Great hockey article e-mailed to me by a friend. I would add to the article below that following the 94 playoffs, Baseball imploded with a players strike. It was a perfect chance for Hockey to take center stage in the fall of 94. The NHL was coming off the Rangers’ cup win, and an amazing playoffs including what was, in my opinion, the greatest playoff series of the past 25 years in the Devils-Rangers series.

In retrospect, the lockout was the beginning of the problems stemming from Bettman, and not the cause. I would throw in over expansion, and poor management at just about every level. But the article below does a great job talking about why the NHL is where it is today; irrelevant and nearly dead.

Blame Gary? You bet, man

Commish let quality of NHL game slide

By AL STRACHAN — Toronto Sun

When you suggest to the people running the National Hockey League that the current mess is their own fault, the answer is always the same.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” they say. “The point is that we can’t go on the way we are.”

But it does matter whose fault it is. If you are responsible for the abysmal situation that exists today, then why on earth should we have faith in your ability to come up with a “new world order” that will be any better?

As the game inched closer and closer to the labour stalemate it now faces, the league devoted itself more and more to economic issues.

But where was the attention to the game itself?

Gary Bettman had hardly settled into his post as NHL commissioner in 1994 when the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup.

At that point, the future belonged to the NHL. TV ratings were high. Fan interest was at a peak, and national magazines were talking about the surge in hockey popularity.

But four months afterward, Bettman forced a three-month lockout, thereby starting the precipitous decline of hockey that continues to this day.

In the subsequent shortened 1995 season, the New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup and the Age of Boredom descended upon the game.

The Devils’ much-imitated trap — and all the tedium it entails — delivered another blow to the sport’s popularity.

And now, we find ourselves in a situation where the NHL has no 50-goal scorers, no 100-point scorers and games that are far too often unwatchable.

While the spectacle went down in flames, ettman fiddled. Instead of worrying about the game, he worried about legal and economic issues.

In a sport that relies so heavily on gate receipts, highly intrusive nets were placed in the end zones. (Granted a young girl had died tragically after being hit by a puck in a game in Columbus in March 2002.) The nets were a classic lawyer’s overreaction.

Bettman found time to institute a system that requires even his own referees and linesmen to be searched upon entering an arena. But he couldn’t find time to address the woes that afflict the game.

OCCASIONAL INTEREST

As a result, ESPN, which had made a major commitment to hockey, backed off to the point that it now exhibits no more than an occasional interest. ABC followed a similar path and, as a result, hockey is in the position that it virtually has to buy time to get its playoffs on U.S. network television.

But we’re not supposed to place the blame for all this. We’re supposed to say it doesn’t matter who created this disaster. Even more unbelievably, we’re supposed have blind faith in those very same people to fix it.

If they hadn’t messed up the game on the ice, the financial predicament off the ice wouldn’t exist.

We’ve all heard the accusation that NHL players earn too much because their league doesn’t have the TV contracts of other sports. But whose fault is that?

Even Bettman admits that the games are more intense than they have ever been. Rarely does a player take a shift off. The game goes at full speed for 60 minutes and the banging starts at the opening faceoff. Players dive in front of shots, finish checks with a vengeance and play through injury.

If all this effort produces a game that is not catching the fancy of the fans, then maybe the people who create the rules should be called upon the carpet to explain.

Because there’s one fact that is unavoidable: If hockey was as popular as some other sports, then TV money would be present in abundance and the teams wouldn’t have any problem whatsoever meeting their payrolls.

And we wouldn’t be facing a lockout.