NHL-sponsored women’s hockey league worth a shot

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/03/2018 (2237 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Women’s hockey finally had its long-awaited coming out party last month in Pyeongchang. Unfortunately, the party ended as soon as the Olympic torch was extinguished.

But could the party now get re-started? And is Gary Bettman, of all people, the DJ this bash has been waiting for?

More on that unlikely image in a moment. But first, some background:

While the women’s game has been a full medal sport at the Winter Olympics since 1998, it had the misfortune of making its Olympic debut in the same year the NHL began sending its players to compete.

The result: women’s hockey had a platform like never before, but it was still dwarfed every four years by the presence at the Olympics of the game’s biggest male stars, from Wayne Gretzky to Sidney Crosby.

But with the NHL sitting out the 2018 Winter Olympics, it was women’s hockey, not men’s hockey, that was the signature event of this year’s Games.

I was in Korea and I can tell you that it was women’s hockey that consistently attracted the biggest crowds; it was women’s hockey, particularly any time Canada and the United States were on the ice, that drew the biggest media scrums; and it was that insane, six-round shootout victory the Americans won over Canada in the gold medal final that will remain for many people the singular indelible memory from this year’s Olympics.

How big was women’s hockey for two weeks in Korea? Well, a defenceman from Ste. Anne that even most Manitobans would have been hard-pressed to name — Jocelyne Larocque — made headlines from Binscarth to Beijing when she removed her silver medal moments after it had been placed around her neck during the medal ceremony that followed the wild gold medal game.

Columnists and pontificators who’d never even seen a women’s hockey game weighed in on the episode from the four corners of the globe, giving Larocque 15 minutes of fame she would have just as soon avoided.

And yet for all the unprecedented exposure women’s hockey received and for all the talk of these Olympics being the long-awaited breakthrough for a women’s game still played at an elite level in only two countries, the only sound you’re hearing from women’s hockey just four weeks after those Games wrapped up has been crickets.

A sport that was centre stage for two weeks in Korea has become largely invisible once again: did you know the Clarkson Cup, the championship of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, is this weekend? Me neither.

And if history is any guide, women’s hockey will remain in obscurity for the next four years until they light the torch in Beijing in February 2022 for the start of the next Winter Games.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, as Bettman told the world this month.

Speaking on a Calgary radio station, Bettman said the NHL is interested in starting a professional women’s hockey league that sounds like it would look a lot like the WNBA, but has thus far refrained from doing so because two struggling women’s leagues — the CWHL and the National Women’s Hockey League — already exist.

“Having two leagues makes it more difficult for us to get involved,” Bettman said. “If there were no leagues, we’d probably start one under the NHL umbrella, and I’ve told both leagues that. But I have no interest in competing with the existing leagues. I think that would be counterproductive.”

Bettman made similar comments to reporters in Vancouver this month, making it clear for a second time that the only thing standing in the way of the NHL setting up a women’s professional league on this continent is the two financially strapped women’s leagues that already exist.

Put another way, what Bettman seems to be saying is that if they can just get out of their own way, the NHL would be happy to give women’s hockey players their biggest breakthrough since Nagano in 1998.

Now, the only logical response to a stunning overture like that from the commissioner of a multibillion-dollar enterprise like the NHL should be: ‘Our two leagues just folded. How can we reach you?’

But such is the dysfunction in professional women’s hockey — where two leagues compete for players, resources and sponsors, ensuring that neither is viable — that the response instead to Bettman has instead been those same crickets we were talking about earlier.

Or at least it was crickets until one of the most prominent people in the women’s game — Sportsnet commentator and former Team Canada captain Cassie Campbell-Pascall — made some noise, announcing this week she was resigning from the CWHL in frustration.

“I believe in something that’s bigger and better than what we have right now,” Campbell-Pascall told The Canadian Press. “I’ve gotten to a point where if I don’t say something, I believe it’s going to take longer to get where we want to go.

“Just make it happen. To me, it’s about two weeks of meetings.”

The CWHL has been around for 11 years and became a seven-team loop this season with the addition of two Chinese teams. They also for the first time began paying their players; although not much, with players earning as little as $2,000 per season to a maximum of $10,000.

The NWHL is smaller, consisting of just four teams in the northeastern United States. They also pay their players a pittance and salaries were slashed last year when the league almost went bankrupt.

Against that backdrop, it is hard to imagine how an NHL sanctioned women’s league wouldn’t be an improvement, both for women’s hockey players and the women’s game generally.

I wanted to talk this week with Winnipeg Jets co-owner Mark Chipman — whose daughters are hockey players and who has always been a big supporter of the women’s game, locally — about what that might look like: Could a women’s team play at Bell MTS Place alongside the Moose and Jets? What would salaries look like? Would every NHL team have a women’s team partner, or just a few?

Chipman said through a spokesman that he didn’t want to talk, which is pretty standard operating procedure for True North when it comes to what they deem hyopothetical questions.

So I spent some time instead looking at the WNBA to see what a women’s hockey league sponsored by the NHL might look like.

Founded in 1996 by the NBA’s Board of Governors, the WNBA has grown from eight teams at its inception to 12 teams today.

Of the current 12 teams, seven are considered “sister teams” to an NBA franchise, playing in the same city and the same buildings. Of those, five also have the same ownership as their NBA affiliate.

There are also three other WNBA teams who play in the same city as an NBA franchise but are unaffiliated and play in different buildings.

Financially, the WNBA struggled for years, receiving as much as $10 million a year in support from the NBA some years.

But the league has started to turn a corner in recent years. A TV rights deal with ESPN helped and as of 2013, six of the 12 teams claimed to be profitable.

Players currently earn between $39,000 and $115,000 per season and the league averaged 7,716 fans per game in 2017. One study estimated 20 per cent of league revenues go to the players, or about $11 million. In contrast, 50 per cent of NBA revenues — $3 billion — goes to NBA players.

So, would an NHL-lite like that be workable in women’s hockey? You can ask True North yourself. Let me know what they say.

But in the meantime, what is clear is that women’s hockey players have nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting their act together and finding out.

The Olympics proves every four years there’s a market for women’s hockey, and never more so than this year.

Bettman and the NHL clearly see it as an untapped market. The question now is whether women’s hockey players will help them serve it.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek