NHL’s Credibility on Thin Ice

They destroyed the village and they didn’t even save it.

The NHL owners can walk through their conquered territory, swell up their chests and proclaim victory after they annihilated the players’ union. But the land beneath their feet is scorched and barren, the buildings around them are demolished.

What good is it to rule a place no one wants?

The NHL can’t be considered one of the “Big Four” professional sports anymore. The worst possible thing happened when the owners wiped out the season by locking out the players: They weren’t missed.

Sure, the hard-core fans suffered. But the general public didn’t notice. More importantly, the television executives found better alternate programs, such as poker. High-stakes poker, celebrity poker, you name it.

As one columnist noted, more people watched hockey players playing poker than playing hockey. Yep, we’d rather see them check than cross-check.

So even though owners and players finally have a new collective bargaining agreement, they have a no-money-up-front network television deal and don’t have a cable TV contract. That means the NHL isn’t really back.

It’s not Game On if the game’s not on TV. Sports has one simple role in the television world: Keep men on the couch so advertisers can sell beer and pickup trucks. The NFL does this better than any other property, which is how Commissioner Paul Tagliabue commanded another $23 billion in the latest round of network negotiations.

When last we saw -- at least, some of us saw -- the NHL, it attracted only a tenth of the viewers of the NFL, one fifth of

NASCAR and less than half of baseball, the PGA and the NBA on network telecasts.

On cable, which is increasingly crucial to all but the NFL, the numbers look even worse for hockey. The NHL ratings were only 1/24 of the ratings the NFL delivered for ESPN, which is why the sports network didn’t exercise its $60-million option for next season.

Someone, somewhere will televise the sport, just because there are so many channels and such a desperate need to fill air time.

But the bidding will be timid, and by the time the contract is divvied up each team will probably have just enough money to sign a backup goalie.

The fans will continue to come to the games. Sports fans are like boxers: They keep coming back no matter how much they’ve been abused. Baseball has survived the cancellation of a World Series and the speculation that so many of those home runs hit in the 1990s were steroid-powered.

In the last NHL season, 23 of 30 teams drew better than 15,000 fans per game, even though the league had an average ticket price of $43.57, according to Team Marketing Report.

It just doesn’t matter if no one watches on TV.

Even in Chicago, an Original Six city, Blackhawk owner Bill Wirtz managed to pound hockey into a little hole because he refused to televise the team’s home games. The Blackhawks haven’t been a big part of the Chicago sports scene since their run to the Stanley Cup finals in 1992. Have you ever heard anyone say “Da Hawks”?

The fans in the arenas will appreciate the rule changes intended to open the flow of the game and boost scoring. But those technical tweaks won’t attract new fans.

Hockey has already tried a bunch of tricks -- NHL players in the Olympics, World vs. North America in the All-Star game -- to no avail. The 2002 Salt Lake City Games produced high-quality hockey played in a U.S. time zone and that’s as good a stage as hockey would get.

And now it’s too late. The much-needed rules changes are too late. The new collective bargaining agreement is too late. Just like track casinos couldn’t save horse racing, any “innovation” the brilliant minds that gave us the lockout could concoct wouldn’t be enough to undo the damage.

The sport couldn’t regain the momentum it lost when it locked the players out for half a season and it won’t recover from this latest blow.

It seemed the only thing Commissioner Gary Bettman and the owners learned from the 1994-95 standoff is, if they’re going to have a lockout, don’t end it until you get what you want. They had nothing to show for the earlier work stoppage -- i.e., no salary cap -- so this time they went for the kill. They smashed the players’ association and made union leader Bob Goodenow look like a fool for leading his minions off the cliff, then caving to a salary cap.

The owners came off as sharp businessmen, but are public relations dunces. They can’t be trusted to get this right.

What hockey needs -- what every sport except the NFL needs -- is a transcendent figure. Someone popular enough to appear in commercials out of uniform, selling non-sports products.

Wayne Gretzky is gone, Mario Lemieux is going and this Sidney Crosby kid better be as good as the two of them combined if the league wants to get back to where it was in the early 1990s.

But it could be a whole generation before another Gretzky comes along, which would mean a lost generation of potential hockey fans.

In the space on the Stanley Cup that would have belonged to the 2005 champions they should inscribe the names of Bettman, Goodenow and everyone else responsible for the demise of hockey, so those who follow will always know whom to blame.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.