Last week, when no one was looking, hockey crawled off into a nearby corner, curled up into a tiny ball and died. It died quietly and without fanfare. I died without notice, almost. Detroit noticed, and fans in Hockeytown shed some tears for the few TV cameras that bothered to watch. A few in New York, Philly and Colorado noticed, although there was nothing they could do. Canada noticed -- it is, after all, a country where hockey is the unofficial official sport.
But, for the most part, the de facto cancellation of this year's NHL season slid under the radar, just like the player lockout that killed hockey has been sliding under the radar for months. In Tampa Bay, purportedly the home of a world championship hockey team, the end of hockey barely made the news.
So, for now, and sadly the foreseeable future, the Stanley Cup will sit in some Florida trophy case, waiting for another bunch of bruised, mullet-haired, unfortunate-toothed world champions to lift it again. It may be a long wait. For a lifelong hockey fan, the petty and incomprehensibly short-sighted determination with which owners, players and the NHL have conspired to kill hockey has been nothing short of amazing.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and everyone gets a big slice. The team owners revealed how little they care about the future of their sport when they turned down a deal from the players, who offered to cut their own salaries by 24 percent across the board. Giving up a quarter of your pay is a pretty momentous gesture, and the fact that the owners brushed it aside with hardly a glance shows how blindly obsessed with their own bottom lines they've become. Not that killing hockey can be doing their bottom lines any favors, but somehow that hasn't stopped them from assisting the players in committing murder-suicide.
As for the players, walking away from the table every time the words "salary cap" leave someone's lips is not a constructive strategy. The players need to realize that a salary cap is inevitable for the cash-strapped league, and the NFL and NBA have done just fine with a cap. But But, instead, the players are burning the village to save it.
Of course the NHL handed them the torch. After a decade of giving away expansion teams to every burb with a stoplight -- despite the falling TV ratings and teams swimming in red ink -- it's no wonder that the situation has come to a head. Not that the NHL will ever propose the contraction that it needs more desperately than Ted Kennedy needs a martini. Axing the numerous empty-arena teams would have been a good start on the road to recovery, but instead the league has opted for axing itself in entirety.
So, for this year, and maybe the next, and maybe the next, the arenas will sit empty. The NHL will complete the disappearing act it has worked on for a decade. When the children running the players union, owners lobby and NHL learn to share, if they ever do, they may just find there is nothing left to share. And, as always, the fans end up the real losers. No more slapshots from the blue line. No more octopi on the ice in Hockeytown. No more Cup Craziness.
Rest in peace, hockey. You will be missed. At least by those of us who noticed you're gone.
