On the Predators
This doesn’t need to be nearly as long as many analysts have made it.
The TSN.ca editorial sums up the situation nicely. Remember that the NHL owners’ group is possibly the most hidebound, self-destructive old-boy network in North America short of the current U.S. administration. They just elected Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs chairman of the league’s Board of Governors, either the most- or second most-powerful position in the league depending on how much freedom you believe Gary Bettman has. This despite Jacobs’s systematic competitive destruction of his own franchise, ruining a franchise that should be the league’s flagship U.S. team. (Hockey’s natural homeland in the U.S. is the “Three M’s”: Massachussetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. Detroit as a city is dying, and the Twin Cities have no national cachet — sorry, Lileks. But Boston has the name, the climate, and the history. The Bruins should be a marquee franchise, and Jacobs certainly has the money to make them a winner. He just doesn’t care, and in a city with an outsized sense of pride, that’s a surefire route to irrelevance.)
And yet he’s the leader of the NHL ownership group. Why? Because he’s been in the league forever, and he’s completely non-threatening to his peers. His team makes money without exerting the slightest amount of effort. Sure, the serious local fans hate him, but hockey is secure enough in the city that the team can survive on corporate tickets and two-game-a-year casual spectators.
So, how could anyone think a group of owners that extols this man’s business practices would approve a loud-mouthed high-tech CEO who tried to move one team already before buying it, then started selling tickets for the new location before getting his hands on his second-choice club? No chance. No, Canadian fans, it’s not a conspiracy against you. It’s that your best market picked the wrong patron.
Balsillie might well have been a good owner. But a group that idolizes Jacobs and Bill Wirtz is nowhere close to accepting its own Mark Cuban. So Hamilton loses, Nashville still loses, Kansas City (probably) wins, and NHL fans get to complain again. Which is really what we’re best at anyway.
28 June 2007 / 0 Comments / Tags: hockey