Why the NHL’s Winter Classic is too little, too late for Bettman

It didn’t matter that the gametime temperature was -13 Celsius.

It didn’t matter that the ‘rink’ was a converted baseball stadium.

It didn’t matter that the fans with seats in row one were a hundred meters away from the action.

This was a game that nobody was going to miss. Over 40,000 fans – in a US city to boot – braved the cold to watch the Detroit Red Wings beat the Chicago Blackhawks 6-4 on New Years Day in the second installment of a short-lived tradition, affectionately referred to as the “Winter Classic”. But what’s ironic here is that in Gary Bettman’s reign as NHL commissioner, he’s stripped the game of many of the things that were ‘classic’ about it before turning face and affixing that label to his new outdoor baby.

Bettman came to the NHL from the NBA where he was mentored by the great David Stern. Stern, who just celebrated his 25th year as commissioner, was riding high after capitalizing on a decade of growth focused on dueling superstars, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and was poised to take basketball to unprecedented heights on the back of the marketing machine that would become, Michael Jordan. Bettman saw all this and decided that the NHL should and could go the way of the NBA. The only problem, which seems to persist to this day, is that Bettman has no idea that the NBA fan and the NHL fan are not one in the same.

Bettman, seemingly completely unaware of this, immediately began his attempt to bring the NHL to the same American mainstream audience that the NBA was now enjoying. He pulled teams out of cold weather hotbeds like Quebec City, Winnipeg, Hartford and Minnesota and brought teams to places Phoenix, Raleigh and Nashville in their place. With labour and revenue problems growing, he stayed the course on expansion plans, trying to grow revenues in Florida and California where a game played on ice is a novelty, more than a tradition. All the while, he further alienated the game’s traditional fans who were losing their teams to markets that didn’t care about hockey and owners that simply didn’t understand the game, and more recently, the law.

Bettman was then lauded for signing the league’s largest TV deal in history in 1994 with the Fox Network. The Fox experiment produced poor ratings in the US and annoyed purists across North America who bristled at the sight of “the Fox puck”, an electric blue graphical trick designed to make the disc easier to follow for the aforementioned Floridians. It came off more like a bad fusion of Star Wars and figure skating. This continues to be one of Bettman’s most consistent mandates – to “educate” new audiences by tweaking the game and making it more digestible to potential fans, rather than focusing on the fact that the NHL has all the history and tradition of Major League Baseball – a sport that Americans adore for its folklore alone.  But clearly, this is something that never occurred to Gary on his march to matching his mentor Stern’s success in growing his sport.
Bettman took another step towards taking the history from hockey when he realigned and renamed divisions. Gone were the historically glorious Clarence Campbell and Princess of Wales conferences, replaced with Eastern and Western. Gone were the Norris, Adams, Patrick and Smythe divisions – named for builders of the game – and in their place, divisions like the geographically appropriate, but soulless, “Northeast”. Thankfully, Bettman has resisted his urges all these names to rename hockey’s most priced artifact, the Stanley Cup… thought I’m sure he’s in talks with Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup on some level…

Now here we are almost 15 years after the Fox deal and the NHL is shown in the US on Versus, a network that gets most of its rating from re-runs of Rocky movies and professional bull riding. You’d be hard-pressed to find a sports fan in the US who would still consider hockey a “Big Four” professional sport. Most of this was due to Bettman’s crowning achievement in ineptitude – the 2004-05 Lockout. The cancellation of an entire season of the league to achieve the very thing that likely could’ve saved the teams in Winnipeg, Quebec and Hartford 10 years earlier.

Now after all this, Bettman has embraced the outdoor game because, as he said in Thursdays postgame news conference:

People shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that 240,000 people signed up for the lottery to get a handful of a thousand tickets. So there’s great interest. That was both in Canada and United States. Sponsors have gravitated to this. Bridgestone, Honda, McDonald’s, all of our sponsors, including some of the new ones, in a tough environment.
We’ve sold a number of sponsorships in the last three or four months leading up to this event. This event activates very well, because it’s really special. It’s unique in the way that it takes the game back to its roots. It’s unique in the way the players react to it, because it’s so special to be there on the ice.

Imagine that, Gary. A game, rooted in over 100 years of tradition, being embraced in freezing cold weather on an outdoor pond. Fans, sponsors, media attention… sounds like everything you ever wanted. When asked about a possible destination for next year’s Classic, Bettman’s musings continued:

I have no idea where we’re going next. We haven’t given it any thought. I never like to look ahead. I like to get through these one at a time, debrief, look at what we can improve…
It won’t be a perfect science, but hopefully when we make the decision it will turn out like this to be a good decision.

It seems like the Winter Classic is 2 for 2 so far, but let’s see what happens next year when Bettman announces they’re moving the game to Phoenix. Some people never learn…

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