Sidney Crosby: The Chosen One

It really is this simple: Commissioner Gary Bettman and the National Hockey League (well, at least the stuffed suits in the league offices) want the Pittsburgh Penguins to win the Stanley Cup - the same way they wanted the Penguins to win the draft lottery to get Sidney Crosby. The most likely scenario is that the lottery was weighted in Pittsburgh's favor. Conspiracy theory? Don't be silly. When you consider the circumstances it all seems pretty obvious, really: The franchise was circling the drain and was thisclose to going belly-up. The league knew if that happened it would have been the worst possible way to come out of a season that was cancelled due to a labor dispute, and it could have had a domino effect on other struggling teams (not that the NHL doesn't have too many teams as it is). So instead, the Penguins "win" the lottery, get the most highly-touted amateur since Eric Lindros, gain instant credibility and are spared the fate of lethal injection. Obviously I don't know for sure, but nobody can deny that it makes a hell of a lot of sense.

It's been over 50 years since a franchise in any of the five major sports leagues (The A.L., N.L., NFL, NBA and NHL) has gone completely out of business. They either relocated to another city or, in one case, merged with another franchise. There are 30 teams in the National Hockey League. There are no other cities to move to. The Penguins going defunct was simply not an option.
Now the NHL is desperately looking for an identity, a face, a selling point. Crosby's the obvious choice. Through an overly aggressive publicity campaign, they tagged him, "Sid the Kid" and "The Next One" (I prefer "The Chosen One."). Watch an NHL promo and 98% of it features Crosby. They're trying to pass him off as Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Bobby Orr all rolled into one (Lindros was the original "Next One" and was given similar hype. That one sure wound up backfiring on the NHL, didn't it?).
There's absolutely no doubt that Crosby is a terrific talent with Hall of Fame potential. When his career is over he'll likely rank right up there with the greats. But come on, lets' be realistic here. As good as he is, he will never be Gretzky, Lemieux or Orr. He just doesn't project to that level. Hell, who would?

Since the lockout, the NHL now is no better than an expansion league. They're pretty much starting all over again. But if Bettman had any kind of honest acumen for the success of the league instead of his obsession with small markets and expansion fees he would have made sure Crosby wound up in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or the traditional Canadian markets like Montreal or Toronto, the same way Joe Namath wound up on the AFL Jets, Julius Erving went to the ABA Nets and Herschel Walker was handed to the USFL New Jersey Generals. What those deals did for the AFL and ABA was improve their biggest market franchises and automatically made the leagues viable and popular enough to warrant mergers with the established leagues. That was their goal. The difference here is that the NHL is the established league. But it's a league in trouble. They couldn't even land a major network TV deal. Bettman has to consider the National Hockey League's long term survival and history has shown that the best way for a struggling league to accomplish this is to make sure the major markets have the best players, at least until things get better. An "attention getter" if you will. If there had been no lockout and the league was successful it wouldn't have mattered where Crosby wound up. But that isn't the case here. This type of maneuvering isn't unprecedented in the NHL. How do you think Wayne Gretzky wound up in Los Angeles? That was the most important deal in league history because it was designed to open up the entire western half of the country to hockey and on that basis it was a huge success.

Bettman has nobody to blame but himself for the league's relative unpopularity (Why do think they're on VERSUS for crying out loud?!). His stewardship has featured two lockouts, a cancelled season, the emergence of a boring style of hockey that was driving fans away before the lockout, an unbalanced schedule that has some teams not even playing each other some years, a flawed, gimmicky point system that makes the standings insultingly deceptive, and overexpansion that has brought in minor league markets like Columbus, Ohio and Nashville, Tennessee as well as teams in Atlanta and Minnesota, cities that had already failed once in the NHL. Expansion is the way the league has made it's revenue in recent years because every time a new team is awarded, that's another couple hundred million bucks in expansion fees for the owners to divvy up. Certainly the brand of hockey being played before 2005 wasn't selling.
And here we are at the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals with Crosby, "The Chosen One," against the best team, the Detroit Red Wings. The Penguins going from their deathbed to the Stanley Cup in only three years would be quite the success story, huh? There will be some great hockey played, but considering all the tiring giga-hype on Crosby and the continuing post-lockout apathy from sports fans, it will likely get very little attention.
So after all the hype fails, what now, Commish? More expansion? I hear the talk of planting a team in Las Vegas (The Gamblers? The Slots? The Craps?). How will you rig that team to succeed? You really have no idea what the right thing to do is for the National Hockey League, do you, Gary? More's the pity.