What Is Gary Bettman Trying to Prove?

I don't know about you, but if you're a hockey fan like me, don't you get sick of hearing about the constant woes of the Nashville Predators? Without going into painstaking detail, the owner of the Predators, Craig Leopold, has been trying to sell the Predators for months. In the time he has owned the Predators, they have been a consistently losing investment. Yes, the team is talented and has put a good product on the ice, and has been in the upper echelon of teams in the NHL, but come on, the team is in friggin' Nashville, for Pete's sake. Hardly a bastion of hockey fandom. Case in point - last year in the playoffs, when Nashville was ranked #1 or #2 or #3 in their conference, local Nashville papers and sports programs didn't even cover or talk about the playoff games in progress. That's because no one cares about hockey down there.

Earlier this year, the CEO of Research in Motion, Jim Balsillie, offered to buy the team and was willing to essentially overpay for the team. Talks were set in motion and they were close to a deal, when Balsillie tipped his hand and started to sell season tickets in the Hamilton area for a hockey team that had yet to relocate there. The NHL and it's commissioner, Gary Bettman found out about this, and persuaded Leopold to pull the plug on the deal. Since then, no one has offered anything even close to what Balsillie offered.

I am disappointed that Balsillie got railroaded by the NHL. Yes, he didn't play it smart and kept his mouth shut until the deal was done, but why the NHL nixed it because of his clear intentions to re-locate, I will never understand. Moving it to Hamilton or Kitchener-Waterloo would be a huge boost to the local economy, but more than that, it would breakdown the monopolizing power of Maple Leafs Sports Entertainment (MLSE) and would immediately force the Leafs to put a competitive product on the ice (as we speak, the Leafs are in familiar territory this year - mediocre to suckedness). Hamilton/KW would have easily supported another NHL franchise - OK, so the Leafs (and possibly Sabres) will feel some pressure, but so what? Competition is good. Monopoly is bad.

What I find strange is that Leopold wants to sell the team - he is desperate to do so. But he won't sell to Balsillie, because of Balsillie's clear intent to move the team. Balsillie is not a dumb guy - he knows the team won't survive in Nashville, and he also knows that Leopold lost a truckload of money over the years. But somehow Bettman convinced Leopold not to sell (my guess is that the NHL offered to top off any lower offer to make it worth Leopold's while). Nowadays, a consortium of people are trying to save the Preds but putting together an offer, complete with arena rights and so forth.

Why can't Bettman just realize that pushing professional hockey in the U.S. will be a long-term losing proposition. He is too proud to admit that his experiment did not work, that's why. His cronie, Bill Daly, the NHL Vice-President, was on a radio talk show this past summer and he was asked point blank whether Bettman is anti-Canada. Daly skirted the issue and refused comment.

Fact of the matter is, there is not really a whole lot of success stories to report on the expansion teams. Why they stuck a team in Columbus, OH, I will never know. Even some seasoned teams like the Chicago BlackHawks are having problems drawing people into the game. Rather than focussing on existing teams, Bettman seems to have this otherworldly mentality that he must expand, and now his crazy head is looking at over the pond in Europe and Scandanavia.

If you look at the other commissioners in sports (David Stern for the NBA, Roger Goddell for the NFL), they are doing things right. They make sure that the current teams are not flat broke, and they are ensuring that they don't expand if the conditions aren't right. And they are not afraid to yank teams from markets that are simply not working. Bettman needs to take a look at these successful commissioners who are out to better their respective leagues, not just make themselves look good.