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NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman says it is not an option for his financially troubled league. The NHLPA wouldn't like it either. But some say it would be a step in right direction to help cure what ails the National Hockey League. It is contraction.
"I think contraction's a dirty word," Bettman told group that had gathered in Quebec to talk about the NHL and it's future back in March. A future Bettman says doesn't include reducing the league's lineup of 30 teams.
"Contraction doesn't have any interest to me," Bettman said during the league's All-Star weekend back in February. "I believe in every market we have, that every franchise can be fully competitive. These are all good markets."
Others aren't so sure.
"The NHL in markets like Nashville, Atlanta, Tampa, Miami, Anaheim, Raleigh ... I could go on and on ... doesn't make any sense," Howard Bloom, publisher of SportsBusiness.com, said in an online chat with USA Today back in January. "Regardless of whatever Gary Bettman says, contraction is in the NHL's future; in fact; it's the league’s inevitable destiny."
Contraction became a hot topic in the sports world in 2001 when major league baseball owners voted for contraction that would have eventually eliminated the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos franchises.
"It makes no sense for Major League Baseball to be in markets that generate insufficient local revenues to justify the investment in the franchise," commissioner Bud Selig said at the time. "The teams to be contracted have a long record of failing to generate enough revenues to operate a viable major league franchise."
Baseball's proposed contraction, which has been put on hold until at least after the 2006 season, did cause some people to raise questions about the NHL possibly reducing its number of teams. Bettman shot it down immediately, but some think his opinion could change.
Baseball's vote for contraction came just as MLB's labor agreement was set to expire. It was seen as a bargaining chip to get concessions from players. Some observers believe Bettman could end up doing the same before the NHL's agreement with players expires September 15, 2004. Even Bettman said things could change.
"I can't sit here and tell you that, you know, there aren't things that are going to happen that are going to make my life difficult," Bettman said when asked about contraction, according to The Sporting News.
But for now the issue remains firmly on the radar screen of some in the media and among many fans. One of the main reasons is economic. That argument goes that the league's move into the southern and western U.S., dubbed the Sunbelt Strategy, has, for the most part, failed. Sure, it increased the league's exposure, generated revenue from expansion fees and increased the league's attendance.
But it also increased the competition for players and sent player salaries skyrocketing. And expansion didn't produce the big U.S. TV contract and revenues the league was hoping for. That's left teams to rely mainly on gate receipts for revenue, and in many of the markets that is a struggle.
"Expansion was mistake after mistake in poor judgment," Bloom, the publisher, told the Washington Post. "Hockey should have never left non-traditional hockey markets."
"Why is Gary trying to expand to Columbus and sell hockey to people who don't know what hockey is?" player agent Ritch Winter wondered in an interview with the Toronto Sun.
And critics of expansion would say the the same thing about expansion to Anaheim, Nashville, Tampa, Miami and Atlanta, where the NHL had failed once before. And they would throw in the relocations to places like Phoenix and Carolina.
The problem with moving into non-traditional markets, expansion critics and contraction proponents say, is that many of those places have little or no base of hockey fans.
"The mere fact that we're discussing contraction less than five years after the previous gluttonous expansion shows exactly how a reasonable concept turned out to be disastrously flawed in practical application," Stan Savran, a sport radio host, wrote in a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Clearly, the novelty is wearing off in those markets not steeped in hockey tradition."
In other words, once the novelty wears off or the team struggles, people will not only tune out that team but hockey as well because many of them weren't fans of the sport in the first place.
"It's one thing to like your team. It's quite another to really like the sport," Savran wrote in the Post-Gazette. "When the team isn't winning, and going to the games is no longer the "in" thing to do or the "in" place to be seen, you had better be in a franchise area where the sport has roots deeper than what passes for grass at Heinz Field (Pittsburgh's football stadium)."
And that's what some people say is happening in places like Nashville, Atlanta, Carolina, Phoenix and in both Florida markets. Florida and Carolina have both made it to the Stanley Cup Finals, but couldn't maintain the fan support when the on ice product slipped. Anaheim made it to the Finals last season, and some wonder if that franchise will continue to struggle if the team's on ice performance dips over the next few years.
Others, however, might point to the successes. The relocation from Minnesota to Dallas is one. So is the move from Quebec to Colorado, where the NHL failed in the 1980's.
Both those franchises have wealthy owners willing to spend and both have benefited from their team's stellar performance on the ice. The Avalanche won a Stanley Cup its first year in Denver. The Stars moved to elite status in the league within four years of moving from Minnesota and won a Cup in 1999. Both remain among the elite teams in the league. That doesn't happen to everybody.
"Any team that wins will be supported. But when you have 30 teams, 14 don't make the playoffs, nearly half the league," Nick Cotsonika once wrote in a Detroit Free Press Column. "When you don't make the playoffs, you're perceived as a failure. When you're perceived as a failure, the fans don't come to see you. When the fans don't come to see you, you don't make money."
But it's not just the sunbelt teams in trouble financially. There is a belief that without some big changes in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement and/or the economic system of the NHL, some of those teams in the so-called traditional hockey markets, could disappear as well. Northern U.S. teams like Pittsburgh and Buffalo are prime candidates. So too are Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. Losing more Canadian teams would be a big blow.
"The NHL cannot afford to lose any more Canadian markets," Bloom said in the USA Today chat.
Bettman agrees.
"Vital. Vital. Vital. Canada and the NHL are inextricably interwoven," Bettman told the St. Paul Pioneer Press when asked about the survival of Canadian teams. "Canada identifies hockey as one of the great unifying sports in the country, and frankly Canada is the heart and soul of our game. More than half of our players are from Canada. As big a deal as people think football and baseball are to the United States, hockey is an even bigger deal in Canada."
And that has led to another theory along the contraction lines -- merge some some of the weaker Sunbelt teams with some of the struggling franchises in Canada and keep the teams in Canada.
A merger in not without precedence in the NHL. It happened after the 1977-78 season when the Cleveland Barons merged with the Minnesota North Stars. The influx of new talent and some solid drafting helped the North Stars become one of the better teams in the early 1980's, including a trip to the 1981 Stanley Cup Finals.
In today's NHL, for example, some point out you could combine the Atlanta Thrashers with the Calgary Flames and keep the team in Calgary. Chances are the combination of the talent from the two teams would make the newly configured Flames more competitive on the ice.
Proponents say mergers would also produce the same league-wide economic benefits as simply eliminating teams and distributing players through something like the expansion draft.
Fewer teams would help reduce the inflationary pressures of escalating player salaries. The teams left over would get a bigger piece of the revenue pie. The league would be smaller, but on stronger financial footing. And some of the weaker teams would immediately become more competitive through mergers.
And there's another benefit, according to contraction proponents. It's an aesthetic improvement. The argument goes that expansion depleted the talent pool, turning the NHL game into a contest that relies less on skill and more on a clutching, grabbing defensive style of hockey.
"If the league were to contract, the level of play would be elevated. And the NHL has to first understand, and then admit, that its product is inferior. Even with the influx of talent streaming in from Europe in record numbers, there just isn't enough to populate 30 rosters," Savran wrote in his Pittsburgh newspaper column. "If you slice four or five teams, the trickle-down effect would find third and fourth line slugs doing their mucking and grinding and clutching and grabbing in outposts such as Newfoundland, Quebec City and Wilkes-Barre.
"There's no substitute for hard work in this sport, but perspiration isn't a total substitute for the skills required to play the game. Those types, so prevalent on rosters today, don't need to be gumming up the works. There's always a role for them on your team, but it shouldn't be a style of play. Contraction would allow the league to return, somewhat, to those thrilling days of yesteryear when skill mattered and had to be defended, not lassoed."
But Savran is also a realist. He knows that it is easy to advocate contraction, but people's opinions can quickly change when the contraction finger is pointing at their team.
In his column, he warned fans in Pittsburgh that "if you're a hockey fan in this town and would like to see the NHL contract, be very careful of what you wish for. Most regrettably, that wish is liable to come true."
There are, however, quite a few people who don't think contraction is the solution. That side of the issue in our next report.
