The owners and players in the National Hockey League have no idea how much they are hated by Canadians and how little we care about the details of their current contract dispute. “Greedy billionaire owners fighting greedy multi-millionaire players,” is how many of us think about the owners’ lockout of players that threatens the entire NHL season. Indeed, the gap between the owners and the players is so wide and the pressure to resolve the feud so weak that the NHL could easily be shut down for two to three years. In recent days, I’ve seen players on my adult hockey teams, guys who once were diehard hockey fans, simply shrug and sigh when asked if they are mad about the lockout, which has already resulted in the cancellation of the first two weeks of the season. The players don’t believe either the owners or the players care about the fans and they completely tune out when either side talks of rollbacks, salary caps, hockey-related revenues, entitlements, targeted revenue-sharing plans, cartels or union decertification.
What’s clear is that the NHL brand is in tatters in Canada. It’s in even worse shape in the U.S., where hockey badly trails football, baseball, basketball and auto racing in terms of fan interest. Outside of a few northern states, few Americans would care — or notice — if hockey disappeared forever. Through it all, the rich owners seem oblivious to the long-term impact the lockout is causing to the brand, acting as if they don’t need to pay attention to fans because they are operating a continent-wide pro hockey monopoly. And it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the players, who average $2.5 million a year playing a kids’ game. Given that the NHL is so dysfunctional, greedy and uncaring to fans, it’s time to consider a radical approach to solving this mess. One solution is to form a new, independent pro hockey league. Crazy? Not when you realize the NHL lockout may last several years. Impossible? Not when you figure lots of rich guys in North America and abroad are itching to own a sports team. Come on down, Jim Balsillie! The former RIM boss tried for years to buy an NHL team and move it to the Hamilton-Kitchener area. In Europe, rich Saudi princes and Russian billionaires are buying up soccer and basketball clubs. Maybe they could buy a hockey team and spend millions in TV ads to support locally and nationally televised games.
The league could be in operation fairly quickly, launching with up to 12 teams. Teams could easily be placed in major cities: Toronto-Hamilton, Quebec City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Seattle, Kansas City and elsewhere. All have large arenas that aren’t owned by NHL teams or that don’t have leases that forbid other pro hockey teams from using them. For excitement, the new league could play an interlocking schedule with the Russia-based KHL, considered the second-best league in the world, with a World Series of Hockey as its ultimate championship. The forerunner to such a new league was the old WHA, which ran from 1972 to 1979. In its inaugural year, some 65 NHL players jumped to the WHA, including star Bobby Hull, who signed a then-unprecedented 10-year, $2.75-million contract. If and when the NHL resumed play, the two leagues could play against each other and have a joint championship. Some fans may argue with some credibility that a new league would only water down hockey even more than it is now and could quickly fold once the NHL reopened.
But while it’s true that the WHA struggled in the 1970s through numerous ownership and franchise shifts, the former league had a profound impact on pro hockey. It brought about huge pay raises for players, dramatically more freedom for players to choose the team they wanted to play for, and shut down any talk of NHL lockouts or strikes because of the sheer presence of a competing league. With rich owners and hard lessons learned from the WHA experience, a new league now could emerge better financed and better managed than the old WHA and provide an on-ice product close to level of NHL teams, with NHLers who jumped leagues and European players. And such a league would send a message to the 30 NHL owners that their days of monopoly control of pro hockey were over. If that happened, then the ultimate winners would be hockey fans who are now so fed up with the NHL that they don’t give a damn if the owners and players ever reach a deal.
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