At his State of the League address in Detroit on Saturday, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman made a very big issue out of the fact he saved the Pittsburgh Penguins and planned to save the Phoenix Coyotes.
As all hockey fans know, the Penguins required bankruptcy protection (for a second time in franchise history) a decade ago but because the team eventually drafted Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin (after the Penguins once again faced financial difficulties in 2002) and because Mario Lemieux jumped into the ownership game (to make sure he was paid the $33 million he was owed), Pittsburgh was able to overcome its financial mess ($37.5 million in losses in 1998 and 1999) and remain a viable NHL member.
“Truth be told, it’s probably fair to say that the Pittsburgh Penguins – during their bankruptcy period – were in worse shape,” Bettman said on Saturday afternoon. “Because they didn’t even have at the time the prospect of a new building. And look at where they are today. …
“We didn’t walk out on Pittsburgh, we fought to fix their problems. We’re fighting for Phoenix because of our covenant with the team and the fans there.”
Yeah, just like he didn’t walk out on Winnipeg when he refused to even discuss the concept of a community-owned franchise (which he later allowed in Edmonton), publicly declared that there had to be one single owner approved by the NHL governors and then did everything in his power to move the team out of Winnipeg to any other stinking building in any other non-hockey community he could find.
Most journalists today like to write (for brevity’s sake, one suspects) that the Jets were simply moved to Phoenix in 1996, but that isn’t entirely true. The purchasers of the Jets, Dr. Richard Burke and Steven Gluckstern, wanted to move the team to Minneapolis, but when they couldn’t cut a deal with the Target Centre, Bettman “arranged” to have the team move into Jerry Colangelo’s basketball building in downtown Phoenix, the one with the obstructed views at one end.
When Bettman says: “We didn’t walk out on Pittsburgh, we fought to fix their problems. We’re fighting for Phoenix because of our covenant with the team and the fans there,” he’s handing the journalists in attendance a lie and expecting those journalists to believe him without a challenge. Sadly, they did.
Gary Bettman did nothing for Winnipeg fans — or Quebec fans when the Nordiques moved to Colorado. He had no covenant in either of those markets. He likes to pick and choose his “covenants.”
On Saturday, Gary Bettman and the truth were strangers.