The irony of it all is so delicious that it almost defies comprehension.
Two parties — lawyers representing the National Hockey League and lawyers representing Phoenix Coyotes owner of record Jerry Moyes — will be in court to hear whether or not a judge will answer the classic hockey question, the one the movie Slapshot made a catch phrase for everything deliriously funny about the many oddities of the hockey business.
“Who oooown ‘da team?”
If Paul Newman were alive today, he might consider a trip to Arizona just to deliver a few well chosen and decidedly blue words to whomever is declared the winner.
Problem is there likely won’t be one. Not right away anyway.
It’s possible that Judge Redfield T. Baum (someone call central casting and get a photo shoot and a resume for this guy, his name alone guarantees him a role in the next edition) will rule for one side or the other; but if he’s anything like the rest of the real-world judges he’ll take the arguments from both sides “under advisement” and render a future ruling, likely when there isn’t quite the media circus outside.
But even if he does rule on the first day, it’s not likely the battle is over.
If the NHL wins and is deemed to be in control of the franchise that Moyes would just as soon let it have if he could get anywhere near ten cents on the perceived dollar that it’s worth, Research in Motion owner Jim Balsillie, the bankruptcy bidder who has forced this issue, isn’t likely to go away. There are reports, published but not linked directly to Balsillie, that he’ll pick another franchise in another location and either induce a troubled owner into filing bankruptcy or wait for the simple realities of today’s economy to have an owner do it for him.
If that happens, the battle will likely be joined again although this time the league will at least have an idea of the strategy at hand.
If Moyes wins and the team is allowed to proceed into bankruptcy then Balsillie’s ploy to gain control and move the team to Southern Ontario is in play and if that happens then all bets and all the media comments and opinions that have filled the papers, cluttered the airways and clogged the internet will be exactly what we thought they were: irrelevant.
Irrelevant is exactly the word that someone very close to the case used when discussing it with me late last week.
“Media opinions are irrelevant,” he said. “What ‘sources’ say, on either side, is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what the judge says. If the judge (eventually) rules that the franchise has lawfully been entered into bankruptcy and that if he (eventually) accepts Balsillie’s bid as the one that best satisfies the debtors and creditors, then the case goes into uncharted territory. The battle will go forward from there and no one can be certain as to what happens after that.”
There is a load of relevancy in that statement and people should read it carefully.
Anyone who was alive when the NHL plunged the league into a year-long lockout allegedly to end the domination of “greedy” players, drive down the cost of tickets and bring “cost certainty” and “fiscal sanity” to the game and we all know how true that turned out to be.
And to be sure, media, for and against the lockout, beat the speculative drums on which side was right and which side was wrong and, to be kind to the profession (and I include myself in that regard) it was not one of our finest hours.
Many of us got it wrong. Many more argued the argument of one side over the other and got it wrong. More still made villains or heroes out of one side or the other, complete with “inside information” available “exclusively” to them and got it way wrong. Some got the end game wrong, calling it over before it was over. Some got the players wrong saying Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux made power plays to end it and they got that wrong.
When it did end and we were charged with explaining exactly what would happen, how many of us actually foresaw that the players would still make huge amounts of money and that ticket prices would continue to rise, unabated, and that then Players’ Association boss Bob Goodenow would leave or (depending upon whom you believe) would be forced out and that his replacement would be overthrown in a player coup to take back its union and that the so-called “partnership” between the players and the league would be nothing more than a verbal sham?
The list is infinitesimally small.
It goes that way in this business. When you are chasing history and relying on sources who have a vested interest in the outcome, you don’t normally get facts. What you get is opinion, swayed ,and in some cases flat out created, by the parties who are battling to influence the outcome. Quite often you get something that doesn’t quite fall to the level of a lie, but never quite rises to the level of the whole truth either. Overall it’s usually bits and pieces of information that have a grain of logic to them but are designed to influence opinion at the expense of reporting fact.
And along the way comes something akin to character assassination (Exhibit A in this case will forever be a CBC commentator calling Balsillie an arrogant buffoon), demonizing (a case in point being the oft-repeated statement that Gary Bettman hates Canada) and a whole lot of opinions supported by too few pieces of too few facts.
Media itself is somewhat responsible for that. In the past decade or two there has been a shift away from solid reporting and a run toward commentary and opinion. It’s easy to see why. The industry has changed. Talk is cheap and media finances have, especially in recent years, hit a low point. Not all that many companies have the wherewithal to cover difficult reporting situations and this case, like the lockout, is both difficult and expensive to cover. It’s not unusual to see a panel of commentators and columnists discuss an issue at length and, sometimes, ad nauseum. It is rare indeed to see a panel of court reporters, financial investigators and bankruptcy experts convened to delve into the same issue.
Throw in the fact that many organizations cover themselves with their own version of the news (see NHL.com, every team website and even team and league-sponsored panels that “report” within intermissions of games and shows) and it’s easy to get lost in the confusion of talk vs. fact and opinion vs. blather.
And so, a word of advice: when following this case, keep your eye and ears on the essential facts. Step 1 is to learn “Who oooown ‘da team?”
Step 2? Well, considering that Step 2 likely will lead to a legal mess of unprecedented proportions with more twists, turns, half lies and half truths than we witnessed in the year of the lockout, perhaps we should wait until we get past Step 1.
To do anything more defies comprehension, at least the kind derived from having enough facts to determine the truth of the matter at hand.
