ESPN Can’t Be Too Upset This Reality Show Is Over

A few hours after he officially became a hockey analyst with no hockey to analyze, ESPN’s Bill Clement went on the air Wednesday to say that “Feb. 16, 2005, will go down as the lowest day in the history of the sport of hockey.”

Actually, it was all that and a lot less.

On Feb. 16, 2005, the day Gary Bettman pulled the plug on his league’s 2004-05 season, the NHL morphed into the worst kind of reality show.

Non-working title: “Used to Be a Contender.”

Premise: Contestants have five months to devise a strategy to salvage a once-prosperous business now swamped by red ink, 10 years of bad decision-making and customer disinterest.

Climactic episode: Tension mounts as all of Canada and some of the United States wait anxiously for the final result. Will the business be shut down? Will it be saved? Fueled by leaked last-minute memo correspondence, speculation is careening off the boards in all directions as the imperious, controversial host steps up to the lectern, taunting viewers with the potential of two endings to the competition -- which one will it be?

“We had to plan two scenarios for this press conference,” Bettman said Wednesday. “The other one had a laundry list of new changes that we could have used in a short season that the owners would have given me the approval to put in. We would have had some fun, coming back, celebrating the fact that we had a new ecosystem. It would have given us a couple months to test out some things and then reevaluate them over the summer.

“We have collectively -- the league, the Players’ Assn. -- squandered what was a great opportunity to move forward. But that opportunity has been squandered over the last two to three years, because we never had a willing participant to work with us to correct what everybody knew and acknowledged what was wrong with this game, except the union.”

So take that, Bob Goodenow. You had your chance, you failed to appease Bettman, game over.

ESPN’s NHL commentators took Wednesday’s news hard, which was understandable. This is a league that hadn’t failed to award the Stanley Cup since 1919, when the finals were canceled because of a flu epidemic. Eighty-six years later, the Stanley Cup finals have been called off again, accompanied by another outbreak of nausea.

Clement called it “a day of tragedy.” Darren Pang said, “We’ve got bloodshed.” Half-joking, Barry Melrose said he was “a beaten man.... I’m going to forget about hockey for a couple of days and relax. And until something concrete happens between these two sides, I’m like everybody else. I’m done with it.”

A couple of recent polls suggest Melrose is joining the crowd. Last week, an America Online survey found that only 18% of respondents would miss the NHL if the season were canceled. Wednesday, an ESPNews poll asked viewers, “Do you care that the NHL season has been canceled?” Sixty-nine percent said they did not.

Practically speaking, ESPN won’t miss the NHL much either. This time last year, NHL telecasts on ESPN2 were averaging an 0.2 rating. During the lockout, ratings for replacement programming on ESPN2 averaged 0.4.

Pang said he believed fans have tuned out because of fatigue.

“The reason why they say ‘We don’t care’ is because they’re tired,” he said. “I mean, if you gave us this in Major League Baseball for six months, fans would say the same thing. Same with the NFL. It’s happened in the past. I’m discouraged. It breaks my heart because all of us work hard to sell the game of hockey.”

Eventually, the conversation turned to Bettman and his negotiating style. Considering the circumstances, how could it not?

It is easy to blame the messenger when the message is “No, you can’t play,” but Bettman’s condescension was hardly the ice-breaker these stalemated talks needed, especially in the final hours.

A sampling from ESPN’s hockey crew Wednesday:

Al Morganti: “It is truly ugly between the players and Gary Bettman. That’s unfortunate. Gary Bettman works for the owners. He has to get them their best deal. [But] I think he has done more with his posture, his language, his arrogance -- as perceived by [the players] -- to keep that union together than Bob Goodenow has done in Toronto.”

Melrose: “The players are very angry at [Bettman’s letter of ultimatum to the union]. It was like a dagger to them. Maybe it even brought them together. Because [before that] they were splintering.”

E.J. Hradek: “As the commissioner of the league, I believe it’s your job, really, to do whatever you can to protect this game at all costs. And I think that, at that point, if you can get [the salary cap] to $45 million, they could have gotten a deal done.

“But he says he waited for the union to call. The union will say Gary never called.... Really, who is protecting the game at this point? I think that is the commissioner’s job. It’s really not incumbent on the union president to protect the game. Gary Bettman didn’t step up and make that call.”

Viewers got a glimpse of that style during Bettman’s news conference, which included everything short of the commissioner thumbing his nose when he said, “We are prepared to pay the players what we can afford. Not one penny more, not one penny less.”

No doubt, many were watching and hoping for Donald Trump to make an appearance on stage, stepping up to the lectern to give Bettman the magic words: “You’re fired!”

However, this was no reality show. This was reality, a much more depressing concept as far as the NHL and its remaining supporters are concerned. For them, the catchphrase is “We’re tired.”