30 years of Bettman

[Xanlet]

Since in 6 posts you've established and maintained a pattern of comments that direct blame squarely at Bettman without ever mentioning anyone else either specifically or generally as being responsible for the things you complain about, IMO it's pretty logical to conclude that you're only holding Bettman accountable.

This may blow your mind, but a person can focus on one part of the problem without saying "this is 100% of the problem and nothing else is". You purposely set up a false interpretation of my position (that I 100% blame Bettman and no one else (your bolding)). Now to try and scramble to justify this absurd leap is actually just embarrassing, especially considering your earlier threshold to accuse me of the same when simply asking another person if they did or did not think Bettman making the owners happy mean "The NHL is running well".

If I make 6 posts saying a player is great, am I saying this is the only great player in the league? Of course not, and if I make 6 posts criticizing Bettman this does not mean I can't criticize other problems with the league separate from Bettman. It's quite perplexing that I have to explain some thing so simple.

 

[KevFu]

To me, valid criticism of someone in power shouldn't be a list of "bad things" WITHOUT a corresponding action that would be better/smarter.

When you look for the better/smarter action, and assess its' realistic possibility -- (and just mention a thing and the posters on this site will immediately tell you how realistic/unrealistic it is, prompting a 20-post tangent within a thread) -- then you discover what things are just circumstance where you really can't blame someone for not finding a better solution.

Like, the Fanatics deal sucks. Everyone knows it. If there was another deal on the table for about the same money with a superior company and they took the bad deal.... then yeah, blast away. But if that was the best deal on the table, then any commissioner is going to take that deal.


An example of lousy sports leadership WITH supporting evidence would be the Pac-12's Larry Scott. Launching Pac-12 Network, he decided NOT to partner with a big television company when ESPN and Fox were interested and go it 100% alone. This led to low carriage and low revenues. He also decided to rent a new Pac-12 HQ that was in downtown San Francisco ($68 per square foot) moving from the FAR CHEAPER Walnut Creek in the East Bay ($39 per square foot). Just the real estate decision cost the Pac-12 $13 million a year. The network was a debacle that saw such low revenues he had UCLA and USC call the Big Ten and ask to join, ending a 90+ year affiliation.

 

[Boss Man Hughes]

His job isn’t to make you happy, you do understand this?

Of course not. But there is no good reason for fans to like put him. Put his worthless sorry ass out with the rest of the garbage.

 

[Ted Hoffman]

Of course not. But there is no good reason for fans to like put him. Put his worthless sorry ass out with the rest of the garbage.

30 years + (IMO, shitty) commissioners in other sports, and some people still don't realize that fans don't decide who a league's commissioner is: the owners do. [Or, in the case of college sports, the college presidents do.]

Hell, Mark Emmert was a goddamn worthless piece of shit [and I'm being WAY too kind] and that was plainly evident from the moment he decided to get involved with Penn State football, and it still took what, 13 years for him to finally step aside? And that was still his choice, even as he sat around collecting a paycheck with both hands up his ass as NCAA sports unraveled and problems appeared at other major universities that should have earned at least two of them the death penalty.

 

[SImpelton]

Minnesota moved because Norm Green's wife demanded he move after he had an affair. Karamanos had an offer for a new arena but he wanted the state to pick up his operating losses while the new arena was being built. Considering that he probably took a huge bath the two years in Greensboro.

As far as QC goes, compare the effort to keep the Coyotes in Az vs not lifting a finger to keep the Nordiques in QC.

I kinda feel like this goes closer to the heart of things than a lot of us are prepared to admit.

Ultimately the Canadians don't really give a damn about Hartford or Minnesota, and Winnipeg was not exactly a healthy franchise before it moved either. The city has grown into being an NHL town since then, obviously, but in the 90s it was a real stretch to call it one. Winnipeg was a casualty of the bad exchange rates as much as anything, and the decision to go south may well have been made before Bettman took office.

I really do feel like "but muh Nordiques" is like 85% of the Canadian angst against Bettman. Especially because a lot of Quebec fans implicitly understood that if QC goes south, NHL hockey will never be back. And it will never be back because unlike the WHL merger which created a QC team in the first place. Montreal has absolutely no reason whatsoever to play ball this time.

The only reason the Nordiques were ever allowed by Montreal to exist in the first place was to make the WHL go away as a threat to the supremacy of the NHL. Faced with an existential threat on that level, Montreal was forced to concede a second Quebec team, in the same way the Rangers were made to share New York.

There is now no urgent incentives to compel Montreal to give up the eastern Quebec media market again. They certainly will not do so without being appropriately compensated, and they absolutely do not have to concede anything and can drag out negotations indefinitely if they so choose.

so there's always somewhere else to expand to without bringing up Quebec and the heckstorm it will cause to try to get Montreal to make concessions. Bettman killed the Nordiques and created a situation where the Nordiques can never happen again. That's his cardinal sin and the one thing the Canadians will never let him live down.

 

[Ted Hoffman]

Of course, the answer to that question is rooted in the WHA merger, which is rooted in the war with the WHA, and the fact that the NHL didn't expand for 50 years until 1967...

I somehow missed this, and I'm going to call it out.

It's incorrect to say that the league didn't expand for 50 years. It's even incorrect to say that the league didn't net expand for 50 years. The first NHL season (1917-18) had 4 teams, and one of those (Montreal Wanderers) shut down mid-season when its arena burned to the ground. A team was added back 2 years later (Quebec, which moved to Hamilton after a season) and two teams were added in 1924 (Boston, Montreal Maroons); by 1926-27, the league was up to 10 teams and stayed that way until 1931-32 when teams started having financial issues and had to shutter operations. From 1936-37 to 1938-39, the league had 8 teams; from there to 1941-42, it had 7 before the Brooklyn Americans had to shut down. Probably also not a good idea to be expanding during WW2, so at best 1946 would have been the earliest practical time to expand.

We can get into the reasons it didn't happen for ~20 years - mainly greed from the existing owners who didn't want to share their increasing profits with anyone else - but it's factually inaccurate to say the NHL didn't expand for 50 years. It did, and it saw teams drop out along the way until it finally landed at 6.

 

[KevFu]

You're absolutely right, and I'm well aware of both Olberman's Original Six rant, and the saga of the New York Americans. Faux Pas on my part.

 

[Fenway]

 

[LadyStanley]

Bettman got a shout out for 30 years as commissioner when the VGK went to the White House.

NHLPA executive director Martin Walsh was mentioned too.