The Winter Classic at Wrigley was not a home run but it was still another successful outing.
CHICAGO - Success with the American public has been Gary Bettman's elusive home run.
Southern expansion? Whiff!
FOX network, ABC, ESPN, Versus? The TV rights down here have been a collective "Stee-rike two!"
So, behind in the count, Bettman has done what any persistent hitter would do. He adjusted his stance, choked up on the bat, and downgraded his goals from a home run to a solid single.
With no hockey on ESPN and a "profit-sharing" deal with NBC that realizes no real revenues, the NHL found itself in a position where it just needed to make some decent contact. And that, if you can suffer the baseball analogies, is exactly what the NHL has got with its Winter Classic.
It is not the home run that Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association hit annually with their American TV contracts. But it is a sharp single to centre, and a promise of another at bat next year.
"It's something that we know can be a significant part of our game if we do it right," Bettman said after a day on which the league didn't make any tangible mistakes, delivering a compelling product and a memorable day at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
Bettman would love it if the Stanley Cup Final was a hotly anticipated two weeks on the American sporting schedule. But it isn't.
He would be elated if hockey had its own day down here in America, the way the NFL has Sunday, college football has Saturdays and even high school football gets Friday nights. But the networks won't give him one.
So he widened his stance, and when the television numbers from last year's Classic in Buffalo came in higher than anticipated, he recognized that perhaps the Winter Classic was a pitch the NHL could hit.
The ice had to get better, so they went out and spent $2 million on an ice plant that would allow the players to play the game at an NHL level. The venue had to be more intimate and TV friendly, and the time frame to put the show on had to be longer than the Buffalo Bills allowed a year ago at their stadium.
They solved both of those problems by going into Wrigley Field. There, Dan Craig had plenty of time to make good ice, and a giant market of Chicagoans and Cubs fans continent-wide had their interest piqued by the thought of a hockey game being played in what I think is the sweetest Major League ballpark there is.
"Coming out of that dugout and seeing the sight, it was pretty cool," said Red Wings defenceman Brett Lebda, who grew up as a Cubs fan in a Chicago suburb. "You're usually on the other side of the fence, sitting in the stands."
The league got the weather required for the players to put on a 10-goal show - no bright sun, no snow, no rain - with plenty of body contact in a 6-4 Detroit win. That, combined with the new ice plant, produced the first outdoor game played at the level we see indoors every other night in the NHL.
"The ice," Bettman said, "was probably better than it is in some of our rinks."
Amid players who donned neck warmers and eye black, the greatest of them all declared the elements a non-factor after the game. "I dressed the way I do for any other game," Norris Trophy defenceman Nik Lidstrom said. "The two teams, once we started playing we played like it was an indoor game."
An indoor game played in front of 40,818 fans - many of whom traveled from out of state to attend - and a couple thousand more on the rooftops of Wrigleyville, the way they'd be if the Cubs ever did the unthinkable and advanced to the World Series.
After failing to provide suitable ice conditions in either Edmonton or Buffalo for a true NHL game to be played, the NHL has crossed that bridge now - while managing to save the quirks that make a game like this special.
Like the walk from the dressing room, which took nearly two minutes. There were stairs to be negotiated, just as there used to be in old Chicago Stadium.
Television viewers got replays from a helicopter, an angle you don't see every day at a hockey game. And the outdoor thing, for a winter sport played by men who all played outside as children, really, truly works.
It's a baby step forward. But for the NHL in America, any step in the right direction is one they'll be elated about.
