COMMENTARY : For Sheer Myopia, Take a Look at the NHL

Trading cards? The NHL may bag the playoffs because the players and owners can’t agree on the distribution of the money gotten from the sale of trading cards?

Give me a break.

Here’s five bucks. Put me down for two Wayne Gretzkys and a Brett Hull.

Now can you please get on with the season?

Of all the stupid things I have heard of in sports--and the list is so long it would take 50 columns to get through it--this is by far the stupidest.

Trading cards. Geez.

Who’s running the NHL, Monty Hall?

Yesterday, I talked to a knowledgeable hockey man, an announcer, somebody who loves the game and makes his living from it, somebody who understands the dynamics of these negotiations. And he said disgustedly: “They’re arguing over bar change. It’s ludicrous. The sport is about to go to hell, and they’re like two guys standing at a bar, arguing over which guy had a draft beer and which guy had a bottle.”

This is so unbelievably myopic, it makes you want to holler, throw up both your hands. Doesn’t anybody in the NHL realize that the playoffs are all there is? That the playoffs are the only opportunity the NHL has to grow an audience? Let me say this again for the benefit of anyone who wasn’t paying attention the first time: There are about 20,000 NHL fans in most of the U.S. cities with NHL franchises. Virtually everyone who wants a seat can get one. If there were many more fans, the NHL would have a network television contract. TV executives are in business to make money. If they thought viewers would watch, they’d put on a pregnant anteater balancing a dinner plate. TV has nothing against the NHL. It simply doesn’t believe anyone will watch.

The only time the NHL generates any real interest among the U.S. public at large is during the Stanley Cup playoffs. I have been writing this sports column for the past eight years, and the only time anybody has ever--ever!--stopped and asked me about hockey was during the playoffs. I get Redskins questions all year long. I get Bullets and Orioles questions in season. Now that Joe Gibbs owns a NASCAR team, I even get questions about auto racing (as if I’d know a cam shaft from Diana Dors). Hockey? Only during the playoffs. Wake up, NHL people. If you don’t have the playoffs, you don’t have squat.

There have been strikes in other sports. Baseball players went out in 1981. NFL players went out in 1982 and 1987. Games were lost from the regular-season schedule, but the season retained credibility because the playoffs remained intact. Legitimate champions were crowned. Closure, however sketchy it may have seemed, was achieved.

Nobody in his right mind cancels the playoffs. You do that, you’re telling your fans they’re chumps. You took their money for 80 meaningless games, strung them along on the promise of playoffs that would determine a champion. They may never forgive you. What makes you think they’ll be there when you’re ready to start?

The NHL owners clearly have backed themselves into an uncomfortable corner by setting up a playoff system that has no monetary incentive for the players. The playoff windfall lands mainly to the owners. NHL players get almost all their money during the regular season. A few years ago, the Philadelphia Flyers played 26 playoff games on the way to losing the Stanley Cup to Edmonton, and their average pay was $700 a game. So clearly, it’s the owners who will get financially smashed if they cancel the playoffs.

But the players will lose too. They inevitably will be seen as villains for not playing, because this is what players are supposed to do, no matter what. The players will be seen as greedy--as players in all professional sports are seen. The average fan might sympathize with the notion that hockey players are underpaid relative to these huge contracts for baseball and basketball players. But that is a relative argument. That fan also will look at a $300,000 average NHL salary, and ask how anyone making that kind of money can whine that he is underpaid? The players have to stop having this kind of salary envy. The NBA, the NFL and Major League Baseball are funded by network television. There simply isn’t that kind of money available to hockey players.

The owners will get no sympathy either. They’re the ones who’ve drawn this line in the sand, and their deadline, like all negotiation deadlines, is artificial. How can the owners claim the moral high ground? They restrict the players’ movement, and churn out ridiculous doomsday brochures about their own financial inviability. They admit to having made a $46 million profit in 1991, and claim that by 1994 they will have a $102 million loss. If that’s true, they are indefensibly incompetent and shouldn’t be in business--the players are doing them a favor by striking. Why do they own teams at all? If business is going to be so bad, why not declare bankruptcy now and avoid the crush later?

Look, I know it’s not just about trading cards. I know the larger issue is about who owns whose likeness. But the fact that the world thinks it’s about trading cards shows you how frivolous hockey has become. The NHL has done such a woeful job of marketing itself in the U.S. that most sports fans don’t even know there are NHL trading cards.

Not that long ago, the NBA was at a similar low ebb as the NHL. It decided to aggressively push its stars. It built a strategy around Magic and Bird, and the trickle-down was that now even a casual NBA fan can name two or three starters on teams. Karl Malone, playing in a land that time forgot, is a star because the NBA made sure to pump him up on TV. The NHL hasn’t done that. There’s Gretzky, Hull, Lemieux and le deluge.

How many Winnipeg Jets can you name?

How many Winnipeg Jets trading cards do you have?