Gary Bettman Can Suck It

No matter how much I wash, it still smells like ass...

Good going you money-grubbing jag-offs. Due to your unbelievably myopic greed and complete inability to negotiate or even notice that you're destroying an entire sports league, the NHL season will be officially cancelled tomorrow.

I know, most people don't care, and that's exactly the point. There's no public outcry from hockey fans (they exist, I promise!) because they're completely aware that pleas from fans won't have any impact when you're dealing with an out of control greed machine like the current crop of hockey owners.

I entirely blame the owners and here's why; Don't believe the bullshit line about how they just want to ensure 'competitiveness' within the league. Bullshit, they want to make as much money as humanly possible and really couldn't give a shit about the overall entertainment value of the league. If every owner got their way, there would be 50 or 60 teams, half of which made money and half of which lost money, but all paying into the league. The half that didn't make money would be kept afloat by the big market teams that, thanks to the salary cap, make ridiculous profits. The biggest drawback, however, is that the teams that do well by running the team well and winning and selling merchandise are then in turn punished by having to give a chunk of their money to the Clippers of the league who don't give a rat's ass about winning because they know the rest of the league will bail them out. When you punish the winners and reward the losers in the hope that they'll both become middle-of-the-road, .500 teams, you've got a recipe for an awful entertainment product.

Salary caps are designed to make the entire league equally mediocre. It's akin to taking the smartest kid in a class and telling him to stop studying until the dumbest kid catches up. It's nice for the dumb kid, but a fucking tragedy for the smart kid. Anyone who has watched baseball or English soccer knows that it's actually much more exciting to have long-standing rivalries like Sox/Yankees or Man United/Arsenal than it is to watch the Florida Panthers play the Dallas Stars for the Stanley cup. And I say this having been born and raised in a small team market. At the end of the day, I would rather watch the Olympic 100 meter dash than a local junior high 'everybody gets a medal' day.

Gary Bettman takes most of his cues from David Stern of the NBA and the only reason Stern hasn't suffered the same fate is that the NBA has gotten extremely lucky over the last 20 years. From Magic/Bird to Jordan/Lebron, basketball has been able to succeed by promoting individuals and not teams. Hockey hasn't been so lucky. Once Gretzky retired, the NHL was left with a product where 99% of people in NHL cities couldn't name one player on their local team.

The other party to blame in this whole mess is greedy city governments. Every stupid city in the country from San Jose to Charlotte has been whipping out their kneepads and checkbooks to get an NHL team. From paying for stadiums to any and all other bribes, there's no depths city governments seem shy from sinking to as they rape taxpayers for the privelege of having a 'real live' sports team in their pathetic little town. Of course, before they bend over completely, they need to be promised by the league that even though their city is 1/50 the size of New York and their owner is some corporate dipshit who just wants a place to send sales clients, that they'll be guaranteed a Stanley Cup eventually because, due to the rules in place, everyone eventually wins.

What hockey really needs is for 10-12 teams to fold (my vote is Nashville, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Florida, Anaheim, Phoenix, San Jose, Atlanta, Columbus and the Islanders). Then let those franchises move to the minor leagues and adopt a 'promotion/relegation' system such as English Soccer. After each season, the top two teams in the minor league go to the NHL and the bottom two teams in the NHL are sent to the minors for the next season. Now that's incentive! Eliminate the draft and let teams sign young talent whenever they feel like they can risk it.

So raise a glass to the death of the NHL. Hopefully, it's the first move in an overall revolution of sports to bring it back to fans and take it away from Corporate Salesmen.