The battle for control of the Phoenix Coyotes between Jim Balsillie and Gary Bettman will leave one man standing and the other on the outside looking in.
I don’t know how the battle between NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and billionaire Research In Motion boss Jim Balsillie will play out, and despite the amazing amount of freely offered opinions by pundits and hockey people, anyone who says he (or she) does know is either lying or surprisingly silly.
But the one thing I can say with relative certainty is that this is a death match and when it’s over one of the above will be finished.
It could be Balsillie, who clearly will go on with RIM and maybe keep trying to land a franchise, but what he’s done in his latest move to upset the NHL apple cart and buy the Phoenix Coyotes out of bankruptcy -- and relocate them to Southern Ontario -- is issue a challenge to Bettman that Bettman must win.
Balsillie has challenged the commissioner in the most personal way. He has attempted what he has always attempted to do: Buy a team and move it into another team’s market without paying any compensation to the league or the offended territories.
Bettman, who works not for the game but the men who own it, is duty-bound to block that, and not because he hates Canada or some other silly notion perpetrated by fans and some media members. If Balsillie gets his way, if he beats down the doors the NHL has constructed to protect the concept (a concept never tested in court) that the league, and only the league, holds sway as to where teams can be located, it will be because the NHL owners have ordered him to do so.
And if Balsillie is victorious it will be because the board is more interested in cutting a deal than taking part in rounds of protracted and expensive litigation. And for that to happen the board would have to kick the commissioner to the curb.
The most interesting aspect of all of this is that both men believe they can win.
If Bettman prevails, if he makes a case to ownership that Balsillie’s actions, should they be successful, would open the door to franchise relocation at the drop of the proverbial puck and that such unstructured, Wild-West tactics, would result in economic chaos for the league, then Balsillie will not get the support he needs on this move or any other he might attempt that doesn’t conform with league bylaws. It’s a strong argument.
There may be owners who would welcome Balsillie into their group and there may be owners who are upset with the way Bettman has handled everything from his American expansion to his troublesome collective bargaining agreement. There may be others who simply have tired of Bettman and think the league could use a breath of fresh air. There may even be owners who feel that deputy commissioner Bill Daly’s time should be now. But even if all those owners formed a majority with an eye toward bringing about change, Bettman still has a card to play.
Bettman can go to Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs and say that if Balsillie is successful at buying and moving a team to Toronto without the blessings of the NHL, then what’s to stop the owners of say the Tampa Bay Lightning from setting up in Quincy, Mass., a suburb of Boston and in an area of good-to-great suburban wealth?
He could go to the Wirtz family and make the same argument for say the owners of the Florida Panthers moving into the Chicago market or for the Atlanta Thrashers for perhaps applying a death blow to the Detroit Red Wings and antiquated Joe Louis Arena by simply setting up shop in the newer and more comfortably located (for suburban fans) Palace of Auburn Hills where the Detroit Pistons play.
The board may be a group of hide-bound, backward-thinking, old boys’ club members, but they are still sharp enough to recognize threats to their franchises. It’s why they hire a commissioner, to keep them from devouring each other.
Bettman can also point to the fact that part of this mess -- franchises moving down from Canada to the U.S. -- is on them as is the ferocious expansion that has overpopulated the league. He can say with some pride that he’s helped fix those problems by successfully steering the Buffalo Sabres, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Ottawa Senators and the Los Angeles Kings out of bankruptcy and back to being good hockey franchises in good hockey towns.
That said (as the commissioner likes to say) Balsillie has some weapons in his arsenal as well.
For one thing, the courts could well rule in Balsillie’s favour. Several lawyers, including some with bankruptcy litigation in their professional background, feel the legal odds are on Balsillie’s side.
In addition, Balsillie may have been quiet for a long time, but he hasn’t been silent. He’s made an effort to reach out to board members trying to paint himself as not a threat to the league but a potential asset and an ally. He has the money to take a money-losing franchise and turn it into a money winner; an action that would relieve board members from the debts associated with at least one failing franchise and he may be willing to at least help out some others.
Balsillie has done a good -- make that a great -- job of making board members see the value of having teams in good markets and that the Toronto area might not only support one new team but could well support two or even three.
Balsillie can also paint a picture of Bettman as a failed commissioner, a man who won the labour war with the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) at great cost, but may have lost the peace. He can also show them that it was Bettman who has brought under-financed, and in some cases less-than-desirable, elements into ownership groups that were almost certain to fail and that those failures are costing the other owners a great deal of money.
Balsillie can argue that it was Bettman who spurned ESPN for the upstart Versus network, a decision that has damaged the visibility of franchises in the U.S. and, by extension, hurt the game’s popularity in that country.
He can also make an argument that revenue sharing hasn’t actually helped the league’s lesser teams, but it’s merely served as a never-ending handout to clubs who design their teams and their payrolls not to win and grow, but to maximize the revenue they get from other owners.
Rest assured it’s a sore point that teams in Canada have to cut cheques to billionaire Tom Golisano in Buffalo after Golisano bought the team out of bankruptcy and has committed himself to nothing but the bottom line while attempting to sell at a price much higher than he paid.
There are owners who don’t believe that Bettman has done what he was hired to do: Make the game more profitable and popular and in so doing raise the value of their respective franchises. Balsillie can be expected to drive that point home with simple Reaganomics: "Are you better off now than you were (fill in the blank) years ago? How many are willing to say: 'Yes.'"
More importantly, how many are willing to say that Balsillie represents the kind of owner who can bring some "can do" to the league in both the short term (setting up a successful second team in Southern Ontario) and the long term (bringing his political clout and BlackBerry advertising dollars and overall wealth to television outlets that could use some).
Both men are loaded with political and media clout, and both men know how to use them. Could the stakes be any higher?
In a word, no. But the real question is not whether an Arizona judge will open the legal door for a team to move to Southern Ontario.
The real questions are whether or not Bettman can rally the owners to spend millions of dollars on lawyers for a case that he might not be able to win, and could be tied up in the courts for years, maybe even decades.
The battle has been joined and no one knows exactly how it will all play out, but one can be relatively certain that one of Gary Bettman or Jim Balsillie is going to lose.
Lose like they’ve never lost before.