February 17, 2005
Bettman's Real Legacy: The End of Hockey As We Know It
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NHL commissioner Gary Bettman spoke like an accountant and looked like a mortician — or maybe it was the other way around — as he directed the final services Wednesday in New York.
He trotted out the numbers that never added up, the plans for salary caps and fixed payrolls that didn't fly, the negotiations that kept breaking down.
With a touch of sincerity, though no emotion, he apologized to fans, saying they deserved better.
"This is a sad, regrettable day that all of us wish could have been avoided," Bettman said.
Eh?
This was a day that absolutely could have been avoided if there had been an ounce of trust among the players toward the owners and their supposedly bloody red accounting books.
It was a day that could have been avoided if the players didn't believe the owners were out to bust the union, not just win a better deal.
It was a day that could have been avoided if both sides had more love for the game than they had for their money. Ah, but we all know it's just a business, cold as a corpse.
Bettman serves at the whim of the NHL Board of Governors, and it's time for that board to look elsewhere for leadership.
He guided the league to unprecedented, unnecessary and unwise expansion. Under Bettman, the NHL made more money and lost more money than any time in its history. He aspired to greatness, took a shot at rapid growth, and wound up flopping.
When a team is losing, the coach is the first to be fired. When the league loses as badly as the NHL just did, the commissioner should be patted on the back and kicked in the butt.
Bettman was a dreamer and schemer, a former NBA marketing whiz who never understood that hockey, for all its history and thrills, didn't have the broad passionate U.S. fan base that could justify his vision of manifest destiny.
Hockey is not McDonald's or Starbucks. It didn't need to supersize itself and post franchises all over the map.
Without rights fees from television, like the ones in the other pro team sports, it couldn't afford to let average salaries skyrocket to $1.8 million last year. NFL players, by comparison, average $1.3 million, and that's with the fattest TV deals in sports.
Figuratively and financially, NHL players are not in the same league with NBA players (averaging $4.9 million) and baseball players ($2.5 million).
The NHL, under Bettman, was run almost like a giant Ponzi scheme, nothing holding it up but hopes and promises and the vague idea that a TV deal would one day bail it out.
Maybe it would have gone on growing if the new generation of owners didn't keep throwing money at the players, and if the players themselves didn't keep undermining the sport at every opportunity.
It wasn't just the crazy stuff that made headlines and police blotters. It was also the way the players, in general, thought they were bigger than their great little game, indestructible and irreplaceable.
Where are they now? Playing in Russia and Sweden and small arenas wherever they can find a cheap skate.
They lost one season and could easily lose another, if the league survives at all.
For young players trying to make their names, lost seasons are serious. For older players trying to keep skating in their 40s, such as Mark Messier, Brett Hull, Steve Yzerman, Ron Francis, Dave Andreychuk and Chris Chelios, there may never be another season.
The player half of Mario Lemieux, 39, wants to skate again, if and when the league resumes, but the owner half didn't want to keep taking losses.
There are losers in every direction from this NHL debacle. Publicly owned arenas, such as those in St. Louis, Detroit and Pittsburgh, will lose millions of dollars in tax revenues. Workers in those arenas will lose income.
Money aside, hockey's die-hard fans are furious that all this had to happen. They are a diminishing cult committed to the game and they hate seeing their beloved sport shrink into insignificance.
For the relatively piddling difference of about $6.5 million per team in the final bargaining positions — the salary of one top-tier player — the two sides couldn't come together and everyone lost.
In the frenzied final days of haggling, Bettman had a chance to exert leadership, to force both sides to yield a tad more. Instead, he stiffened up, stood firm with the owners, and pronounced the season dead.
If you're curious about how this all happened, you have the benefit of AP Sports Columnist Jim Litke's historical breakdown of Bettman's reign:
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Bettman was not a "hockey guy" — his first real exposure came during pickup games while he was an undergraduate studying labor relations at Cornell in the 1970s. But he was a marketing whiz, and he had a plan.
Viewed strictly from the supply side, that plan was a rousing success. The number of franchises increased from 21 to 30, revenues quadrupled from $400 million to more than $2 billion, and players' salaries more than tripled from $558,000 in Bettman's first season to $1.8 million in the last one.
But all that expansion came at a considerable cost. Bettman locked out the players and wound up canceling almost half the 1994-95 season in a failed bid to get a salary cap and luxury tax. Then, he passed on a chance to opt out of the agreement two more times — in 1995 and 1997 — rather than endanger the league's expansion plans.
New arenas were going up, the Nagano Olympics offered worldwide exposure and multimillion-dollar expansion fees were lining the owners' pockets. It was easy to get swept up in the notion that once the NHL blanketed the U.S. map from coast to coast and locked up a big TV deal, enough money would flow in to cover up all the mistakes.
Not being a "hockey guy," though, Bettman made a fatal miscalculation. He grew the game recklessly and watched his owners lavish profligate contracts on players, assuming that demand would eventually catch up with a suddenly bountiful supply. The opposite turned out to be true.
The NHL landed one big TV contract with ABC/ESPN in 1999 — a five-year, $600-million deal — but ratings were minuscule. That's why the two-year deal with NBC signed in 2004 doesn't include rights fees, only revenue sharing. The flow of cash has slowed to a trickle.
The knocks against hockey when Bettman took over were its fascination with fighting, its limited regional appeal and blue-collar roots, even the fact that the puck is hard to follow on the small screen.
Now, fisticuffs are down. But gone, too, are a handful of franchises in hockey-mad Canada and the wide-open style of play that made Wayne Gretzky a household name. They've been replaced by Sun Belt towns with no hockey roots and little developing affection for the plodding, clutch-and-grab version of the game being peddled.
During the weekend, when Bettman briefly lifted a ban on owners speaking out, one of his staunchest supporters dared wonder whether the rush to expand had come at the expense of the product.
"We might be better off to stop chasing growth and revenue and play just high-quality hockey and let its popularity take care of itself," Peter Karmanos Jr., owner of the Carolina Hurricanes (news), told the New York Times.
"We're not a public corporation," he added. "We don't have to have compounded annual growth."
They won't have to worry about that, at least not for the foreseeable future. No matter when, or in what form the NHL returns, it won't find people clamoring to get back under the tent.
"You hear how certain people believe that the hardcore fan will definitely return, that the damage isn't irreparable," Flyers captain Keith Primeau said in Philadelphia.
"I think that's a huge miscalculation or judgment in error of who and what your fan base is. That, I think, is going to alarm a lot of people when the doors are reopened."
In the words of Rod Brind'Amour, "The game's just suffered an absolute blow it'll never recover from," the Carolina Hurricanes forward said. "They're totally underestimating the damage that's being done." We can only guess what the future might hold:
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Without an agreement, there can be no June draft. The sport's heralded next big thing, Canadian phenom Sidney Crosby, won't pull on his first NHL sweater anytime soon.
Then there is the parade of aging stars — Mario Lemieux (39), Mark Messier (44), Steve Yzerman (39) Brett Hull (40), Ron Francis (41), Dave Andreychuk (41) and Chris Chelios (43) — whose playing days could be ending on someone else's terms.
"This is a tragedy for the players," Bettman said. "Their careers are short and this is money and opportunity they'll never get back," Bettman said.
Despite being the NHL's best-known star, there was never a chance that Pittsburgh's Lemieux, the first owner-player in modern American pro sports history, would side with the players.
"A few years ago, I thought the owners were making a lot of money and were hiding some under the table, but then I got on this side and saw the losses this league was accumulating," he said Wednesday.
Hockey was already a distant fourth on the popularity scale among the nation's major league sports. The NHL lost the first season of its two-year broadcasting agreement with NBC that was supposed to begin this season, a revenue-sharing deal in which the network is not even paying rights fees.
Taking a year off, or more, will only push the league further off the radar screen.
"The scary part now for hockey is do the fans come back? We're not baseball, we're not the national pastime," Nashville forward Jim McKenzie said.
Between shifts of a pickup game at the Denver rink where the Avalanche used to practice, fan Don Cameron called the cancellation "a shame."
"When they come back, it's not going to be as easy to pay for a $90 season ticket," he said.
Not to mention how difficult it will be for all the ushers, trainers, officials, Zamboni drivers and businesses near arenas that will continue to be affected.
"We profoundly regret the suffering this has caused our fans, our business partners and the thousands of people who depend on our industry for their livelihoods," Bettman said.
"If you want to know how I feel, I'll summarize it in one word — terrible," he said.
Bettman said the sides would keep working toward an agreement.
"We're planning to have hockey next season," he said.
Goodenow stressed that the players had already given a lot of ground. "Every offer by the players moved in the owners' direction," he said.
"Keep one thing perfectly clear," Goodenow said. "The players never asked for more money — they just asked for a marketplace."
Not being a hockey fan myself, I think this is more like watching a trainwreck than anything for most sports fans. We just can't look away when two groups are so determined to get their way, they'll lay waste an entire sport if they can't get it.
One thing's for sure, whether there's a season next year or not... this is end of the NHL as we know it.
- Arik
Posted by Arik Johnson at February 17, 2005 04:40 PM
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