Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

Bruce Dowbiggin

Hockey’s Image Problem: The Commissioner Who Won’t Leave

Published

9 minute read

We once had a former MLB player/ media type tell us that if he were a manager he’d prefer his players go to their hotels after the game, smoke a little weed, play video games and get proper sleep. Especially now that smoking weed is legal in large parts of the continent. Staying up till 3 A.M. chasing girls in bars was the road to ruination, he said.

Apparently the NBA agrees. It is announcing that it will no longer test for marijuana as part of its drug-testing protocols. In its new collective bargaining agreement the NBA has dragged sports into the 21st century. By that we don’t mean the NHL will follow.

Gary Bettman’s NHL never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity at modernizing its product. Stasis would be the best word to describe the hermetically sealed snow globe that is the NHL. Even when it embraces change it does so in a way that tarnishes the League. See: Non-binary hockey and Pride Nights. So you know that the NHL will only drop testing for weed when it can be used as a weapon in future CBA tong wars against new NHLPA executive director Marty Walsh.

To grasp how sluggish the development of the NHL has become under The Commissioner Who Won’t Go Away, one need only look to the NBA which this weekend announced its new collective bargaining agreement with its players. The NBA CBA was done without even the threat of a work stoppage and is full of innovations and progressive ideas on how a sports league with a salary cap needs to operate.

In the NHL a collective agreement is never reached till Bettman has wiped out large segments of the season, necessitating class warfare with his product, the players. While pissing off the consumers of his sport and the networks who carry the games. [We remain opposed to salary caps in a global sports market, as we documented in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and Why The Free Market Could Save Them.]

What does this deal say? First, the league is responding to the popularity of soccer’s many midseason competitions and the successful recent World Classic Baseball by committing to a midseason “tournament”. To qualify, teams will participate in pool games already on the regular-season schedule. Eight teams will get into the final play-down in “December Madness”, which will receive buckets of media exposure. Winning players and coaches will get extra money, which should help increase their motivation.

The reason behind this is simple, as we stated in Cap In Hand. In a global sports market, fans don’t want to wait for six months to see their favourites play meaningful games. They also want to see best-on-best as often as possible. Witness: Soccer’s Champions or Europa Leagues that play concurrent with the Premiership or La Liga schedule. We had a former NHL executive promote this ideas to us over a decade ago.

Of course, Bettman, the Herman Roth of commissioners, ignored him. He still believes Columbus versus Winnipeg on a January night is enough to keep the fans happy. Under his watch international play— once the crown jewel of the sport— has withered and died. World Cup? That’s a whole lot of bother for owners who like the Bettman formula they bought into. Right now there is one Stanley Cup winner and 31 losers.

There will no doubt be some bumps as NBA fans get the hang of the tournament formula. There are those who will moan about how the NBA CBA does nothing for mid-sized markets. “Players lose again … Middle and Lower spectrum teams don’t spend because they don’t want to,” Golden State’s Draymond Green posted to Twitter. “They want to lose… And this is what we rushed into a deal for?” (Draymond, outside of local markets no one cares about mid-sized teams any more.)

But it says here that the fans will grab onto the December Madness tournament formula. As will the exploding betting industry. But the NHL won’t touch this novel project— or Olympics or World Cups— till Bettman squeezes the NHLPA at the next CBA session.

The NBA CBA, which runs till 2030, also says players will have to play 65 games to qualify for season-ending awards, cutting back on “maintenance days” for superstars. It also will allow players making ga-jillions to now be owners of teams, invest in other sports franchises or lose all their money… er, invest in the cannabis industry. Having players learn the other side of the business can only be a positive. Under Bettman’s rule the top players never make near their worth, so this would be moot in the NHL.

The only threat to Bettman’s status quo is the financial collapse of many regional sports networks in the U.S., the backbone of his U.S. strategy. They are being hammered by the cord-cutting trend in cable TV.  As we wrote here in January, for a league like the NHL that has counted heavily on regional revenues the past 30 years cord-cutting is a disaster. “Greg Boris, a sports management professor at Adelphi University summed up the looming disaster: RSNs have ‘been a golden goose. You remove cable TV from the scenario, and franchises are worth a fraction of what they are today, players make a fraction of their salaries today…”

In March, Bally Sports— which operates 14 regional sports networks in the U.S. (covering 12 NHL clubs)— filed for bankruptcy protection to eliminate about $8 B in debt. The hope is that Chapter 11 will give them time to re-organize. But that won’t change the collapsing numbers of subscribers who bail on services for channels they never watch. Already, Bally is looking to reject the contracts of four MLB teams as part of the bankruptcy.

Time Warner Discovery, too, has said they are looking to exit the regional sports network business. While leagues like the NHL might move to streaming services, there is little expectation that it will produce the same revenues. Ergo, financial collapse.

Maybe a ruinous TV contract might finally send Bettman into retirement and the NHL into an enlightened age. Till then everyone probably needs a little weed to get through the process.

Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent.  https://share.hsforms.com/16edbhhC3TTKg6jAaRyP7rActsj5

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

 

Before Post

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

Follow Author

Bruce Dowbiggin

Why Canada’s Elites Are Captives To The Kamala Narrative

Published on

“As he closes the election with rank racism, relentless unreality and authoritarian threats, Trump’s popularity among Canadian Conservatives is higher than ever. This seems like it could be a problem”.— Bruce Arthur, Toronto Star 

A problem for whom, Bruce? It’s telling that while 50 percent of Americans see through Kamala Harris and the DEMs coup narrative as complete bushwah, probably 90 percent of Canadians– led by Arthur and the corporate media– lap up this condescending narrative. Their biggest fear remains that the populist revolt against authority in the U.S. might threaten Canada’s elite class. Like Toronto Star squishy columnists.

In the hermetically sealed media world of Canada, natives take their cues from CNN and MSNBC talking points both of which employ Canadians in highly visible roles. (Here’s expat Ali Velshi famously describing on NBC that the 2020 George Floyd riots that burned for weeks— destroying billions in damages while resulting in multipole deaths— as “generally peaceful”

The narratives of Russiagate, drinking bleach, “fine people” to Hunter Biden’s laptop— long ago debunked down south— are still approved wisdom in Canada’s chattering class. Especially if America’s conflagration election can be used to demonstrate the good sense and judgment of Canada’s managerial and media class.

The northern pecksniffs have loads of insanity to work with as Trump seemingly edges ahead in polls. There’s the brouhaha over a shock comedian at a Trump rally calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”. Unhinged outgoing POTUS Biden then called GOP voters “garbage”. So Trump made an appearance as a garbage man, to the shrieking disapproval of CBS News chief anchor Nora O’Donnell.

Then there’s Whoopi Goldberg on The View predicting Trump will “break up interracial marriages and redistribute the white spouses: “He’s going to deport and you, put the white guy with someone else… The man is out there!” Forget that Trump did nothing of the sort when he was president from 2016-2020. It’s every hysteric for himself as Nov. 5 looms. Their biggest fear? Those who vilified Trump the past decade will be out of the power loop for at least four years— or longer if VP candidate J.D. Vance extends the Trump revolution. It’s panic time.

Picked up on by those fearing their place in the Canadian power grid might fall next. The disdainful cheers from Arthur and Andrew Coyne and the CBC bien pensants at each thrust of Trump-as-Nazi echo through a press corps which now fawns over Mark Carney, the bespoke banker/ heir apparent to Trudeau. They grasp at each anti-Trump narrative like starving men in the desert.

It’s 1990s redux in Ottawa as think-tank Aristotles work to reinforce their status quo. While a public that has CPC ahead by 20 points in the polls demands change, the Liberal/ NDP cabal want that old-time political religion of insider baseball Ottawa-style. Here’s NDP attack bot Kathleen Monk insisting that PM-in-waiting Pierre Poilievre get security clearance on the Chinese election interference case so that he might better be skewered for not telling Canadians the truth included in them about how their elections are being subverted by the Chinese.

No one drawing a Liberal support cheque worries aloud that Trudeau knows the truth contained in this files, that it’s injurious to him and the NDPs, that Canadians need to know the names of MPs and senators taking bribes, why a police request sat on a minister’s desk for 54 days unopened. It’s Poilievre/ Trump who’s untrustworthy. It’s a strategy that the Libs and NDP pray Poilievre will fall for. Pierre’s sin is he doesn’t believe the public should depend on government for everything. That’s heresy in Canada’s Family Compact, and so the Trump comparisons.

The anti-Trump vendetta also means that Canadians have decided that Elon Musk, the pre-eminent genius of the 21st century— is now Josef Goebbels to Trump’s Hitler. As we wrote recently “on his way to immortality Elon Musk made one critical mistake: purchasing the website Twitter, now re-branded as X. In doing so he fired 90 percent of the previous staff and instituted a policy of open speech for the Right on the site— starting with restoring Donald Trump’s account. Which put Musk on the Hit List for leftist plutocrats.” 

So now the sneering scribes are going after him, too, in spite of his Canadian citizenship. This is no small thing as Canadians reflexively grab at any shred of CanCon elsewhere. Canadian politics under the Liberals has become a vedette exercise since Pierre Trudeau started dating Funny Girl Barbra Streisand.  In the U.S. outsiders to the political system are rare. Much of the pearl clutching about Trump results from his not being manipulated by the byzantine American political universe.

In cases such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, the nominees were moulded by the machine to highlight their acceptability. Ronald Reagan excepted, the insider track is the preferred route to a nomination in either party. Biden personified lifelong membership in the insiders club. As did John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John McCain, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Gerald Ford, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and so on.

But in Canada, the Liberal party in particular now disdains the tried-and-true. After decades of zero-charisma PMs such as Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent and Mike Pearson, the Grits went ga-ga for the international flair of PET. His irreverence and impertinence on the world stage was catnip to Liberals as the 1960s cultural revolution shook up staid Canada. Since then the blue print has listed more toward “star” candidates from outside the party, such as Michael Ignatieff, Stephane Dion, Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney.

Trudeau II is the epitome of the vedette candidate, bathed by the glow of U.S. magazines and slathering leftists in Europe. Liberals felt vital as long as the trust-fund PM got props from outside, such as when WEF honcho Klaus Schwab outed Skippy as one of his lieutenants. Trump, the antithesis of the Dauphin, is a blustery carny riding the wings of populist outrage. His crass, bumptious style personally offends the sensibilities of Toronto Star scribblers and CBC wind therapists.

The clincher for Canadians is the overwhelming Kamala love from the Hollywood crowd. Virtually every high-profile actor/ singer/ writer has embraced the woman who was parachuted into the nomination in a coup— even as the glitterati raved about anti-democratic Trump. From Beyoncé to Bilie Eilish to Bruce Springsteen, their support has been a winner in Canada’s fangirl/ fanboy culture.

So as we head to next Tuesday’s end to the election marathon in America, the finger-wagging will increase as Canadians try to elevate themselves above a nation that, for all its faults, has actually staged a policy choice. Meanwhile in Canada, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh once again embraces his coalition with a drowning Trudeau for another year.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Continue Reading

Bruce Dowbiggin

Musk Win: How Elon’s Heel Turn Has Driven The Left Insane

Published on

It’s not often that we can watch the workings of our modern world with childlike glee. But glee might be the best word to describe the feelings of most as they watched the stunning safe return of the booster rocket from Starship X. The video showed how the arms of the Starship X tower grabbed the rocket from out of thin air as it slowly descended to earth, gently place it safely back on the launch pad.

In normal times the person who created such a company would be hailed as the pinnacle of human potential. Add in that he has also created revolutionary electric cars and Starlink satellite systems and the PayPal network and you’d probably nominate the South African/ Canadian in question as a permanent Nobel winner. He’s among the world’s richest people as a result.

But on his way to immortality Elon Musk made one critical mistake: purchasing the website Twitter, now re-branded as X. In doing so he fired 90 percent of the previous staff and instituted a policy of open speech for the Right on the site— starting with restoring Donald Trump’s account. Which put Musk on the Hit List for leftist plutocrats.

How? He hired prominent independent journalists such as Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberg and Matt Taibbi to show that Twitter, along with Facebook and other prominent social media sites, had been paid to censor opponents at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign during the 2020 election. He started posting about the disturbing contrast of America’s voting system (results up to three weeks after election) compared to Argentina (6.6 hours).  He pointed out that America is broke, saying things like “”The reason why I’m involved in politics this time, is because this time it’s a fork in the road. I think we’re doomed if Trump doesn’t win, so he’s gotta win.”.

From worshipful respect, Musk was suddenly met with scorn, derision and, in Europe, plans to censor him permanently. Brazil shut down X completely. British intelligence targeted his association with Trump. The radical Left in the U.S., accustomed to its version of truth, suddenly decided that Musk was in line with Nazis and the Far Right.

As blogger Mike Benz notes, the deep state targeted him for not playing along. “CCDH — whose explicit written goal is to “Kill Musk’s Twitter” — not only has its Chairman come from NATO’s Atlantic Council, its former Comms chief was a CIA operative who worked extensively in NATO intelligence ops… CCDH’s former Head of Communications is a self-described “CIA operative” in her own Twitter bio (!!) with an extensive history of NATO operations: ‘Covert operations, intelligence & disinformation’”

While admitting that he’ll likely be in jail within six months of Kamala Harris winning the presidency, Musk is unfazed. Here’s fired CNN talking head Don Lemon challenging— and losing— on Musk’s commitment to free speech. But Musk’s deft debating didn’t discourage the purchased media of the left from trying some more.

Here’s Vanity Fair excoriating Musk for veering from their catechism. Here is reliably lunatic NBC News saying Musk is— gasp— against DEI. For good measure here’s Reuters giving an airing of former Twitter employees grievances against Musk. Topped by president Joe Biden’s demand to “Politically, lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do,” said even as he president’s Justice Department was in fact trying to jail Mr. Trump literally.

When he realized that the Left was using him as a piñata Musk responded to the onslaught by making an alliance with former president Donald Trump, the Beelzebub of Woke folk and the bureaucrat’s nightmare. Because Trump, the braggart, was at least in favour of free speech for other braggarts, Musk agreed to join his team after the election as Efficiency Czar for government.

Musk began saying things like he’d reduce the approximately 340 agencies in the U.S. federal government to just 90. He also questioned the usefulness of most people in the DC bubble. He began asking why the government’s $42 B plan for rural internet, awash in delay and debt, shouldn’t be shelved for his Starlink system which already serves customers at a fraction of Kamala Harris’ white elephant.

While he was at it, Musk also eviscerated the DEMs pet cause of border reform. “If given 4 more years to do it, the big govt machine will legalize vast numbers of illegals, making all swing states permanently deep blue, just like they did with California. Every major Democrat politician has stated that their goal is to legalize all illegals. Believe them.

If you thought January 6, 2021, was a shock to Washington’s privilege, a Musk efficiency regime— combined with RFK Jr taking on the healthcare industry— will be tantamount to setting off a thermo-nuclear device beneath the Senate lunchroom. Democrats and the trained hamsters of the GOP establishment swore a fatwa on a guy whom they’d venerated not long ago.

Here’s the New York Times, party organ of the DNC, on Musk’s Efficiency commission. “That would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.” Yahoo calls him a threat to national security because something something something. MSNBC, the TV voice of Woke Washington, declarded that Musk is using his power to sue his critics into silence.

But such is the temperature of the DEI Left as it faces imminent destruction in the 2024 election. Having rationalized two assassination attempts on Trump they now nurse snuff fantasies about eliminating Musk the Menace. As legal scholar Jonathan Hurley writes, “It is all part of Musk mania and the need to break the only executive who has defied the anti-free speech movement.”

You can measure their panic by the employment of DEMs superstars like Barack and Michelle Obama and the odious Clintons. While the obsequious Obama laments division in the body politic, Kamala Harris states: “Trump is literally Hitler and he will use the military to kill US citizens.”

Obama, who institutionalized the Racism® industry upon his winning the presidency, is accusing Trump and Musk of… you guessed it… racism for dividing Americans. From Henry Louis Gates to struggle sessions in the military to embracing race hustlers with ankle bracelets in the White House, Obama guaranteed the George Floyd America as it heads to the polls on November 5. Before Musk bought Twitter, he got away with it all, But a Musk X has exposed the glib Obama as a petty Marxist tyrant.

That a transitional figure such as Musk is being sacrificed to the altar of Woke politics is, regrettably, no surprise in these times. Which makes it no less reprehensible. The Obama motto regarding enemies is “No one gets out alive”. Perhaps Musk should heed A.E. Houseman who observed, “smart lad to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay. For early though the laurel goes, it withers sooner than the rose.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Continue Reading

Trending

X