It has been quite the week for the National Hockey League. Consider the series of unfortunate events:
Driving off a billionaire with a passion for the game who was willing to pay what was arguably an $80-million (U.S.) premium in order to purchase a Pittsburgh Penguins team featuring a couple of the sport's brightest young stars.
Suffering the consequences of allowing the franchise's fate to be decided by murky, local insider politics, after staking everything on the possibility of becoming the first major North American team sport to benefit directly from the profits of legal gambling.
Making it absolutely clear to Canadian hockey fans that their fantasies of the big-league game being drawn back to the heartland, even in the new, economically-diminished NHL, are just that. It's obvious now a U.S.-based team will relocate north of the great unguarded border only over NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's cold, dead body. And that's true no matter what they say publicly to pacify Canadian fans.
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And heck, it's only Thursday.
Perhaps, to be fair, the origins of the Pittsburgh crisis shouldn't be tied directly to the league office in New York. Though there is a long history of bad ownership in the NHL extending over several administrations, the league hierarchy can't bear the full responsibility for those who drove the Pens into bankruptcy not once, but twice.
They weren't allowed to die a natural death largely because Mario Lemieux was determined to be paid the millions owed him, and it was his return to the NHL as a player/owner that kept the team afloat.
But Mario couldn't really fix what was broken, he couldn't get the arena built that the franchise so desperately required and he couldn't be seen to be moving the team himself out of the place where he makes his home.
The failed Isle of Capri Casinos deal was born of desperation. It was also the kind of long shot, politically fragile, optically dubious arrangement that no other professional sport would have touched with a 10-foot pole.
Obscured by the Penguins' long death throes was the fact that, especially compared to a whole lot of places where the NHL is doing business, Pittsburgh is a reasonably good hockey town, with a long history in the sport dating back to the league's infancy. The inability to make a hockey business work there would certainly reflect poorly on the prospects of those places that now feature half-empty buildings even in the brave, new, postlockout, competitively balanced world.
Enter the saviour, Research In Motion co-founder Jim Balsillie, with bags of money at his disposal, and a passionate interest in hockey that stretched far beyond its investment potential. In other words, the perfect NHL owner.
But, having not just fallen off a turnip truck, he was unwilling to pay significantly more than the team was worth while also having his options severely limited by the league in advance of the slot-machine licence decision.
At the very least, Balsillie might need leverage in cutting a new arena deal in Pittsburgh. Failing that -- and who knows, perhaps it was his plan all along -- he required the freedom to move the franchise elsewhere.
Not so long ago, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly suggested owners in the league couldn't pull an Al Davis, arguing the law and the league bylaws now forbade it. But the addendum to the sales agreement they put in front of Balsillie at the last minute strongly suggests, at the very least, they didn't fancy the prospect of a legal battle with someone who has enormous resources and doesn't shy away from the cut and thrust of litigation.
They must have been terrified Balsillie planned to move the team where they didn't want it moved -- to Southern Ontario -- and dare them to try and stop him.
Balsillie said he'd still be happy to talk about the Penguins, even after Lemieux ripped him up and down earlier this week and pledged to hold on to his deposit. That hardly seems likely.
Failing a rekindling of those interests . . . well, there's always brewery chief Frank D'Angelo. Surely Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's name will pop up at any moment. And there's that brand-new empty arena in Kansas City, Mo., just begging for a tenant.
Now, there's an NHL move we've seen before: Taking a team out of a decent hockey town with a substandard building and shuffling it off to a lousy hockey market with far better digs and just enough of a big-league veneer to satisfy Gary Bettman's "vision."
How's that working out so far?
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