News

It has been quite the propaganda war.

Gary Bettman, cast as a hater of all things Canadian. Jim Balsillie portrayed as a zillionaire maverick, bordering on kook.

On both sides of the fence, some very fine and sophisticated fiction has been spun around the potential sale of the Nashville Predators and their move to Southern Ontario — a deal that now seems dead in the water.

But step back for a second, and get past the character assassination.

Though it's loads of fun to tweak the commissioner, to contrast his oh-so-heartfelt paeans to Canada when he was begging for government handouts or trying to enlist fans to the cause of breaking the players' union through a lockout, against the stonewalling now, the picture of Bettman as some kind of anti-Canuck bigot doesn't really hold water.

And Balsillie, the dangerous rebel, is the same guy the National Hockey League's executive committee endorsed unanimously, with enormous enthusiasm, when he was about to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins.

If Balsillie stopped playing by the "rules" in his attempt to purchase the Preds and move them to Hamilton and if he deviated from the league's unwritten protocol by making his arena deal public and taking deposits on season tickets, perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising, given what happened to him when he stayed quiet and polite and did things by the book while pursuing the Penguins.

And, in any case, this is a league that historically hasn't been awfully picky about whom it allows into its exclusive club.

So let's assume that the NHL's absolute opposition to a second franchise in Southern Ontario has nothing to do with either Bettman or Balsillie, personally.

It also has absolutely nothing to do with the good of the game, or the good of the professional hockey business.

You simply can't make the case that the sale of a dead-end team for an enormous, precedent-setting amount of cash and its subsequent move into the biggest, richest hockey market on the continent could be anything but beneficial to the NHL and the vast majority of its owners.

Up go franchise values, up goes equity and up goes the price of an expansion team.

A "have not" team that has taken more money than any of the others from the revenue-sharing pool immediately becomes a "have" team playing to full houses and contributing money to the in-house welfare system.

Hamilton has its issues, but with eight million and counting mostly hockey-literate people in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, what's the real difference if the team is there, or in Burlington, or Oakville, or Mississauga or Cambridge? Fans would certainly find their way to the arena, and one of the NHL's worst problems — though certainly not its only one — would be solved in the process.

The Buffalo Sabres, just a couple of years removed from insolvency, and reeling now over the loss of two key free agents, might be damaged in the process. But on a cold-blooded, bottom-line basis, given how little the Sabres bring to the league table, it's hard not to believe that most governors would be willing to accept that risk in return for the rewards that Balsillie's team would guarantee.

Which brings us to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The NHL's official position is that the 50-mile territorial veto that is explicit in its bylaws no longer applies (a change made to fend off anti-trust action of the Al Davis variety.) But Balsillie's people think it's still there.

And, more important, so do the Leafs, which is why they have remained very quiet, and very secure, even as the two sides have been firing salvos back and forth.

Simply put, no other team is coming into Southern Ontario, because the Leafs don't want it to happen. The Toronto owners are guaranteed enormous profits no matter how their team performs on the ice. They are in many ways the chief beneficiaries of Bettman's new economic order, forced to pocket tens of millions of dollars that they would have spent on player salaries in the old, cap-less world, while watching their revenues go up and up and up (not to mention the windfall of the 90-cent-plus Canadian dollar).

It's all good for them, and they don't plan on sharing, because they don't have to. It says so right in the NHL constitution.

Is that legal?

Well, if it never comes to a vote, if a sale is never approved, if relocation is never on the governors' agenda or if there's nothing to challenge in court, then we'll never know for sure. There are all kinds of ways to kill a franchise transfer without being explicit about it, as has become blatantly obvious in the past few weeks.

But make no mistake where the buck stops: not with the personalities out front, but with the discrete folks at the Air Canada Centre, who haven't lost a moment's sleep despite all of that noise.