Phoenix Roadrunners (WHA)

Lore & Background

The franchise originally competed in the Western Hockey League (WHL) from 1967 to 1974 after being moved from Victoria, British Columbia, where they had played for the three previous seasons as the Maple Leafs. In 1974, the Roadrunners joined the WHA with their roster mostly intact when the WHL ceased operations. The Roadrunners achieved relative success during their first two WHA seasons, but lack of financial success resulted in the removal of local favorite Sandy Hucul as coach and his replacement with Al Rollins, who was disliked by Phoenix hockey fans. Rollins did not succeed in improving the team's fortunes. At one point, the team was forced to sell players just to pay the bills. The Roadrunners finally gave up and folded at the end of its third season.

Reader's Guide

The Phoenix Roadrunners are notable as a short-lived WHA franchise that folded due to financial difficulties before the WHA–NHL merger. Their history illustrates the instability of the WHA, where even a relatively successful on-ice team could not sustain itself. The team's star player, Robbie Ftorek, was the last active WHA Roadrunner in major professional hockey, retiring from the NHL after the 1984–85 season. Decades later, the Phoenix Coyotes (a relocated former WHA franchise) purchased their AHL affiliate and moved it to Tucson, naming it the Tucson Roadrunners, which uses a logo very similar to the WHA Roadrunners. This connection preserves the legacy of the original team in the region's hockey culture.

Did You Know?

• The Roadrunners played at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.
• The team folded for financial reasons before the WHA merged with the NHL in 1979.
• Robbie Ftorek was the WHA MVP in 1977 and the last active WHA Roadrunner in major pro hockey.
• The Tucson Roadrunners, an AHL team, use a logo very similar to the WHA Roadrunners.

A Brief Chapter in the WHA

The Phoenix Roadrunners existed as a franchise within the World Hockey Association, the upstart professional league that operated from its founding in the early 1970s until it ceased operations in 1979. The WHA, while short-lived, produced a level of competitive intensity that drew significant attention, as evidenced by the Winnipeg Jets winning the league's Avco World Trophy championship three times and reaching the finals in five of the league's seven seasons. The Roadrunners were one of the teams competing in this environment, calling the Phoenix metropolitan area home during the league's brief run. When the WHA ultimately folded under financial strain, four of its organizations were admitted into the NHL through a merger agreement. The Roadrunners were not among those four, and their existence as a professional hockey entity in the desert city remained a footnote in the broader narrative of North American hockey. Their tenure in the WHA, while brief, placed them in the same league as some of the most memorable teams of that era, and their name would later resurface in an unexpected way when a new franchise arrived in Phoenix more than two decades later.

The Cartoon Rivalry Written into a Team Name

When the relocated Winnipeg Jets needed a fresh identity for their new life in Phoenix in 1996, the organization weighed several candidate names, including Mustangs, Outlaws, Wranglers, and Freeze. A public name-the-team contest ultimately produced the official moniker: Coyotes. While the coyote is a fitting symbol for the desert Southwest, the choice carried an additional layer of local resonance. Phoenix had previously been home to a short-lived WHA franchise called the Roadrunners, and the naming of the new team was widely interpreted as a deliberate nod to the classic Looney Tunes rivalry between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. In other words, the Coyotes' very name functioned as a gentle homage to the Roadrunners who had once occupied the same city's hockey landscape. The cartoon connection gave the new franchise an instantly recognizable cultural hook, linking a brand-new professional team to a piece of the city's earlier, if fleeting, hockey history and to a piece of popular animation that audiences of all ages could immediately picture.

Ecology as a Naming Criterion

Beyond the cartoon association, the selection of Coyotes over any roadrunner-inspired identity was grounded in practical geography. The roadrunner, while iconic in popular culture, is a bird whose natural range in Arizona is confined to the southern and western portions of the state. A franchise representing the entire Phoenix metropolitan area and, by extension, the broader Arizona market, would therefore be carrying a symbol that only partially reflected the state's ecology. The coyote, by contrast, is endemic to the whole of Arizona, found across its diverse landscapes from the Sonoran Desert to the high country of the north. This made Coyotes a more universally representative name for a statewide professional team. The Roadrunners, as a former WHA franchise, had carried a name that was geographically narrower in its Arizona relevance. The ecological distinction thus provided a straightforward, defensible rationale for why the new franchise's identity diverged from the bird that had once shared the city's hockey history, ensuring the name resonated with fans across the entire state rather than only those in the desert's southern reaches.

Phoenix as a Minor League Hockey Hub

The presence of the Roadrunners in the WHA was not an isolated incident in Phoenix's hockey history. The city and its surrounding metropolitan area had long served as a home for multiple minor league hockey teams, creating a layered ecosystem of professional and semi-professional play well before the NHL arrived. By the time the relocated Jets became the Coyotes in 1996, Phoenix still hosted an International Hockey League franchise, meaning the city maintained a continuous thread of organized hockey at various competitive levels. The Roadrunners, as a WHA team, occupied a unique position in that lineage: they were part of a major professional league rather than a minor one, yet their tenure was so brief that they never became a lasting fixture in the city's sporting memory. Their existence, alongside the IHL team and other minor league squads, contributed to a broader culture of hockey fandom in the Phoenix area. When the NHL franchise eventually took root in the desert, it inherited a community that had already demonstrated, through its support of the Roadrunners and other teams, a willingness to embrace hockey as part of its local identity, even if those earlier teams had not endured.