Woe, Canada : Hockey, the National Game, Has Fled South and NHL Economics Indicate It Won't Return Soon

By HELENE ELLIOTT

Nov. 13, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Will the last Canadian-based NHL team to move to the United States please turn out the lights?

Although their flight has halted--at least temporarily--after the Quebec Nordiques’ departure for Denver and the Winnipeg Jets’ move to Phoenix, the plight of NHL hockey in Canada has, in many ways, never appeared worse.

Thousands of seats go unsold for games in Ottawa’s new Corel Centre, and the Calgary Flames play to about 85% capacity in the expensively renovated Saddledome. Vancouver fills about 90% of the seats at GM Place, and even the Montreal Canadiens don’t sell out every game. The Toronto Maple Leafs, who play the Mighty Ducks tonight in Anaheim, do well at the box office, but they haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967.

It’s bad enough that Canada lost the World Cup of Hockey to the United States in September. Still, most Canadians accept it as the outcome of a compelling and fair competition. That native sons make up an all-time low of 60.8% of the NHL’s players is also tolerable because they believe foreigners add skill and flair to Canada’s uniquely gritty style.

But losing their teams because the American dollar is stronger and more plentiful strikes them as unjust, a difference that can’t be settled on the ice.

“There is some feeling we’ve lost control of the game,” said Christie Blatchford, a columnist for the Toronto Sun. “The World Cup loss is a matter of national pride, and couple it with the fact that Hamilton [a city located between Toronto and Buffalo] can’t seem to get an NHL franchise when cities that, to us, appear to be bizarre for hockey or that appreciate it in a different way are getting franchises, and it combines for a sense of loss.”

The Nordiques and Jets, situated in cities with small business communities and arenas that had no luxury boxes, couldn’t keep pace with rising player salaries. The Nordiques were sold for $75 million and became the Colorado Avalanche before last season, and the Jets, bought for about $67 million by Richard Burke and Stephen Gluckstern, became the Phoenix Coyotes this summer.

“Everybody has a different version of what should have happened. The [new] arena should have been built sooner. There’s probably half a dozen reasons,” said Winnipeg lawyer Mark Chipman, who led a group called Save the Jets. Drawing on mom-and-pop businesses and kids’ piggy banks, the group raised $60 million to help support the team. It wasn’t enough.

“Even if we had gotten it done, we would have run out of time,” Chipman said. “In three years’ time, we might have been back asking the public [for money] again. . . . I don’t think the NHL owners really care about where their markets are. They say they do. The whole lockout [in October, 1994] was to protect the small markets, they said. But the collective bargaining agreement has never been used to stop the escalation of salaries.”

In Quebec, individual fans could afford to pay only so much for tickets, and there was little corporate support to pick up the financial slack.

“In the new world of the NHL, it wasn’t a strong market, it’s as simple as that,” said Pierre Gauthier, who spent 12 years with Quebec as a scout and is now general manager of the Ottawa Senators. “You can’t blame the government, you can’t blame Marcel [Aubut, the former owner]. That’s free enterprise. If you have any kind of business, those are the issues you have to deal with.”

The Edmonton Oilers last winter nearly fled to Minnesota or Nashville. They stayed only after a local group, Friends of the Oilers, recruited local businesses in a massive ticket-selling effort and the NHL devised a program that gives Canadian teams up to $5 million U.S. annually if they reach specified season-ticket and advertising sales levels. The program, which will be reviewed after next season, is also providing subsidies to the Senators and Flames.

“It’s tough for Canadian teams because they’re in smaller markets with smaller revenue sources and have to deal with the 30% difference on the dollar,” Gauthier said. “It’s like fighting with an arm behind your back.”

The subsidy isn’t huge, but it allowed the Oilers to commit $6.1 million over two years to re-sign their two best young players, Doug Weight and Jason Arnott. With season-ticket sales up from 6,200 to 13,200 and national sponsors such as McDonald’s about to pitch in dollars and clout, the Oilers have staged a tremendous turnaround.

But will it last?

“It’s kind of like the chicken and the egg. You can’t get good players until you get fan and business support, but you can’t get support until you have good players and a good team,” said Doug Piper, the Oilers’ executive vice president of business operations. “A few years ago, we were not able to sign players who had grown into a higher economic market. We’re finally ahead of the chicken-and-egg trap.

“That assistance program is really important for us to survive in a small market. If they ever take it away, it’s going to be difficult for us. But I don’t think it will be taken away because even U.S. teams realize how ingrained hockey is in Canada.”

Perhaps, but hockey was deeply ingrained in Winnipeg. The Jets, whose roots were in the World Hockey Assn., were the first North American team to import Europeans en masse, bringing Swedes Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson to play with Bobby Hull. The Nordiques, also WHA survivors, carried on a long tradition of excellence in the NHL’s most French city.

“In the final analysis, both teams left for the same reason: nobody was prepared to own that team in that market,” said NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who got the Jets a one-year reprieve while they sought funding for a new arena but couldn’t postpone the inevitable. “Faced with that state of affairs, there’s nothing you can do but move the club. The reason is no bona-fide owner stepped up, and in the absence of a new building, new owners concluded it would be a risky investment.”

It makes sense. But emotion often overrides logic.

“There’s something special about small Canadian cities. Talk to anybody who went to Winnipeg as a visitor, and they’ll tell you they were never treated bad,” said King forward Ed Olczyk, who spent parts of five seasons with the Jets. “I feel fortunate I got to play there twice. I raised my family there. I had a house there the first time. I still talk to people there, and I feel bad when I call them. It’s like opening a wound, and I don’t know if it will ever be sutured.”

That wound isn’t likely to be healed by adding a team elsewhere in Canada through expansion. Hamilton was the only Canadian city to submit an expansion application, and its chances are considered negligible.

“Let’s say you did get in, you did sell your 13,000 season tickets and you did get your luxury boxes and your corporate support. Then you’d qualify for a small-market subsidy,” Oiler General Manager Glen Sather told the Hamilton Spectator. “Do you think large American markets would let a team in that they’re going turn around and grant a subsidy to?”

An editorial in the Toronto Star predicted Hamilton will be snubbed and called it, “the latest chapter in a continuing national tragedy as ‘our game’ slips away south.”

Bettman said he hasn’t ruled it out. “We’ll look at the applications and see what makes sense and which teams would help strengthen the league,” he said. “This isn’t an American issue or a Canadian issue. I understand the importance of Canada to the game.”

Besides losing economic control of “their” game, Canadians fear hockey will lose its quirky innocence in the hands of Americans. With the influx of U.S. dollars and marketing techniques, they worry that hockey will be tarted up and sold like breakfast cereal without regard to its history or essence.

James Deacon, sports editor of the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s, decried what he called “a Shaqification of sport” in the U.S., an emphasis on the individual over the team that contradicts hockey’s credo.

“My biggest concern about the Americanization of hockey is that hockey has always been inherently a team sport. The ethic is to check your ego at the door. Walk into the locker room with a big ego and your own guys will chop you down in practice,” he said. “But the U.S. tradition in sport, whether it’s baseball, basketball or football, is you’re a superstar. You don’t even tie your own shoes. There’s a reward in the U.S. for being that kind of star.”

Blatchford is worried too.

“For hockey players, the league’s growth has been a great thing and I like to see them getting rich. They’re getting American exposure, which is good for them. . . . I just have a terrible fear that if it’s dumbed down and the traditions that were born here are forgotten, 20 years down the road you’ll walk into an NHL dressing room and no one will talk to you. They’ll be jerks, like baseball players, and turn their backs to you.”

Bettman said the NHL will never turn its back on its Canadian members. “I’m optimistic about the six Canadian teams. I didn’t want to lose any teams from Canada, and I don’t want to lose any more,” he said. “Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa, if there’s fan support there, will succeed.”

Gauthier agreed. “It’s a new world. I don’t believe we should be complaining. I believe we should work at making it better for our fans,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with having more teams in the U.S. Maybe the weaker markets couldn’t support NHL teams.

“We’re getting into the 21st century and our game is in transition. In reality, it’s the best thing for the game. We’re getting more kids playing and now it’s an international game. We’ve got six teams in Canada, and we should be proud of them and that 60% or 65% of the players in the best league in the world come from our country.”

Times staff writer Lisa Dillman contributed to this story.

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The Changing Face

Hockey isn’t only Canada’s game anymore. Over the years, the NHL has taken on an increasingly international flavor:

Percentage of players

1967-68

U.S. born: 2.0

Canadian born: 96.7

Non-North American born: 1.3

1977-78

U.S. born: 6.8

Canadian born: 89.5