The NHL has shot itself in the foot again

No professional sports league has a history of shooting itself in the foot like the NHL. The NHL has had three lockouts in roughly 20 years, costing them two seasons of hockey. They are the only team to lose an entire year to a work stoppage. And that’s just part of the terrible PR the NHL contends with.

Gary Bettman has been on record stating fans don’t care about player salary information. Yet Capgeek was wildly popular and gave way to General Fanager and Cap Friendly. These are three sites that without, we would have no way of knowing a player’s impact related to salary. In a hard-cap world, player salary information is a must have.

Then there was the complete disregard for the newer stats that have become mainstream. The league finally admitted to needing to give fans that information, then completely botched it on the NHL site. The stats section on NHL.com is an embarrassment to the league, since it has outdated (score close) metrics. But even that’s just part of it, since some of the information is flat out wrong.

But hey, this is a league that insists that the fans don’t want to see superstars promoted, since this is such a team game. No, we don’t want to see Henrik Lundqvist, who is a generational talent playing in New York who could potentially have the same charisma and nice-guy draw as Derek Jeter. But please, keep shoving Patrick Kane and his questionable character and morals down our throats. Heck, I’d prefer Sidney Crosby being plastered all over the place instead of Kane. But Kane is American, and you need an American boy!

But perhaps yesterday is the worst infraction of all. The NHL made the announcement that NHL players will not compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics. This is just a mind-numbingly stupid and short-sighted move by a league that never fails to screw up their own product.

The official statement on the NHL site leads with the dumbest reasoning I’ve ever heard:

“We have previously made clear that while the overwhelming majority of our clubs are adamantly opposed to disrupting the 2017-18 NHL season for purposes of accommodating Olympic participation by some NHL players…”

Oh, so you don’t want to disrupt the season for the Winter Olympics, but you’re ok with disrupting the season for the World Cup and the mandated bye week for every NHL club?

For a league that needs to grow it’s international appeal, skipping the Olympics –when all other major professional leagues, like the KHL, are not– is a move that seems more like a negotiating tactic and less like a move that betters the game. Bettman went further:

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has repeatedly said in the past several months that the owners were against Olympic participation for a variety of reasons. Chief among them was the 17-day break in the schedule required in February, a time when the National Football League’s season has ended and Major League Baseball’s season has yet to begin.

So the chief reason is that the owners, through Bettman, don’t want to miss out on that critical February stretch when the NHL competes with the NBA for air time.

Sure, that would make sense if the NHL had a national TV deal on a station that you could find. NBCSN is channel 212 for me. NBC shows one game a week, sort of. There is no TV deal with ESPN. The logic Bettman spewed seems good on the surface, but any form of critical thinking applied deems it as flawed.

If the NHL wants to promote its product, perhaps they shouldn’t have signed an exclusive-rights deal with a network that doesn’t even prioritize it. Golf gets more air time than hockey on NBC.

But then the NHL shoves a poll in our faces, stating that 73% of Americans and 53% of Canadians don’t want players to go to the Olympics. When was this poll taken? I certainly did not know of it.

And then perhaps the ultimate slap in the face, the one that assumes fans are stupid, is the argument that players get fatigued and injured at the Olympics. So, I’m guessing they won’t get fatigued or injured in NHL games? Half of the players play three games, miss the elimination round, and go home. The other half play at most three additional games. Six games in 17 days is supposed to fatigue the players? Did I miss something here?

In the end, this all comes down to money, and don’t let any statement convince you otherwise. The IOC is not covering the NHL’s expenses of sending the players to the Olympics this year. And now all of a sudden the league can’t swing it? Oh please. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.

The owners and its puppet have once again done a disservice to the league, its fans, and its players. For a league that is so focused on re-growing its fanbase –an issue caused by them– they seem hell bent on shooting themselves in the foot. They never get it right. And we, as fans, are always the ones that lose out.