Apparently, you do have to hit Gary Bettman on the head with a sledge hammer more than a once for him to get it. While you were enjoying the thrilling ice hockey tournament at the 2010 Olympics, Bettman and his NHL cohorts were busy failing to learn the key lesson of the games: people are excited about hockey; it's the National Hockey League that bores them.
Bettman is currently dragging his feet with Sochi, Russia about taking a two-week hiatus in the NHL season for the 2014 Olympics because the Olympics haven't delivered the expected interest-bump to the NHL. This is like Nome, Alaska complaining that tourism didn't increase after an ad campaign for Honolulu.
Here's the painful truth that the lords of the NHL have managed to ignore for 20 years: the Olympic tournament is everything that the NHL is not. The Olympics presents a two-week tournament in which every game matters. It makes for terrific matches with everything on the line.
It's exactly the same in the National Hockey League -- in the sense that it's totally different. Thirty teams play 82 games each through the fall and winter in order to eliminate the most dreadful 14. Then they start all over again and have the remaining 16 teams play as many as another 28 more games in the spring to decide the champion. By the time some strapping Jacque is kissing Lord Stanley's cup, the world has gone to the beach and forgotten about games played on ice.
Instead of holding the players hostage, Commissioner Bettman should consider learning something from the Olympics. If he wants his league -- once the fourth major sport; now simply irrelevant -- to matter at all, he should shorten the season, slash the playoffs in half and crown a champ by tax day. In the short term, the league will lose revenue. But it will gain relevance, which is ultimately a lot more important. Maybe the NHL representatives from Canada can tell him about it while they kiss their gold medals.
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