Political stickhandling in NHL vs. players

IT’S A BIG LOSS FOR LEAGUE IF NEW YOUNG STARS ARE NOT SHOWCASED AT 2018 OLYMPICS

And now, we find out how serious the NHL owners are about forcing their players to skip the next Olympics.

It’s been building to this for some time. Gary Bettman has for years been cool to the idea of sending NHL players to Pyeongchang 2018, but as is often the case with the NHL commissioner, it was hard to know how much of what he said was the truth and how much was a bargaining position. While there was some validity to all of his arguments against Olympic participation — it disrupts the NHL schedule, it upsets competitive balance, the NHL itself doesn’t get to have its brand anywhere within the official Olympic circles, and South Korea is way down there at the other side of the world — there was always the suspicion that Bettman was saying all of this because he has learned not to give away for free that which you could sell later at a price.

It was not a great surprise, then, that late last month the commissioner did indeed come up with a fee: the NHL and its owners would consent to Olympic participation if the players, through the NHLPA, agreed to extend the current collective bargaining agreement for another three seasons.

It was also not a great surprise when the players rejected that proposal on Friday. An extension would have locked the NHLPA into the same CBA through 2025, nine full seasons from today, and would have meant that the players were foregoing the ability to bargain for more than a dozen years. The current deal was settled in early 2013; the majority of players in the league would have had their careers begin and end in between attempts to improve the deal in their favour. The evil genius of the league’s proposal was that it would have seen most NHLers give up their bargaining ability for the entirety of their playing days — the average career lasts less than six seasons — just so a few dozen of the top players could take part in the Olympic tournament. (Although, as Bettman has pointed out, lesser players are also very much in favour of Olympic participation because it gives them a nice two-week break in the middle of a punishing season.)

All of which leaves us here, with the PA saying they remain in favour of going to Pyeongchang — “We still think it’s important,” executive director Don Fehr told The Canadian Press on Friday — and the NHL and Bettman officially sounding less than convinced that they agree. Quite why this remains the league’s position is another question entirely. Whatever the trouble involved with NHL participation in the Olympics, it is baffling that the league is officially skeptical about the benefits that follow from having its players involved. Having the best hockey players in the world showcased at the world’s biggest sporting event, in a tournament that offers the best version of the game, an embarrassment of speed and skill, is a clear advertisement for the merits of the world’s best hockey league, even if the NHL shield is not formally a part of the proceedings. That’s such an obvious statement that it feels silly to even write it, but we’re doing so here because the NHL does not seem to agree.

The NHL’s popularity is highly regional and its national exposure rises and falls in accordance with the size of the markets that make deep playoff runs. Chicago-Boston had strong ratings for a Stanley Cup Finals in 2013, last year’s Pittsburgh-San Jose matchup did not. The same is even true in hockeymad Canada, where playoff ratings fell off a cliff last spring when zero Canadian teams made the tournament.

International play, though, is the one time when hockey transcends that regional bias and becomes a national-level event. Bettman can roll his eyes at the prospect of Olympic hockey being broadcast at odd times in North America because of the time difference with Pyeongchang, but the interest in Olympic hockey swelled in Sochi 2014, which was hardly time-zone friendly. The two highest-rated hockey broadcasts ever on NBC Sports Network, the cable channel that carries the bulk of NHL games in the United States, were the Canada-USA semifinal game at Sochi and the USA-Russia game in the qualifying round, the one that featured the shootout that wouldn’t end. The Canada-USA game even took place at noon eastern time on a Friday, and still pulled a better rating than NBCSN’s prime-time NHL slate. The ratings for Olympic hockey in Canada have been ridiculous, with audiences of eight million (Sochi) and 16 million (Vancouver) for the last two goldmedal wins. Last year’s Stanley Cup final averaged a little over two million viewers in Canada.

Olympic hockey in 2018 has the potential to be a landmark event. A passing of the torch from Sidney Crosby to Connor McDavid on Team Canada and a Team USA with a host of young stars — Johnny Gaudreau, Auston Matthews, Jack Eichel, Dylan Larkin — is unlike any that they’ve ever had at a best-on-best tournament. The Americans crashed out of the World Cup of Hockey in part because all that young talent was raided for the made-up Team North America, but at Pyeongchang they could have a terrifying lineup. It could be a team that gets America truly interested in hockey.

You’d think the NHL would want to help make that happen.

MARTIN ROSE / GETTY IMAGES FILES It remains to be seen whether Sidney Crosby and the rest of Team Canada will be playing at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.