The NHell: The Horrible Off-Season For The NHL

Last year, the NHL received a gift in a captivating Stanley Cup Finals series. Both Pittsburgh and Detroit returned to the Finals and Game 7 had a big event feel and lived up to the hype. The NHL had a fantastic end to the season. Most successful organizations would build on the momentum of such a great event. Unfortunately for hockey fans, the NHL is far from a successful organization. Since that great moment of the Penguins raising the cup, the NHL has managed to mess up almost every important issue they have faced.

Opening night was Thursday night, and I’ll get to the television angle in a moment, but there was something fascinating about what happened on opening night. Detroit is in Europe playing a few games in an effort to help expand league interest world wide. CBC showed a Canadian team double header to start off their season, which was fun to watch.

The second game of the Versus doubleheader was in Colorado, to celebrate the retirement of Joe Sakic, one of the great players of the last 20 years. Versus and the NHL obviously showed off the Stanley Cup Champion Penguins in the opener to start the season.

Oh wait, no they didn’t. Instead Washington started the season in Boston, because every hockey fan would rather see the two teams that lost in the second round face off instead of the champions. So what if the Penguins are raising their banner, they already have two. The fact that the Penguins have to wait until Friday night to start the season shows how little the NHL gets it. Crosby, Malkin and the Penguins are the face of the NHL currently, and to have their banner raising relegated to the NHL Network on night 2 of the season helps spotlight how clueless really is. Luckily for me as a Directv subscriber, I can see it.

As a Directv subscriber, I was unable to watch Alexander Ovechkin be awesome or watch Boston stink up the joint. Directv and Versus are in a heated dispute over fees the satellite provider has to pay to Comcast, the owner of Versus.

I’m sure that Directv is at some fault in this debate, but the biggest offender in this whole issue is the NHL. The NHL is the powerful league that lets a cable company bully them around in order to get any level of exposure. Versus does a very mediocre job of covering hockey. Anytime a network is unable to show a game 7 of a playoff series because of an issue with another cable provider, that network is not doing its job to best advertise the league.

I don’t know which nights Versus shows hockey, I don’t know who the announcers are, and I can’t imagine the NHL gets tons of successful cross-promotion from the drivel that Versus shows most of the day. Directv is willing to point out Versus’ love of paid programming because Comcast and Directv are major competitors and both have had big problems in the past. Just ask any Flyers fans in Philadelphia who own Directv. Versus is a toy to Comcast, hell they’re making a bid to buy NBC, meaning that Comcast would control all American NHL exposure.

Directv gets hurt a bit by not having Versus since they advertise themselves as the leader in sports, but football is their calling card and they look like the company taking the stand against rising costs. The real loser in the NHL, the league that needs every ounce of exposure they can get, and now isn’t in 15 million homes and thousands of sports bars across the country. Roger Goodell takes his issues with cable companies to court, Gary Bettman sits back and watches his league lose ratings and viewers. Bettman is too busy sitting back and watching his league lose markets and credibility.

Glendale, Arizona is a hockey wasteland, and the team needs to be moved out of there as soon as possible. I did make a previous argument that a team probably could survive in the Phoenix market, but if the NHL is unwilling to build an arena in Tempe or Scottsdale then the Arizona experiment is worthless.

Jim Basille keeps coming in and wants to buy a team, and is willing to pay a premium price to do so. He has massive Blackberry assets, and would be a very involved passionate owner.

Gary Bettman and other owners do not like his tactics, and they let personal animosity get in the way of a sound business decision. The NHL worries that a team in Hamilton would hurt the viability of Toronto, while in reality the Toronto market is big enough and has enough fans to have a second team in their city. Toronto hockey fans would accept any successful team at this point.

The NHL most likely could have two teams in Toronto, one in Hamilton and one in Buffalo and have four viable successful franchises. Instead they have to preserve the Nashville and Phoenix markets with ownership messes, much smaller fan bases, and no potential rivalries.

I can’t wait to see Anaheim vs Phoenix. The NHL has no exit plan for Phoenix, as they look ready to own a team guaranteed to lose money, while having Nashville still be a mess and the Islanders with a stadium quagmire and an owner that regrets buying the team.

The NHL just sits back watching multiple franchises fall apart, and we haven’t even seen the effect of the economy on ticket sales yet. The southern United States experiment has mostly failed, and the NHL desires to double down on their bad investment by saving the Predators and Coyotes in order to stay in larger markets. 

Nashville and Phoenix are busy cities where there are so many more things to do besides hockey, while Winnipeg or Hamilton even Toronto would be in cities where hockey would be a high priority for recreational dollars because of Canada’s love for the sport. Canadian and northern American cities like Seattle may not have as much “potential” as a Nashville or Phoenix or Miami, but a smart league would recognize the losses are adding up way too quickly and probably will get much worse in a bad economy. Then again, this is the NHL, where bad marketing, bad exposure and bad management are commonplace.