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Coyotes withdraw bid for 2018 world juniors

Winnipeg Jets v Arizona Coyotes

GLENDALE, AZ - OCTOBER 09: Fans line up outside of Gila River Arena before the NHL game between the Arizona Coyotes and the Winnipeg Jets on October 9, 2014 in Glendale, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

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In the midst of the Arizona Coyotes battle with the City of Glendale team owner Anthony LeBlanc announced the club will not pursue a bid to host the 2018 world junior hockey Championship.

“There’s no way we can move forward with a world junior bid based on the actions of the city council,” LeBlanc said during a conference call on Thursday. “Those bids are due at the end of this month and I’d be laughed out of the room in Colorado.

“We weren’t guaranteed to get it, but I think we had a really good shot. We were putting together one hell of a bid, I had an internal group which was working exclusively on it. Working with the local chamber of commerce, working with the Canadian Arizona Business Council, working with the Glendale Hotels Association – the local Westgate hotels are apoplectic right now. They had hundreds of rooms blocked in support of this bid for late 2017, early 2018 that we unfortunately had to inform them this morning that ‘you can release those’. That was just for the teams that we would anticipate coming in. I can’t sit here and say that was a guarantee, but what is guaranteed now is we won’t get it.”

Helsinki, Finland is set to host the 2016 Under-20 tournament while Toronto and Montreal will once again share the 2017 event.

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