Return to InstaPunk.com
|
Los Angeles Daily News
Whatever happened to the NHL?
Saturday, November 13, 2004 - Here's a little query for those feeling
all smug over on the Avenue of Americas to ponder:
What if they canceled the entire NHL season ... and nobody
noticed?
That's right, Ice Breath, no NHL. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not a single
game played. Not one puck dropped.
And the nation reacted with the most telling yawn in the history
of sports.
No doubt this comes as a shock, but this is happening, which is
to say, the NHL is not.
By Saturday night, 212 games had been canceled. An entire month
of the season wiped out as the owners' lockout reached 59 days.
There is no end in sight to this, and it's very likely the NHL is
about to become the first professional sports league to lose an
entire season, which is saying something.
Maybe by then someone will have actually noted that ice rinks are
empty, but don't bet your Jason Allison bobblehead on it.
The whole league has been sucked into a black hole. Just
disappeared like it never existed. Vanished from the face of the
Earth.
They need to bring back our X-files friends for this one. How do
you misplace an entire league, and why couldn't it happen to the
reality shows?
Even more curious, not only has the NHL departed, apparently so
has anyone who ever cared about it.
There's no outrage. No frustrated fans picketing the NHL's New
York headquarters. No daily stories in the newspaper, no calls to
sports talk shows, no angry letters to the editors.
For a rough and tumble sport, it sure seems to have a lot of
passive aficionados. Where's the passion, the indignation, the
frustration?
If the NFL had a strike or lockout, there'd be four stories a day
in newspapers. Irate fans would flood talk shows. Somebody would be
calling out someone every day.
If it were the NBA or major-league baseball, fans would be in
mourning. Lives would be disrupted. Vacations ruined. Rage would
rule the day until the sport resumed.
Newspaper columnists would opine on it daily. Best I can tell so
far, most columnists are like everyone else -- they don't know the
NHL is gone.
It's the most bizarre lockout in sports history. If a tree fell
in the forest and nobody heard it, it'd be the NHL.
Owners are in this for the long haul and apparently blind to all
this. They are fond of saying they will actually lose less money by
canceling the season than by playing it.
It's a perverse logic. Why, just close down the league for good
and think of all the money that can be saved!
Owners should be paying attention to the general apathy that has
greeted their sport's hiatus. They may well break the players'
union, but at a cost they can never fully recover.
Because unlike baseball and the NFL, there is no guarantee NHL
fans will come back.
The NHL has overexpanded. It's up to 30 teams, and at least a
third of them are in cities with no roots in ice hockey, let alone
that white frozen stuff. Fathers don't take the children out on the
ice-covered local lake to sharpen their power play in Phoenix.
There's no history to fall back on in all these warm-weather cities.
It's not like the NHL was still carrying the same buzz it had 10
years ago. It was hip and happening back then. Women were drawn to
the sport. The league had a TV deal with Fox. It kept expanding.
It's no longer the country's fourth-largest sport. It's so far
behind the NFL, the NBA, baseball and NASCAR, it's embarrassing to
mention them together.
The NFL just signed TV deals worth $11.5 billion. The NHL
doesn't really have a national TV contract. It only makes money on
what TV advertising it can sell. Infomercials do better.
Does anyone even remember who won the Stanley Cup last year?
Hint: from a state that grows a lot of oranges.
Players thought owners would knuckle under around Christmas, but
that ain't gonna happen. The owners have dug in, even if they can't
recognize they may be taking the league down with them in the
process.
You don't hear much from the players these days, either. Many
are playing in Europe, and for almost half of them, that's home. How
fired up can they be to end this thing?
How fired up is anyone? It's the silent lockout. It's news these
days if the NHL makes news. And if it actually makes the cover of
the sports sections, editors will investigate.
The baseball playoffs are over now, but college football is in
full swing, the NFL is barely at the half-way point, the NBA is
underway and college basketball is about to start.
And the NHL? Didn't it used to be around here some place? Fast,
entertaining little sport played on ice?
Gone behind the magician's cape. Gone without even a puff of
smoke. Erased from the memory banks.
A year from now the NHL may well get that hard salary cap to
control the spending it was unable to control itself, but it's
paying a steep price in the process.
Because no one is paying attention, and if nothing else, the NHL
needs to pay attention to that.
---
|