Off Wing Opinion

Here's my friend Jeff Cooper with some post-cancellation thoughts:

Hockey can be a truly beautiful game, and for awhile in the Gretzky era NHL hockey was, at least some of the time. Ever since the rise of the New Jersey Devils and their trapping defense in the mid-nineties, though, the game has been going backwards (much as the NBA has in the same period, since the heyday of the goonish, Pat Riley-led Knicks). I can't remember the last time I watched a regular-season NHL game, and I doubt I would have watched one this season even without the lockout. There is a loss here, to be sure, but the loss was in progress well before the lockout began.

At the end of last season, I would have said that one of the NHL's marketing goals would be to try to attract fans like Jeff back to the game. While he might never have played, he was more than familiar with the sport while he was growing up, and was even exposed to it at its highest levels while in college.

But the fact of the matter now is that we're staring at another eight months minimum without the NHL. And over those next eight months, the league will have to do a lot of work shoring up the core of its support, and won't have the time or energy to focus on growing the game.

Perhaps that's how it should be, because as I've discussed here more than once, the NHL has many problems to address both on and off the ice. But the question remains whether or not the folks in charge in New York, Toronto and around the league will use this period to their advantage, or spend it consumed in plotting what I see as an inevitable legal action against the union which will require the employment of strike breakers and plenty of billable hours for the folks doing the NHL legal work.

I'm not exactly hopeful. Why? Last night on PTI, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser brought on ESPN Hockey Analyst Ray Ferraro to talk about the lockout and its effect on the league (perhaps the first time in months they've actually talked about hockey).

The most interesting tidbit that Ferraro passed along had nothing to do with the lockout, and everything to do with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Apparently, later in his NHL career after Ferraro was old enough to be considered a grizzled veteran, he had the occasion to run into Bettman.

And the Commissioner didn't know who he was.

Or even recognize his name.

Now, it might just be the case that Bettman is a numbers guy, a businessman, and that the fact that we're dealing with pucks and sticks instead of widgets shouldn't matter.

And indeed, in business, some of the most successful kinds of leaders have shown that they can make things work no matter what sort of business they're in -- something that General Electric makes sure of when they train their executives to succeed no matter what business unit they managed to get slotted into.

Now, I've met plenty of those sorts of people, and what impressed me the most about them was how their enthusiasm and passion for success led them to become absorbed with every last detail of the business they work in. If Bettman had that kind of passion, the sort of passion that the hard core fan brings to the league, I wouldn't be worrying.

But the owners aren't alone in deserving the burden of responsibility for this mess. As others have noted, it's very easy to look at some disputes like this, and find that both sides should equally share in the blame. But that's exactly what we're looking at here.

In essenece, the market has spoken when it comes to the NHL as a business. It is not, has never been, and most likely will never be (even with HDTV) a hot television property. Its appeal is limited to Canada, and the American Northeast and some sections of the Midwest. And it simply doesn't generate enough revenue to support a league of 30 teams.

Who's to blame here? The owners of course, just like the owners and managers of any other business. By any sort of measure, they've been poor stewards of the game, and worse businessmen. But when revenues fall, or profits fail to materialize, business normally has only a few tools to turn things around. And one of the most popular is to go hacking at your costs, in this case, personnel.

Is this fair? No, it isn't fair at all. But as I've said before, it's the reality of the business world, and one the rest of us have to deal with all the time.

Trust me, in my time in business, I've seen thousands of people lose their jobs in a flash because of gross management incompetence. And while I wouldn't wish it on anyone, that sort of pressure is just the reason why American business is as successful as it is, and why our economy throws off trillions of dollars in GDP every year.

But when you try to suspend these conditions, just as the NHLPA is now, all you do is put off the day of reckoning a little longer.

In a lot of ways, the NHL is like a patient that has just been diagnosed with a critical illlness. Without drastic treatment, we know the patient is going to die. But instead of plowing ahead, and working together to find a cure, NHL fans are saddled with a medical staff that would rather argue with each other than come up with a plan of action.

Each day without treatment puts the patient closer to death. And each day without treatment means that the ultimate prescription to save the patient's life will have to be more radical, and far reaching, than many of the folks involved may be willing to contemplate.

As for the fans, the folks who are finding they have a lot more time on their hands than they ever expected, we're occupying ourselves with other pursuits, and discovering that life goes on even when we're robbed of one of our passions.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing. In the meantime, we'll be spending our time and treasure elsewhere.

Whether or not we return is another question entirely. And one that the fans shouldn't be terribly eager to provide a response to.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 6:47 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Hockey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.