Why is no one covering the Stanley Cup finals? Blame the NHL
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by user J Cunningham
Why, you ask? Well, the NHL hasn't exactly been near the pulse of the American sporting landscape for the past couple years, and that can easily be attributed to the way the game's higher-ups -- commissioner Gary Bettman, specifically -- have handled their on-ice product.
So when newspaper after newspaper decides not to staff the finals, who's to blame? The newspapers for not staffing? The readers for not caring the newspaper didn't staff?
No ... it's the NHL's fault.
I won't sit here and say hockey's a bad sport, because it's really not. Sure, the on-ice action can at times be hard to follow on television, and I find it almost impossible to listen to a hockey radio broadcast (just too much going on), but it's one of the fastest, most exciting sports there is.
But nobody cares, and that's a product of the NHL's upper offices and the NHLPA. The lockout, and the fallout from it, have hit the sport so hard not even the most famous trophy in all of sports generates that much excitement anymore.
Consider first the fact that the lockout took away an entire season. Not a partial season, not just the playoffs ... the entire season.
Sure, Major League Baseball suffered when it went on strike and took out the 1994 World Series. But the game never went away for the full 162-game tilt. Neither have the NBA or the NFL -- hell, the NFL's last work stoppage saw the advent of replacement players so the games would continue and the sport wouldn't fade from the national consciousness.
But the NHL? It lost the playoffs, the Stanley Cup finals and the 82-game schedule, thus making it irrelevant and unreported for over a full calendar year. Which meant no one was talking about hockey ... because there was nothing to talk about.
People always get mad at work stoppages in professional sports -- millionaires bickering with billionaires over money never engenders public sympathy -- but most of the time, the shortage is short enough to thrust the sport back into the national spotlight before public memory of the games fades. But with the NHL, that memory was long gone; the NHL didn't play a game for nearly two years, so is it any wonder hardly anyone remembered what hockey was like when it finally came back?
Then there's the TV deal the league struck upon its return. Rather than sign a deal with ESPN for far less, the NHL went with a split deal with NBC and Versus (formerly OLN, the official home of the Tour de Lance). There was a lot of money in the deal, but a lot of cable providers nationwide don't carry Versus ... and for a lot of the cable subscribers who do have it, they can't find it on their dial.
I only found my Versus only because it was a channel before Comcast SportsNet, which until this year broadcast Baltimore Orioles games. So I saw bicycle racing or fishing or a rodeo every time I flipped over to the game.
The NHL should've signed on with ESPN. Sure, the Worldwide Leader wasn't offering nearly as much, but it's called the Worldwide Leader for a reason; when ESPN gives a sport a significant amount of air time, said sport is viewed more favorably in the public sports consciousness. By broadcasting NHL games, ESPN would've essentially told the public, "The NHL is a viable product and a sport that's worth your -- and our -- attention."
Versus and NBC don't do the same.
So between the lockout and the asanine TV deal, Bettman has shut a good deal of the country off of his sport. And it's a shame, because the games are exciting and some of the young talent throughout the league is really something ot be proud of and get pumped for. But when Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin grow on the ice, hardly anyone gets to see them, because the NHL is run by mindless simpletons who seem determined to derail their sport.
Bud Selig looks at these guys and shakes his head.
So I have no issue with the country's major newspapers thumbing their nose at the Stanley Cup finals. Because I get the impression the NHL thumbed its nose at us a long time ago.
