Checking Line » Blog Archive » Bettman’s Biggest Failure

January 31, 2007 by chuq · Comments
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Checking Line » Blog Archive » Bettman’s Biggest Failure:

Now let’s get to where he actually messed up…

Ultimately, Bettman’s biggest failure as commissioner was that he didn’t achieve what he did during the lockout years earlier… and that goes for everything from the salary cap, to revenue sharing, to the changes in the rule book.

The game on the ice was allowed to slip for too long. Defense will always ‘win’ and coaches will always coach defense first. The league allowed scoring to drop too much before doing anything to counteract this effect. The changes they made during the lockout were years in the making and it’s important that they realize now that if they don’t do anything again for the next 10 years the game will again get ‘boring’. And fans need to recognize that being proactive is good for the sport, not the bad thing many so-called traditionalists make it out to be.

Off the ice, the league was unstable financially for too long and, despite what some people will tell you, the financial landscape did lead to a competitive imbalance. Expansion would be viewed as less of a failure if markets like Miami were more in a position to be competitive for their first 13 years of existence.

This is a valid point, but if people look back to the lockout of 1994-95, the owners came out of that stoppage with a CBA where they thought they’d “won” and fixed the problems. It quickly became clear that they hadn’t, as the agents found ways around things like the salary cap for rookies, and arbitration escalated salaries.

There was a later time when the league had the option to open the CBA (1999, I think) and chose to extend it, instead. Was that a mistake? Yes. but it was also, it seemed, a practical reality. It has to be remembered that the labor stoppage wasn’t about the “league versus players” per se. It was more complicated than that, in that there are two factions among owners: the high revenue teams like Toronto and the Rangers, and the low-revenue teams like Calgary and Buffalo. Until the pain became bad enough that even the higher revenue teams agreed that something needed to be done, there was no reason to open the CBA, because politically, the owners wouldn’t be resolved and unified (enough) to get the changes needed to REALLY fix things. (it’s unclear they still have, although early indications are encouraging).

So it’s no failure if you come out of a fight thinking you won (and didn’t), and then later wait until you know what has to be done AND have the backing of your side to make it happen. opening the CBA early, only to have a faction of the owners agree to a new CBA that doesn’t solve the problem — well, it doesn’t solve the problem. probably makes it worse.

What this really comes down to is that you have factions of owners more interested in their own success than the league’s success (and yes, that is stupid and shortsighted but Bettman can’t fire an owner, he works for them), and the process Bettman and the varous ownership factions had to work through to generate concensus and actually unite the owners long enough to make change possible. And while that took a while, it looks like Bettman finally succeeded at it.

And it’s no failure waiting on a fight until the odds favor you. Unless of course, your business fails in the meantime. but the real look of the internal politic among the owners indicates taht it had to get pretty desperate before some of the owners would come along for the ride and admit they had to agree to some of the changes.

And bettman probably deserves more credit than he’ll get for getting that group of 30 rich, ego-driven, successful and stubborn businessmen to all agree about anything, much less about enough things to get this new CBA in play….