When Gary Bettman left the NBA for the NHL a lot of people said that the reason David Stern let him go was that the NHL was (then) competing pretty aggresssively with the NBA, and Stern needed a Trojan horse to bring the hockey league to its knees.
It seemed a silly joke at the time, but wow, it seems more and more plausible every day doesn't it?
Word is Craig Leipold has "decided" (i.e. been brow-beaten by Bettman et al) to take $50 million LESS for the Nashville Predators than offered recently by Jim Balsillie of Research in Motion fame. That's right, it seems an owner whose been hemorraging money for years on this ill-advised adventure in Music City is going to leave $50 million on the table.
"To keep them in Nashville?", you ask (incredulously, I'm sure). No. Seems the powers that be have decided that one NHL team failing in Kansas City wasn't enough, and they'd like to see another team go down in flames there rather than send a team somewhere where it will, you know, SUCCEED. (Do you even remeber the Kansas City Scouts??? Exactly.)
The NHL would, it appears, rather see a long-suffering owner (whose done his bit to try to make hockey succeed in a market that doesn't care) lose out on $50 million so that another owner can experience the joy of failing in a market that doesn't care about hockey. All to keep a team out of Southern Ontario. We now live in a world where Florida and California have 5 NHL teams and Ontario and Quebec have three, and it seems clear that the powers that be would rather run the league into the ground trying to sell hockey to people who don't care, rather than giving hockey to people who are salivating to hand over their hard-earned money for it. All out of some delusion that a half empty rink of bored spectators in the U.S. is somehow better for the NHL than a sold out rink of excited hockey fans that happens to be North of a line on the map. As though the potential (unrealized for DECADES) of 10,000 spectators a night and no corporate sponsorship in a 300 million person country with huge corporations will EVER be better than the reality of 20,000 fans and ACTUAL corporate support in a country of 33 million. The Stanley Cup finals can't even outdraw Gold Cup soccer in the U.S. (SOCCER people) even when the hockey is on NBC broadcast in English and the soccer is on Univision broadcast in Spanish. Bettman is clearly living in some fantasy world in which somehow decades of declining interest and increasing national ridicule in the U.S. is going to be turned around by moving the league back to cities that rejected the sport years ago (Bettman's motto: "If at first you don't succeed, stay the course." To Gary, it's the universe that's wrong, not him, and he's more than willing to wait for the universe to change, dammit).
Now, kvetching about Bettman is damn near our third national sport, and who doesn't LOVE seeing the guy booed everywhere he goes (the only credit I DO give Bettman is that he is generally pretty good-natured in public about the fact that everyone who cares about hockey hates him). However, now it's not even funny anymore. The man needs to be stopped. Someone has to save hockey from these people, and I think we need to start having a national discussion about what we can all do to help.
Any sugestions?
Maybe someone should start by suing Bettman for collusion with Stern to bring down the NHL. It wouldn't fly (it really is just a joke) but maybe the optics alone would be enough to finally run the guy out of town. I'd also like to investigate ways to ban Bettman from entering Canada. A message needs to be sent, and I'd love to hear your suggestions on how to send it!
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Something needs to be done about Gary Bettman
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
When in doubt, make stuff up and lie...
So the PM totally lied in the House of Commons today, regarding the Official Languages Commissioner's report to Parliament today.
Wells has the story.
It'd be funny if it weren't so sickening.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Ducepppe making the move to the PQ...
Well, this will shake things up I'd bet (just how though I'm not sure anyone can say yet).
Very interesting times we live in.
Too bad we can't hold a snap election. I'm too afraid of a Tory majority, but I wouldn't mind a renewed Tory minority mandate if we could devestate the Bloc while we were at it.
Maybe that would go over so horribly in Quebec as a "kick 'em while they're down" move that it would backfire, but still, it'd be fun to decimate the Bloc's position in Ottawa.
Hopefully, this is the beginning of that regardless.
Conservatives storm out of committee meeting...
Yesterday, a professor from the University of Alberta was testifying at a committee hearing on the "Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a 2005 accord by the U.S., Canada and Mexico to streamline economic and security rules across the continent". The professor testified that "the deal, which calls North American “energy security” a priority, commits Canada to ensuring American energy supplies even though Canada itself — unlike most industrialized nations — has no national plan or reserves to protect its own supplies."
So, what happened when the professor testified that the SPP could endanger Canada's energy security by committing us to safeguarding American energy supplies before stockpiling for our own emergencies? The Tory Chair of the committee (Leon Benoit) ordered him to stop testifying, and declared his testimony "irrelevant".
The rest of the committee, realising that the potential effects of the SPP on Canada's energy (and therefore national) security certainly IS relevant to a hearing on the SPP (because they're not idiots) voted to overrule the Benoit's ruling, which they did.
Benoit's reaction? He threw down his pen, unilaterally declared "The meeting is adjourned." and stormed out with three of the panel's four conservatives.
Perhaps realizing that the Chair of a Parliamentary Committee can't just arbitrarily and unilaterally declare a meeting of the committe adjourned ("at press time, parliamentary procedure experts still hadn’t figured out whether he had the right to adjourn the meeting unilaterally") the Opposition members of the Committee continued the meeting (with the lone remaining Tory) and allowed Professor Laxer to continue his testimony into the potential national security implications of the SPP plan.
Canada's New Government: I'm too depressed to even come up with a humourously ironic catch phrase.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
NATO in Afghanistan...
A quote regarding NATO operations in Afghanistan:
"Civilian deaths and arbitrary decisions to search people's houses have reached an unacceptable level, and Afghans cannot put up with it any longer... It is becoming a heavy burden and we are not happy about it... I hope the international community will find with us, with our relevant ministries, a mechanism that will bring an end to collateral damage, to damage to civilians".
Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan.
