The lockout-shortened National Hockey League season gets underway today, and the team owners and players are saying they are eager to get back to business on the ice. But in the NHL, business as usual has come to mean ceasing operations during labor disputes, locking out players, and depriving fans of enjoyment. Three lockouts on NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman’s 20-year watch is not a record of which to be proud.
This lockout was driven primarily by owners who calculated they could reduce the players’ slice of the pie and still win back the fan base in hockey-addicted markets like Boston over the course of a 48-game season. And with the football season coming to a close, even sports fans in places like Phoenix and Columbus, Ohio, would turn to the ice for some hard-hitting action.
Comments
Hockey is a sport of passion. Nothing duplicates playoff hockey and the intensity of desire. The NHL knows this and is willing to slap the fan base and supporting markets. The overall greed and arrogance is appalling. This is driven by people who believe the "servants door is on the side of the house." Yet we flock again. The only message that can be sent is keep your money in your wallet at the game. A concessions boycott will convey our willingness to go without for two plus hours. We did it since September.
I am a fan of nearly all sports, but none surpasses ice hockey for its combination of speed, grace, athleticism, heart, passion, and drama. Moreover, as a general rule, the professional hockey player is the most accessible, humble, generous, manly, lowest paid, and toughest, physically and mentally, of all the professional athletes. [One has to go a long way in the NHL to find a player who is a jerk; one has to go a long way in the NBA to find one who is not.] No sports product holds greater excitement and drama than do the Stanley Cup playoffs. No professional team plays a greater price for supremacy in its sport than does the Stanley Cup Champion. That the destiny of this great sport, and of these great athletes who play it, should rest in the hands of a former NBA management weenie like Gary Bettman (whose salary is $2M a year, by the way) is surely one of life's greatest, and cruelest, ironies. Just Google "Gary Bettman booed" and see what I mean. Welcome back warriors!
The NHL's financial problems stem from the markets they decided to expand into. Owners took expansion fees from new owners of these franchises and now are stuck with teams that will never have the following required to be profitable. Rather than correct their own mistakes they keep going back to fleece the players in order to make up the money these expansion franchises need. Gary Bettman has been at the helm for expansion and the subsequent lockouts. If he was any good at his job he would have found a way to fix what ails the NHL. Football found a way to revenue share that has made them the most profitable sport. Guys like Jeremy Jacobs will never do what best for the game, only what fits their self interests. Too bad such a great game is run by those who don't respect it.