A Day to Ponder the Season That Has Been Written Off

The NHL was supposed to open its season tonight.

The Tampa Bay Lightning would have begun defending its Stanley Cup championship, no doubt rekindling the battle of wills between budding superstar Vincent Lecavalier and Coach John Tortorella.

The Calgary Flames, who lost to the Lightning in the final, would have opened in Anaheim against the Mighty Ducks, an inadvertently inspired bit of scheduling.

The Ducks lost the 2003 final to New Jersey and missed the playoffs the next season, as had 2002 runner-up Carolina. Would the Flames have continued that pattern or would Jarome Iginla, touted as one of the game’s brightest and most marketable stars, have carried them back to Cup contention?

The Kings would have opened at Colorado, always an emotional matchup. Brett Hull would have made his Phoenix Coyote debut. Obstruction would have been called closely tonight and for the next month, then standards would have relaxed and clutching and grabbing would have made their ugly return.

None of this will happen. Not tonight. Maybe not for more than a year.

NHL owners locked players out on Sept. 15, demonstrating their willingness to kill the season to gain sweeping economic reforms in a new collective bargaining agreement. They may also be killing the sport, another step down a path of stupidity.

This is the essence of the labor dispute: Owners, claiming two-thirds of their number will lose less money during a lockout than if the season were played, want predictable player costs. They’d prefer to get them through a salary cap, set at about $35 million. Commissioner Gary Bettman says he won’t accept a luxury tax, which is less restrictive than a cap, because salaries would still be subject to inflation and owners couldn’t set budgets in advance.

The NHL Players’ Assn. says it will reject a cap or any other proposal linking salaries to a percentage of revenues. No matter that a cap tied to a negotiated percentage of revenues saved the NBA when it was wobbling and on the verge of losing several clubs in the 1980s.

The players’ association wants a market-based system under which salaries would be set by demand and wouldn’t be limited by a cap or threat of a tax. That’s idealistic. In the real world, individuals and businesses wanting to stay solvent peg their expenditures to their revenues. No decision is made in a vacuum. Besides, tying salaries to a percentage of revenues gives players incentive to grow the game, to borrow a favorite Bettman phrase. The more the game is promoted, the higher its revenues. The higher the revenues, the higher salaries will go.

The sides haven’t talked since Sept. 9, when the NHL rejected a union proposal that called for a 5% salary cut and rolling back limits on entry-level salaries. That might have brought short-term relief, but raises would have soon brought salaries back to the $1.83-million average they hit last season. That won’t work, because the NHL will get no upfront money in its new TV deal with NBC and won’t match the money it got in its last deal with ABC and ESPN.

Bill Daly and Ted Saskin, the seconds-in-command for the NHL and union, say there are no talks because there’s nothing to talk about. Neither wants to make the first move for fear of being perceived as weak, a stupid game that no one wins. They should at least be discussing side issues, such as players’ participation in the 2006 Turin Olympics, so those matters won’t delay an eventual agreement. Bettman is scheduled to take questions from fans in an online forum today at 11:30 a.m. at www.nhl.com. He should use the opportunity to invite the union back to the table or suggest that Bob Goodenow, executive director of the players’ association, call him.

He probably won’t. This is about saving face, not saving a season.

Both sides seem to assume fans will return in great numbers when play resumes. They may be mistaken. There are too many new options for spending entertainment dollars, and fans are angry after the years of rhetoric that preceded the lockout. Fans don’t want to hear billionaire owners, many of whom got tax breaks to build arenas that cater to the rich and put “cheap” seats miles above the ice, complain about losing money. They don’t want to hear millionaire players reject a cap on salaries most fans can only dream of earning.

They want hockey. And they want good hockey, which they haven’t gotten in sufficient doses the last few years.

The NHL has suffocated itself through overexpansion and tacitly approving defensive tactics that strangle the creativity and speed that distinguish the game at its best. Hockey has never translated well to TV, and low-scoring games in which weak teams drag superior opponents down to their level don’t help. Hockey has receded to the point where it’s a niche sport in the U.S., one with fanatically loyal followers but with limited appeal nonetheless.

In Boston, a longtime U.S. hockey stronghold, the Bruins’ absence has gone unnoticed while the Red Sox advanced to the American League championship series. How many people are pining for the Predators in Nashville, or really missing the Rangers in New York, except to laugh at Glen Sather’s free-spending follies? The Blackhawks vanished off the radar in Chicago years ago, with no great outcry.

A prolonged lockout, as this is destined to be, will push the NHL off a cliff. And maybe that’s what Bettman wants, to turn it into a boutique league with 16 or 20 clubs operating on rigid business plans that generate small profits for owners.

Few people buy NHL franchises as sole sources of income; for most, it’s a real-estate play, as with Philip Anschutz’s purchase of the Kings and construction of Staples Center, or as content for regional TV networks. If Bettman can assure owners they’ll make a little money, they’ll be happy as a smaller, regionalized league that’s a satellite of the other major professional leagues.

The measure of hockey’s greatness has always been its ability to survive, despite the people who ran it. Now, though, they’ve run it into the ground, taken the joy and excitement out of it and are on their way to taking it away altogether. There are no good guys in this fight. They’ve all played a part in letting hockey wither and die, and if they can live with that, they might find that fans can live without hockey.

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NHL LOCKOUT DAY 27

Central issues:

* NHL: Says its teams are spending 75% of their revenues on player costs and that two-thirds of its 30 clubs lost money last season.

* Players’ union: Says clubs’ financial reports are inaccurate and hide revenues that are funneled to related companies, magnifying losses attributed to each club.

* NHL: Says it must have “cost certainty,” and introduced several proposals with that aim last summer, including a hard team cap.

* Players’ union: Rejects a salary cap or any system that would tie salaries to revenues, in part because it contends owners are not telling the truth about their revenues.