In a perfectly accurate sentence, veteran Ottawa Citizen sportswriter Bruce Garrioch succinctly describes the absurdity of North American professional sports: 'Allowing fans of the Habs to gather only 40 minutes from the doorstep of the Canadian Tire Centre (in Ottawa) doesn't make any sense for the league or the Senators.'
The issue arose when three local organizations decided to co-host a watch party for Saturday night's playoff game between the Montreal Canadiens and Carolina Hurricanes at the wonderfully named Centre Slush Puppie in Gatineau, Quebec, where the Olympiques major-junior hockey team plays. These watch parties have cropped up all over Quebec during the Habs' thrilling playoff run, from the Centre Vidéotron in Quebec City — where more than 15,000 showed up for a second-round game against Buffalo — to the Saint-Jean-l'Évangéliste Cathedral in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
Tickets were $13, and the proceeds would go to charity. Plenty had been sold. But the National Hockey League said, 'Not so fast, Gatineau.' Gatineau is within 80 kilometres of where the Ottawa Senators play (or rather, recently played) hockey, and thus the Senators own exclusive territorial rights, Radio-Canada reported.
Sens' owner Michael Andlauer, who previously had a stake in the Canadiens, is very improbably trying to expand his perennial-loser hockey team's appeal across the Ottawa River. So Habs fans will have to watch the team they actually like at home or at a local tavern … unless perhaps the NHL goes a step further and orders total television and streaming blackouts, or perhaps deploys security forces to prevent people outside Montreal from watching altogether.
The Senators, to be clear, are no longer in the playoffs. The Hurricanes dispatched them in the first round as one might a particularly incompetent mosquito. Let's zoom out and look at what's happening here. The NHL is actively dissuading people from watching its product. The Senators, who want special favours, including financial ones, in order to build a new arena to replace a perfectly good one that's only 30 years old, have at the very least not spoken out against the Gatineau watch-party ban. ('The Senators did not veto the move, according to sources, but they also did not accept it,' Radio-Canada reported in French.)
What sort of business would behave this way? It's called a cartel. It's profoundly un-American. But it's more or less how every American (and therefore Canadian) sports league operates. You limit supply artificially to benefit the incumbents. Want to start a hockey team in Quebec City, one of the very biggest hockey markets in the world, and compete for the Stanley Cup? You'll have to fly to New York and lick NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's loafers. He'll say 'no,' and the NHL will try for a third time to put a team in Atlanta. Or maybe Phoenix a second time. You just know Bettman lies awake at night pining for the desert.
