NOW THAT everyone is squared away on the difference between a lockout and a strike, it's time to ditch the idea that hockey is dead. Hockey isn't dead. The NHL, as we know it, is dead. Let me hear you say 'Amen.'
We in the media devote virtually all our resources to a microscopically small percentage of the people who play Canada's game.
Most teams employ 30 or so players through the season. There are six Canadian teams. That's 180 NHL hockey players north of the 49th.
Compare that figure to the 575,000 people playing organized hockey in Canada.
Throw in beer and shinny leagues and you're probably talking about a million people who play the game for fun compared to 180 who play at the top of the profit pyramid.
That means 5,555 people in this country, our kids, our friends, ourselves, playing the game because they love it for every single NHLer playing on a Canadian team.
Likewise, you will find 2,500 indoor rinks in Canada and thousands more lovingly tended in fields and parks and backyards across the country. NHL hockey is, or was, played in six arenas.
Not one Canadian is going to quit the game because the NHL has bolted the doors. Hockey isn't dead.
For one blessed year, and who knows, maybe more, our kids won't need to sift through hours of hooking, high sticking and trapping to glean a few moments of skill.
There will be no more of Don Cherry's predictable and calculated bouts of political incorrectness.
There will be no fear of another Todd Bertuzzi-like attack, no weeks of numbing self-absorption about where the game first really went of the rails, no orgy of fighting videos on the highlight shows, nothing for the bleeding hearts, like me, to cluck our tongues about.
There will be no NHL hockey players referring to themselves in the third person, or even the first.
Gradually, we will be treated to the spectacle of millionaire players humbling themselves at card shows and memorabilia auctions in a vain attempt to maintain their standard of living. The insulation that is wealth will be leached away and that alone could be as much fun to watch as any Minnesota-Vancouver game.
Likewise, the ego strokes an owner gets from seeing his name in the paper will vaporize. C'est dommage.
If we haven't already, we will soon tune out both the owners and the players. For now, cost certainty means I'm not going to spend a dime on your sorry-ass game.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is right about one thing: The game is broken and needs to be fixed.
Bettman, of course, is one of the architects of that destruction. His notion that salary escalation could be countered with expansion and television money has been proven an expensive, disastrous fallacy.
The NHL, addicted to violence, distended into indifferent markets, is only viable in the six Canadian cities and, perhaps, 15 or so American ones.
PRATTLE
Even if you were to believe the owner's prattle that lower salaries would result in sheared ticket prices, you overlook the central obstacle of the game in the U.S.
Americans like American endeavours -- baseball, football, NASCAR, college sports. They always have. They always will.
Hockey, no matter how it is priced, will only be a regional flavour and in that incarnation it will need fewer teams, better players, less, not more violence, and profound structural change to return flow to the game.
Hockey isn't over. The NHL is over, maybe for a long time. Let me hear you say 'Amen.'
