Quick Hits

Brief comments on a wide range of subjects:

1. The First Month: No matter who wins tonight in Anaheim, its been a great start for the Canucks. It could easily have been a disaster given the injuries and the schedule. It wasn’t, despite the fact that the Sedins have not been good, Luongo is just rounding into form and Steve Bernier has not been impressive. Before the season started I thought the keys would be the young players and they have not disappointed. Kesler, Edler, Hansen, Bieksa and Mason Raymond have all been excellent. As a result, this is a good hockey team.

2. Sundin and Cap Space: Mike Gillis still seems to be optimistic about Sundin. If Vancouver gets him for the rest of this season, great. If the two year deal is still on the table, Gillis is insane. Its really difficult to forecast anything in this environment, but the Canucks are in position to manage a big cap cut next year. I expect a few teams will have real problems. I don’t think Gillis should punt away that advantage.

(Its going to be interesting to watch if revenues do actually take a big hit this season. The wealthy teams and the players have enjoyed the ride up, but I think we’ll see real problems if the cap falls. An unintended consequence of the CBA was long contracts. They all look good when the cap is going up in leaps and bounds and the player percentage of revenue was rising rapidly. Reverse that and teams will find themselves without any flexibility.)

3. The Panthers et al: I pretty much agree with Greg Ballentine on this one. The fact that the Panthers are saving money by cutting staff, cutting staff benefits, cutting service, and cutting out Fedex is not a good sign. That they are giving away many, many tickets is nearly as bad. I was pessimistic about the economy before the crash and I’m even more pessimistic today. Any one of four teams – Nashville, Atlanta, Florida or Phoenix – could fail.

Hockey teams are very illiquid assets. The Forbes “valuations” are not very realistic when potential owners can’t get financing.

4. On Head Shots: What price are we willing to (make the players) pay to keep reckless abandon in the game? That’s the real question in the debate.

My view? I don’t see why the officials did not call a penalty on Weight. I’d call a penalty – some penalty, any penalty – every time someone unloads on a vulnerable player. I’d rather not legislate the issue. If the league can call holding when there was no holding, they can call elbowing when there was no elbow or charging when there was no charging. As long as the hit was dangerous, nobody will complain.

5. Can Bettman: Adam Proteau calls for Bettman’s head. Nobody would complain about that either. Eventually he will get the axe and after he leaves, everybody will agree that he was awful for hockey.

6. On Media Criticism: I don’t know what this guy is talking about:

The NHL is by far the most heavily criticized major sport in North America. Major TV networks (ahem, ESPN) and casual fans everywhere don’t think twice about taking cheap shots at hockey. They’ll talk about how fighting is a disgrace, how there’s consistently an on ice attack every year, or how the NHL is embarrassing because they’re on a network that isn’t shown by many major cable networks. That’s about the extent of the criticisms that anybody has about hockey, and the only legitimate one is about some violent on ice occurrences, but even that is pretty rare. It may seem frequent because the only time ESPN cares about showing the NHL is when something controversial happens.

ESPN does not provide good coverage, but the league knew that would happen when they cut a deal with Versus. While the TV deal has been criticised – and gratuitous violence highlighted – that is not the extent of the criticisms. The most important knock is that the league is not very popular among American sports fans. The NHL is hardly ever criticised in the American media because it is hardly ever mentioned. It is ignored. That’s the problem.