What we have in professional hockey is a failure to communicate. This can happen when the body lacks a head, which has been a problem for years.
John A. Ziegler Jr., appointed president of the National Hockey League in 1977, was a decent enough fellow. John’s only flaw was that, like Orville and Wilbur Wright, he had this urge to fly. Thinking of himself as a bird, John spent more time on the Concorde than at his desk. So when the NHL needed Ziegler to act, he could be found only on radar.
He was succeeded briefly by Gil Stein, a Philadelphia lawyer who, in his spare hours, wrote poetry and rigged the Hall of Fame voting so as to secure his induction as a builder.
Meanwhile, there is this administrative arm called the Board of Governors. Dollar Bill Wirtz, boss of the Blackhawks, chaired this august group for the longest while until he was supplanted by Bruce McNall, a new breed type who owned the Los Angeles Kings. Both collected coins, Wirtz preferring the spendable kind while McNall went for the ancient variety. He once paid $420,000 for an Athena decadrachm from the 5th Century B.C.
The price was about four times what the thing was worth and about four times what the Hawks paid Bobby Hull before he bolted for Winnipeg. Unfortunately, McNall wasn’t backed by such properties as the lovely Bismarck Hotel, and he could be headed for the penalty box. As cutthroat as Dollar Bill is, he is a priest next to McNall.
To rectify this lack of direction, the NHL hired as commissioner Gary Bettman, a New York basketball guy who cannot be described as a rink rat. What’s worse, this doughty little leader of a bilingual industry speaks neither English nor French.
He threatens to “postpone” the start of the regular schedule next Saturday instead of telling us what we know, that such an action would constitute a lockout. Bettman mumbles about “cost containment” while refusing to employ the preferred popular term of the ’90s, salary cap. You read this gibberish and wonder how Bettman can order eggs in a restaurant and not get oatmeal.
Whatever, here we are on the cusp of another fractured sports season. Bettman claims he doesn’t want to be like baseball, but he’s right there with Fehr-Ravitch in the all-important animosity column. To drive home his point, Bettman decrees that players must buy their own plane tickets to training camp and receive no meal money while there. This is the rawest form of insulting the product.
Granted, as in football and basketball, the NHL has taken to spending unholy sums on untried kids, a pay-on-promise scheme that could be rectified by a salary cap on rookies. The Hawks, with a litany of disastrous drafts, tried to solve the dilemma a few years ago upon discovering that some of their prospects were better at playing pool than playing hockey. What the Hawks, of course, did was remove the pool table from their locker room.
They still haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1961, which is 18 years before the league consumed the Edmonton Oilers, who have won five Stanley Cups since. Ah, but this argument is all about helping small-market franchises like Edmonton that allegedly can’t cope. In fact, it’s the Oilers who should be sharing with the Hawks-brains, if not money, too.
What this benevolent movement to prop up small-market teams really involves is preserving possible expansion venues. If, say, Phoenix is held open, it represents maybe $125 million to baseball owners and $75 to their hockey brethren. But if the financially strapped Pittsburgh Pirates or Winnipeg Jets move there, their leagues might be stronger, yet their owners’ wallets weaker.
So if the small markets can push for a salary cap, the large markets can unbutton their shirts, let their hearts fall out and agree to revenue sharing. Exactly what Bettman calls this policy is uncertain, but it feels a lot like collecting coins.