PowerPlay Magazine

With the NHL and NHLPA recently agreeing on a new lopsided realignment of franchises the prospect of expansion has once again surfaced in various media outlets. Considering the last rounds of expansion and relocations have not yet proven successful it's remarkable that such a thing can be thought a credible possibility. That credibility originates likely in the zeal Bettman has displayed in keeping struggling franchises afloat and strenuously resisting their relocation. Credit should be given where credit is due, and there has been some appreciable success in his proclaimed mission to “grow the game” in non-traditional markets. But if nothing else it's cathartic to take a closer look and try to glean where and why the mission has faltered.

Nowhere is this mission more ripe for closer inspection than in Phoenix. The poster-child of troubled sports franchises, the punch-drunk 'Yotes organization stumbles seemingly from one off-ice disaster to another. Their usually self-inflicted turmoil has become so prevalent that the franchise has become more or less a punchline that sadly overshadows its plucky and much-loved Winnipeg Jets history. The franchise has fallen far, and yet somehow keeps going like a re-animated corpse from some zombie flick.

Superficially it's fairly obvious why the franchise is in such trouble: It doesn't make nearly enough money; likely because it's in a nowhere location; of a nowhere suburb; of a nowhere hockey town. Add to that the years of gong show organizational management from relocation to the present and it's clear the “invisible hand” of the free market should have brushed aside this ongoing 17 year venture long ago. But it hasn't, and therein likely lies a big part of the problem.

Bettman and the NHL board of governors have stood by this sorry excuse of a franchise year after pitiful year. The aforementioned zeal necessary for such steadfastness could be borne of a kind of evangelism to “grow the game”. It would help explain the fairly irrational, almost pathological obstinacy that has been required of Bettman and the governors to keep the Coyotes in place and operating. But evangelism of the game would by definition mean there is a deep appreciation and respect for the game itself. Despite his meagre protestations to the contrary little of Bettman's history as NHL commissioner has displayed a particularly deep respect or appreciation for anything but the wants and needs of the owners.

It wasn't a deep appreciation and respect for the game itself; a fundamentally hockey decision, that compelled a relocation of the Winnipeg Jets from the cradle of the game in Southern Manitoba to the hot and dry outback of the Sonoran desert. It was a business decision. It wasn't a fundamentally hockey decision to permit the move of team operations from downtown Phoenix to the suburban wastelands of Glendale, it was a business decision. Repeatedly allowing into the fraternity of owners shysters like “Boots” Del Biaggio, John Spano and John Rigas, or nouveau riche, economic bubble-magnates like property developer Steve Ellman or Goldman Sachs' Joseph Ravitch weren't in essence hockey decisions. Those were all business decisions. And of course there are those lockouts. As the balance sheets prove it can be fairly easily argued that Bettman has not been assiduously growing the game of hockey, but the business of hockey. The growth of the actual game, such as it has been, has been merely incidental to that purpose.

It's perfectly fitting that Phoenix is the site of the greatest turmoil in Bettman's growth plan. Phoenix was one of several ground zero's of the subprime mortgage collapse which triggered the Global Financial Crisis. Just like the American government response to the GFC, the NHL keeps throwing good money after bad in the possibly vain hope of propping up what were always fundamentally unsound and thoroughly unprincipled business decisions. But as with the GFC so long as those at fault remain not only in positions of power of influence, but also unaccountable to the turmoil they have wrought there is no reason to expect their motivations nor their decision-making to change, be they concerning exotic financial instruments or be they exotic non-traditional NHL markets.