Break up the NHL

I get the feeling that the NHL players are a strong union. The NHL is an assemblage of mostly dissociated teams, where some are more profitable, some are less profitable.  The more profitable teams would like to get out of the lockout and play, whereas the poorer teams likely are content to keep fighting until they get what they want. After all, having no profit is better than losing money.

And thus, I believe an effective solution to getting hockey back would be to break up the NHL, rather than breaking up the Union. Profitable teams are happy with the current structure, and leaving the league while adopting the previous CBA will get players get back to playing, we get back to seeing top class hockey.

There are 12 teams that made money in 2012, Toronto, Montreal, New York (the Rangers), Vancouver, Edmonton, Detroit, Chicago, Colorado, Philadelphia, Boston, Ottawa, and Calgary. 12 is enough for a league. All teams could play each other a defined number of games, rather than a confusing number of cross conference and intradivisional games or what have you. Other teams may drop out of the NHL, such as Pittsburgh, Dallas or Los Angeles, whose losses were minimal and join the newly formed association. Suddenly, the NHL is left with teams outside of marquis markets and little ground to stand on, as well as declining profit expectation. The high margin teams will effectively force a necessary down sizing on the NHL, and the NHL under Bettman has an untenable future.

Of course, there will be teams that will till hang on to the NHL for as long as possible, but will still want to play hockey when it inevitably folds. The new league will be able to expand, but with lessons learned from the failure of the NHL, and teams like the Minnesota Wild and Winnipeg Jets would jump back in, but teams from Phoenix, for example, would be gone forever. The way to solve the lockout and prevent thing like this from ever happening is to destroy the NHL and bring back hockey as a smaller, smarter, leaner league.

It won’t ever happen, though, which is too bad. If it did, I might be a Red Wings fan.