PROFILES IN JELLO-HEADEDNESS, PART 2: THE NHL'S BREAKUP SONG

(Part 2 in a rant. Here's Part 1.)

Gary Bettman hasn't turned hockey into the NBA, like so many feared he would when he became NHL commissioner 14 years ago today, Feb. 1, 1993.

No, Little Lyin' Gary, the real-life Nathan Thurm, has overseen something far worse. He has turned the NHL into Major League Baseball with higher ticket prices.

On Feb. 1, 1993, baseball was the sport that was getting battered pillar to post by the media -- it had labour unrest, sagging TV ratings, fans fed up with greedhead players (remember the shitstorm over Bobby Bonilla getting $29 million for 5 years?) a bad national TV deal and, with Fay Vincent having been forced out as commissioner the previous year -- this is the big one -- a complete lack of a credible central authority who could facilitate solutions to the game and league's problems. It had become a lumbering dinosaur. Gee, sound familiar?

Today, the emperor has no clothes, Iraq doesn't have the WMDs and Bettman has, in the immortal words of my man Chris Thomas, "noooooooo credibility." The great leap forward that was envisioned 14 years ago has been the biggest flop this side of Basic Instinct 2. It's not as bad as people make it out to be, but let's be honest: Who thinks hockey can survive Gary Bettman and the teams who have the long end of the stick, like that one run by Lou Lamoriello in New Jersey?

It can, on one condition: Break up the NHL as we know it (there's a strong decentralization movement afoot already), and get away from a structure set up first and foremost to maintain wealthy interests -- and that includes the players and the NHL Players' Association. Only in a sport as hidebound as hockey would anyone ever think you could have a revolution without a change in the hierarchy.

There are teams in cities where no one cares about them and Canadian cities who would kill to have real hockey or more real pro hockey (instead of what some deride as the Almost Hockey League) but have no hope of getting it under the NHL's current structure. There are hockey-mad fans who have to sell a vital organ to afford tickets (i.e., Toronto) while even once great U.S. hockey cities like Boston, Chicago and St. Louis can't give 'em away. For pity's sake, Hal Gill gets paid more than $2 million per year. Most importantly, there is an eroding connection between players and fans, and it's all but gone.

(Just a note, and thanks to Pete Toms for pointing this out: There is no cause-and-effect between high salaries and high ticket prices -- the Leafs or Senators charge what they think people will pay. But with free competition, we can bring both ticket prices and salaries down, and grow the game.)

Maybe it's just a case of the curtain being pulled back on the business side of the game, but the NHL has reached the point where they don't care about entertaining people anymore, notwithstanding whatever minor changes were made in 2005-06. No one, not even Bettman, meant for this to happen, but that's what we have.

Maybe it's the effect of globalization, but a league whose structure has no relationship to where passion for the game runs deepest -- there's a team in Sunrise, Florida, but not one in Winnipeg -- is not a sport. It's a fraud. It's no longer enough to say you "like the game the way it is," and think that passes as a valid argument. Hockey needs to adapt and stick with tradition.

Tradition, by nature, is always changing. Ken Dryden probably had it right when he said the golden age of hockey is "whoever was playing when you were 12 years old." (Or 10, or 16.) That would put us in the late '80s, early '90s. The Original Six was long gone, but no one who could think seemed too put out by Los Angeles having a team. Players were earning high six-figure salaries, but weren't held up as greedy like their counterparts in baseball and basketball (for a time, hockey's whiteness served as a halo effect there), and more players than ever before were able to make a decent living. On the ice, clutch-and-grab tactics were becoming a problem, but not to the extent that radical change -- bigger nets, 4-on-4 hockey -- was being proposed to maintain the parry and thrust between skill guys and checkers, or shooters and goaltenders.

Hockey in that 1985-93 period wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the setup we've got entering Year 15 of the Wonderful World of Gary Bettman, where tradition is all but spit on -- which is why no one with a heart should mind if a sweater retirement gets overly grandiose, almost as a form of compensation. The topper, for a lot of people in Canada, came during the all-star break last week when the league, with its head up its ass and its finger as far away from the public pulse as possible, voted any against adopting a schedule that would have ensured all Canadian teams of playing each other in 2007-08.

One question which failed to come up: If Vancouver and Montreal, or Calgary and Toronto have representative hockey clubs, why do they need Gary Bettman and Lou Lamoriello's say-so to play each other in a meaningful game?*

Not allowing those teams to play each other every season amounts to restraint of trade and it's not fair to the fans. If the Canucks, Flames and Oilers had any balls, they would protest this by refusing to sell tickets for the home games they'll be forced to play in 2007-08 against a poor-drawing Atlantic Division team like the New York Islanders and letting everyone in for free. Of course, they won't, since there's increasing pressure to milk the game and the fans for every last dollar and pay those salaries.

Which kind of gets to the real problem, the one that explains why we need to break up the NHL the monopoly for the good of the sport. As things stand, the lack of competition at the business level and for players traps the owners into paying the high salaries. That's not sustainable, since it ultimately puts more and more distance between the fans and the players they want to identify with.

The real irony of the '04-05 lockout was that it was a missed opportunity for the owners. They could have broken up the NHL, made everyone free agents and signed them back for pennies on the dollar. But they were so bent on breaking the players' association, they insisted on a strict adherence to their bloated 30-team corpse of a league. You can only imagine the lawsuits that would have been filed if it had gone down this way, but the owners could have had the players over a barrel if they had announced they were dividing into three or four different leagues, giving 10 or so AHL operators major-league status to create more jobs as a sop to the players' unions, and making everyone a free agent.

The league is decentralizing anyway, so why not go all the way?

With, say, 200 or 300 defencemen flooding the free-agent market, there would have been no equivalent to the Boston Bruins wouldn't have paying $7.5 million per year for Zdeno Chara last summer, since they would have had access to Chris Pronger, Scott Niedermayer and dozens and dozens of second- and third-line D-men. It's called a buyer's market. But no, they had to rob us of a season to make the hockey world safe for the Florida Panthers. It was totally worth it.

If the NHL had Balkanized itself and given some AHL owners -- such as Hamilton, Winnipeg, or the Chicago Wolves -- a chance to move up to the big leagues, the player pool would have been there. Far from squawking over the talent being too diluted to support expansion to 32 teams, there's probably enough talent for 50 to 60 quality teams in North America. There isn't that wide a gap in talent between the NHL and AHL anymore. It's just that the best teams don't have access to all the available talent, since it's tied up due to draft rights and farm systems.

So what's the proposal here for hockey's Brave New Post-Bettman World? It's not concrete, but it starts with a few basic principles that should be nailed to the door of every pro hockey arena.

1. Free competition, starting with the breakup of the existing 30 teams into at least two leagues, and possibly as many as four, with many existing markets opened up to competitor leagues.
2. League alignment that recognizes the game's geography and its history: How about carving a league out of the existing Canadian teams, Winnipeg and Hamilton, a second team in Toronto, and strong northern U.S. markets such as Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philly, Buffalo and Boston? If Raleigh-Durham, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Atlanta and Sunrise, Fla., really want to have hockey, let them have their own version of NFL Europe -- out of sight and out of mind for all but the most hardcore fans.
3. Free the minor leagues. No formal affiliation agreements. No more of Winnipeg feeling like it got stuck with a cheap facsimile of hockey so Vancouver can have everything. Teams would be on their own for coming up with players (hey, Tier II Junior A and college teams do it), and there could be a transfer system (similar to soccer's) for moving players from a lower-division team to the top leagues. Corporations who own two teams in the same market -- like in Toronto, where MLSE owns the Leafs and the Marlies -- would have to divest themselves of one of their teams, and could not stop a competitor from entering.
4. The leagues shall do nothing in concert -- no licensing deals, no TV contracts, no player drafts (each can have its own), no rule changes -- except agree to hold a Stanley Cup final.

With the breakup of the NHL, salaries would drop, but more players would get to play the game at an elite level. Ticket and concession prices would drop since the public's expectation of what it should cost to attend a pro hockey game would change, and free competition -- in the Leafs' case, a team on the other side of town -- would force them to justify their ticket prices.

Access to real hockey would be more equitably distributed. More people would probably attend games, especially in Canada. Instead of 5,000 fans for an AHL game at the MTS Centre in the 'Peg or Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, those teams would get two to three times that for a team in what would truly be the New NHL.

The game would be more diverse, since each league in each pocket of North America would take on its own style of play, and would be free to tweak the rules as it saw fit. There would be a more interesting regular season -- teams could probably play a shorter schedule and spice it up with challenge tournaments or exhibition games. For instance, the Canucks could just invite Sidney Crosby's team in for a game, similar to a big intersectional game in college hockey.

Would teams get gimmicky? Sure. That's showbiz. There would also be instability -- teams failing, folding in mid-season -- but that's business, and if it's between a little instability and more Bettman-induced malaise and monotony, instability looks pretty good.

Change -- real change, the first that hockey's had since the WHA challenge of the '70s, would be more possible, since smaller leagues would all have to work to win the public's attention and disposable income, and they would all be learning from each other's trials and errors instead of just offering spin-doctoring.

The point here is to spur people to not to be resigned what we've had in 14 years under of Gary Bettman. It's not the only way, much less the best way.

(Much obliged to Bill James, whose essay "Revolution" formed some of the basis of the arguments presented here.)

* As much as one game out of 82 can be meaningful.

Related:
Unhappy Anniversary (Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports)
Few cheers for Bettman anniversary (Jack Todd, Montreal Gazette)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.