate, it’s loud, and it’s quirky and charming. It’s also an absolutely ludicrous place to host an NHL game, let alone serve as a team’s full-time home for up to four seasons — which was the best-case scenario even if Tempe voters hadn’t rejected the team’s arena proposal in May. No matter how much money the Coyotes sink into the locker-room annex and the fan experience — another million bucks was spent this offseason, according to a team spokesperson — it’ll always be a 4,600-seat venue, less than a quarter the size of 17 NHL arenas, and smaller than all but three American Hockey League rinks.

“They’re working away at resolving the uncertainty around where they’re going to play long term,” was all NHL commissioner Gary Bettman would say about it at last week’s GMs and coaches meetings in Chicago.

That’s the biggest hurdle for the franchise, both existentially — Salt Lake City, Houston and Atlanta are salivating as they wait — and in terms of attracting free agents. Cooley said Mullett had a “great atmosphere” when he played there as a Golden Gopher last November, picking up a goal and an assist in a 3-2 victory. But Cooley turned pro because he wanted to play in the NHL. And this was not the NHL environment he dreamed of as a little kid.

“Obviously I don’t want to be there the whole time,” he said with a laugh. “But it’s a good home for now.”

Conor Geekie, the 11th pick in the 2022 draft, has been through this whole thing before. His WHL team, the Winnipeg Ice, played in the 1,600-seat Max Bell Centre on the campus of the University of Manitoba while it tried and failed to build a new rink of its own. That college rink wasn’t up to snuff compared to the other WHL rinks, either.

Didn’t stop the Ice from going a league-best 57-10-1 last season, though. Or 53-10-3 the year before.

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“I had the same situation in Winnipeg, right?” Geekie said. “We were playing out of not the greatest rink, and everyone judged us for a long time, and we were at the top of the league. Statistically, in Winnipeg, we were probably the best team — in my opinion — to ever play. It was super fun.”

That all said, the Ice were sold and moved to Wenatchee, Wash., for the upcoming season. Entirely because of the arena situation. Oops.

But despite the sword of Damocles hanging over the franchise, fans seem to be buying in — to the arena, and to the Coyotes’ eventual rise. A team spokesperson said ticket sales revenue is up 20 percent from this same time last year, and full-season tickets have increased by 50 percent over 2022-23. It’s a small arena, but that’s no small feat, because the ticket prices are not for the faint of heart. Hey, when you don’t have 18,000 seats to sell, you’ve got to make money somehow.

“The rink is the rink, and that’s up to the ownership,” Armstrong said. “Hopefully the league can help get it done.”

In the early 1980s, Pittsburgh was a hockey wasteland. There were only six ice rinks in Pittsburgh and its sprawling suburbs, and they weren’t exactly hopping. Then in 1984, Mario Lemieux arrived, and everything changed. By the time Lemieux retired for good — by then, owning the Penguins — there were dozens of rinks in the area, youth hockey exploded, and a steady parade of NHL players emerged from the area.

One of them is Cooley.

Can he become Arizona’s Mario? A franchise savior, an inspiration to millions of kids in the Valley, a multi-time champion?

“That’s something every player wants to be, is a guy like him — a guy that could change a franchise,” Cooley said.

Of course, the mere existence of the Coyotes already has made an impact in the desert. Auston Matthews grew up on Phoenix-area rinks, as did Sabres star Tage Thompson, Knies and Ottawa center Mark Kastelic. Matthew and Brady Tkachuk are Phoenix natives, because their dad Keith was playing for the Coyotes when they were born. Another top prospect, Ottawa winger Tyler Boucher, was born in Scottsdale when his dad, retired goalie and current TV analyst Brian Boucher, played for the Coyotes.

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“The first time I was on skates was in Arizona,” the younger Boucher said. “I remember my dad took me out after a game and pushed me on a sled. That’s where it started. It’s great to see the game grow in all different spots, and see hockey expand as a sport. I think it’s awesome to get more states in tune with it. Now you start to see a lot of players coming from everywhere. I noticed it when I was playing youth hockey. L.A. had a team, Arizona, even Texas. There are a lot of kids from Florida I know now.”

Arizona has a long way to go to become a true hockey hotbed. But boom times for the Coyotes will mean boom times for Arizona youth hockey, too. It happened in Pittsburgh. It happened in Chicago in the late 2000s and early 2010s. And it can happen in Phoenix, too. It’s one of the 10 largest metro areas in the United States — that’s why Bettman is so dead set on keeping them there — and remains a sleeping (well, sleepy) giant waiting to be stirred.

And who doesn’t want to be part of a renaissance?

“I’d say we joke about it more than we take it seriously,” Geekie said of himself, Cooley and the Lemieux comparison. “I think that’s how me and him cope with a lot of stuff. But it’s a huge honor to be put in that category, and I’m just looking to take advantage of that.”

The weather’s nice. The winter golf is a nice perk. And that NHL paycheck doesn’t vary based on how big the arena was on a given night.

But what really appeals to Cooley and Geekie and some of the other newcomers to the Coyotes is the opportunity of it all. The franchise is largely a blank slate. There’s no weight of history, there’s no lingering culture to exorcise. It’s a fresh start, whether you’re just breaking into the league or you’re trying to get your stagnant career jumpstarted.

“With the Coyotes, there’s so much opportunity,” Cooley said. “There’s a bright future here, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

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They’re young. They’ve got loads of exciting talent. And after years of walking aimlessly through the desert, the worst is finally behind them.

Well, on the ice, at least.

“There are things as a GM you can worry about, and things you can’t,” Armstrong said. “In this particular case, you just have to concentrate on what you can control, and that’s what you build. We talk about that, ignoring the noise and focusing on what we can do and the positivity we can create. We’re a new, upbeat organization, from sports science to analytics to the way we practice to our coaching staff and the way they handle the players. We can’t worry about the rink. What we can control is providing a great environment to play, and to bring in the best coaches and the best players. And then, hey, let’s do some battles in the desert.”

(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

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