THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, February 17, 2005, Thursday

Copyright 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

February 17, 2005, Thursday FINAL

SECTION: SPORTS, Pg. D3

HEADLINE: BETTMAN BROUGHT HOCKEY TO ITS KNEES

BYLINE: JIM LITKE Columnist

BODY: A DOZEN YEARS have passed since a behind-the-scenes NBA power broker named Gary Bettman stepped off the fast track at what was then the hottest pro sports league and signed on as commander in chief of the coldest.
"When I first heard about it," said Pat Williams, general manager of the NBA's Orlando Magic at the time, "I sent the guy a puck. And I heard he spent all day at his desk trying to figure out how to open it up."
Bettman is working at it still - while the sport he was supposed to build burns to the ground.
It made little difference that this farce of a negotiation between the NHL's rock-headed owners and clueless players ended with Bettman's announcement yesterday that the season was finished. It's pointless, too, arguing about winners and losers - whenever the game gets back on its skates. Everybody lost, fans most of all.
What might be instructive, though, is to recall how this game of "chicken" began. It might be the best way to keep it from happening again.
That was early in 1993, when Bettman was NBA commissioner David Stern's right-hand man, praised by insiders for helping develop and sell the salary cap that brought relative labor peace to pro basketball. He was well-paid, well thought of, and loved going to work every day. And when friends like Williams asked Bettman why he would give all that up, Bettman answered, "I couldn't resist the chance to become commissioner of a sport with the upside potential that hockey has."
The reason it had so much potential, of course, was because of how far hockey lagged behind the three other major team sports. Bettman was not a "hockey guy" - his first real exposure came during pickup games while he was an undergraduate studying labor relations at Cornell in the 1970s. But he was a marketing whiz, and he had a plan.
Viewed strictly from the supply side, that plan was a rousing success. The number of franchises increased from 21 to 30, revenues quadrupled from $400 million to more than $2 billion, and players' salaries more than tripled from $558,000 in Bettman's first season to $1.8 million in the last one.
But all that expansion came at a considerable cost. Bettman locked out the players and wound up canceling almost half the 1994-95 season in a failed bid to get a salary cap and luxury tax. Then, he passed on a chance to opt out of the agreement two more times - in 1995 and 1997 - rather than endanger the league's expansion plans.
New arenas were going up, the Nagano Olympics offered worldwide exposure and multimillion-dollar expansion fees were lining the owners' pockets. It was easy to get swept up in the notion that once the NHL blanketed the U.S. map from coast to coast and locked up a big TV deal, enough money would flow in to cover up all the mistakes.
Not being a "hockey guy," though, Bettman made a fatal miscalculation. He grew the game recklessly and watched his owners lavish profligate contracts on players, assuming that demand would eventually catch up with a suddenly bountiful supply. The opposite turned out to be true.
The NHL landed one big TV contract with ABC/ESPN in 1999 - a five-year, $600-million deal - but ratings were minuscule. That's why the two-year deal with NBC signed in 2004 doesn't include rights fees, only revenue sharing. The flow of cash has slowed to a trickle.
The knocks against hockey when Bettman took over were its fascination with fighting, its limited regional appeal and blue-collar roots, even the fact that the puck is hard to follow on the small screen.
Now, fisticuffs are down. But gone, too, are a handful of franchises in hockey-mad Canada and the wide-open style of play that made Wayne Gretzky a household name. They've been replaced by Sun Belt towns with no hockey roots and little developing affection for the plodding, clutch-and-grab version of the game being peddled.
During the weekend, when Bettman briefly lifted a ban on owners speaking out, one of his staunchest supporters dared wonder whether the rush to expand had come at the expense of the product.
"We might be better off to stop chasing growth and revenue and play just high-quality hockey and let its popularity take care of itself," Peter Karmanos Jr., the outspoken owner of the Carolina Hurricanes, told The New York Times.
"We're not a public corporation," he added. "We don't have to have compounded annual growth."
They won't have to worry about that, at least not for the foreseeable future. No matter when, or in what form the NHL returns, it won't find people clamoring to get back under the tent.
"You hear how certain people believe that the hardcore fan will definitely return, that the damage isn't irreparable," Flyers captain Keith Primeau said in Philadelphia.
"I think that's a huge miscalculation or judgment in error of who and what your fan base is. That, I think, is going to alarm a lot of people when the doors are reopened." Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Reach him at jlitkeap.org