No, No, It’s not a Fiasco

Tom Benjamin’s NHL Weblog: No, No, It’s not a Fiasco:

Update: I agree with Matt Fenwick’s assertion in this post about the subject. This kind of fiasco would not happen if decision making was decentralized. I also agree that centralizing kills innovation. This train, however, left the station a long time ago. Reebok is prepared to pay a premium for exclusivity. Centralizing may not make for the best equipment, but it makes for the most money.

Even centralized, this did not have to be a fiasco.

This argument is specious. Decentralized decisions is what gave Chicago their fabulous home TV coverage, and is what’s allowing some canadian teams to move games to pay per view. It also brought us those famous third jersey designs by Anaheim and Boston.

The reality is, jersey specifications and vendors have been centralized decisions for decades. Teams at best might have had a choice of one of two vendors, but generally, there was only one vendor for jerseys, and a limited/approved number of vendors for pants, socks, helmets, pads, gloves, skates and etc.

The Reebok situation isn’t new, other than it’s a new vendor making some significant changes, and it’s not working as well as it could have. Oh, and it’s a great excuse for Tom to once again blame Bettman for something, since we all know Bettman is at fault for everything bad in the unverse including preventing release of the cure for the common cold.

Now, having said that, the league did screw up big time here; these jerseys should have spent a year in the AHL or ECHL being field tested. The testing they did clearly wasn’t sufficient for such a radical change.

But that’s a failure of process — not a league vs. team issue. Except in Tom’s mind, where everything bad is the league’s fault, because by definition the league is Bettman and Bettman isn’t qualified to dress himself in Tom’s mind. Or maybe qualified isn’t the word. As far as I can tell, Tom doesn’t seem to think Bettman’s capable of dressing himself.

Which is too bad, because Bettman DOES have his faults, but Tom, and the people like him, go so far into la-la land ot blame bettman for everything including global warming that it’s hard to take them seriously — even when they have a point.

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