Gary Bettman had to be watching David Stern on television this past week - an easy task considering that Stern was seemingly ubiquitous - and wondering why it wasn’t him doing the talking.
Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA), was surfing a wave of non-stop good news. The league crowned its new champions (San Antonio) in a dramatic seventh-game showdown over Detroit, announced a new collective bargaining agreement with its players’ association and conducted an amateur draft that further expanded its reach into international markets.
Meanwhile, Bettman, the commissioner of the suspended National Hockey League (NHL), announced nothing. Worse, it seems that few care that the NHL is saying nothing these days. It is as though ice hockey has vanished from the American sporting psyche.
The first and only professional sport league to lose an entire season due to a labour dispute, the NHL has slipped into an abyss of indifference while the NBA has suddenly jumped back on to centre stage with its television ratings soaring for both the decisive seventh game and then again for Tuesday night’s annual player draft.
But the NBA’s biggest coup was scored behind closed doors on the eve of the season’s final game after Stern fired a warning shot across the ever-fattening wallets of the league’s players.
Advertisement
Facing a possible labour impasse between the union and its players and the potential of a delay to the start of the 2005-06 season, Stern suggested that the union take a hard look at what has happened to the NHL and work to avoid a labour impasse at all costs.
Voila! The NBA had a new collective bargaining agreement almost overnight with the two sides hammering out a deal that could be announced in concert with San Antonio’s 81-74 victory over Detroit in the finale of the seven-game NBA championship series. Led by Tim Duncan, the series MVP, the Spurs won their third title in seven years.
Clearly, Stern brought home the lesson to be learned from the NHL, a lesson the NHL still doesn’t grasp.
Out of sight, out of mind. Burned previously by both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Football League (NFL), American sport fans and corporate sponsors are no longer willing to forgive and forget when a league shuts down a season while seeking to negotiate a new agreement to govern player-owner relations.
Baseball barely rebounded from its latest stoppage in 1994, one that led to the cancellation of the World Series. It took the home-run hitting exploits of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds to rebuild excitement for the game though those exploits are now tainted by allegations of performance-enhancing drugs.
Advertisement
There are fears that the NHL will never recover from the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 campaign. Television contracts have expired and are not being re-negotiated. The corporate sponsors that helped pack NHL arenas have found other outlets for their perk budgets.
Worse, the NHL still has no agreement in place even as the scheduled opening of training camps for the upcoming season rapidly approaches. The only thing that talks seem to inspire are denials and counterdenials that serve only to turn fans against the league.
Firing the latest volley was Jeremy Roenick, the Philadelphia Flyers forward, who told fans who blame the NHL lockout on player greed to “stay at home”. He didn’t stop there. “We don’t want you at the rink, we don’t want you in the stadium, we don’t want you watching hockey.”
Should there be an agreement, the NHL has no potential superstar in place - it hasn’t had one since Wayne Gretzky retired - to rekindle interest in the sport among the masses.
These were likely some of the talking points that Stern stressed to the negotiating parties as the NBA approached and ultimately avoided its own Armageddon. Given the state of its rival for the winter-spring sports dollar in the United States, the NBA’s timing of an agreement couldn’t have been more perfectly scripted. Its boost may have been a knockout blow to the NHL.
Advertisement
With a new collective bargaining agreement in place, an exciting title game still fresh in the memory and a successful draft all coming togethr in the past week, things could not be much better for Stern. Ride the wave, David.
Five days after the championship game, Stern’s NBA was centre stage again with its annual draft of eligible youngsters free of the dark cloud of a potential strike hanging over the event. Everyone was all smiles as seven-foot Andrew Bogut, a 20-year-old Australian of Croatian descent, became the first player selected in the draft by the Milwaukee Bucks.
Bogut’s selection was notable on several levels. Bogut is the seventh foreign-born player to be selected first overall in the NBA draft. And for the first time ever, the same college - the University of Utah - has produced the first players taken in both the NBA and NFL (quarterback Alex Smith) drafts.
American Graffiti
- Birdie Kim won the US Women’s Open at Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, as Annika Sorenstam’s bid for the Grand Slam ended when she finished in a tie for 23rd. She had won the season’s first two majors.