With a truly outstanding Stanley Cup playoff spring in full bloom, we enter May with another mind-numbing discussion of the Phoenix Coyotes financial woes and whether or not the Coyotes might one day return to Winnipeg.
It’s mind-numbing because it’s moot. It’s mind-numbing because far too many commentators are just catching up with old news (read this headline today: Suddenly, players’ union singing Canada’s praises. Wow, “suddenly?” NHLPA executive director Paul Kelly has been singing Canada’s praises for more than a year). And it’s mind-numbing because commissioner Gary Bettman is still more concerned about doing right by himself and a handful of owners, than doing right by the game.
We got word this week that the league had bailed out the financially moribund Coyotes once again and that it was the NHL, not Doug Moss, Wayne Gretzky et al., who were running the team. That turned out to be patently false, as far too many of these newspaper-reported items have turned out to be, and while the NHL did, in fact, send the Coyotes a pile of dough, the league did not take over the team.
Not like that would matter. As long as Bettman is commissioner he will insure that there will be a franchise in Phoenix. After all, he’s the guy who put that team in the desert and he will fight to the death (of the league?) to keep it there.
After all, despite what a lot of hockey fans really want to believe, Bettman isn’t stupid. He knows his reputation relies on his decision, made early in his career, to place teams in the American south. He believed in the “footprint,” and despite all the signs to the contrary — and everything that isn’t outright delusional in this world — the footprint has, to this date, failed to provide the revenue or the fan base that Bettman was so sure the NHL would receive.
Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Nashville, Atlanta and Phoenix are great places to live (I’d move to anyone of them tomorrow), it’s too bad the folks who live there aren’t hockey fans.
A simple combination of history and mathematics would suggest that by moving teams from the U.S. South and Southwest to Ontario, Quebec, and the Canadian West, it might not guarantee absolute financial success, but it will guarantee a fan base and therefore a legitimate chance at financial success.
Certainly, in Winnipeg, an NHL franchise would lose money, but not the $40 million that Phoenix lost on operations in 2008-09.
However, once again, that’s moot, at least until there is a new commissioner.
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