About Time
As he’d been threatening to do since the beginning of the month, Judge Redfield T. Baum threw out both the NHL and Jim Balsillie’s bids for the Phoenix Coyotes today, hopefully bringing to a close one of the longest, ugliest, saddest, and yet downright boring court cases in hockey history, if not quite in sports in general. The NHL didn’t quite get what it wanted, though since Baum ruled that the league could make a bid in the future and that it does have the right to decide to who owns one of their teams, that shouldn’t matter. Balsillie got even less of what he wanted but that doesn’t mean he won’t just start the whole circus all over again the minute the Florida Panthers start looking shaky. I realize this story probably doesn’t deserve 3 separate posts on this blog but I can’t help pointing out its long-delayed end. What’s happened in Phoenix is a perfect symbol of why the NHL gets treated with so much apathy and ridicule: teams located in markets that can’t support the sport enough to make any money, endless arguments over ownership standards, legendary ex-players allegedly squabbling with the league, and tensions between big markets with no appetite for hockey and Canadian markets with less people but more hockey fans. On the ice, the NHL can be just as, if not more, exciting than any of the other 3 major sports and even at its most boring, it’s still no worse than a Pirates-Nats game in August or a Grizzlies-Clippers game in March. But as long as any of its teams make more headlines for going bankrupt and getting into year-long court cases than they do for playing games, none of that is going to matter to the casual sports fans the NHL is trying to attract to broaden its fanbase.
