\u201cAllowing fans of the Habs to gather only 40 minutes from the doorstep of the Canadian Tire Centre (in Ottawa) doesn\u2019t make any sense for the league or the Senators.\u201d<\/p>\n
In that perfectly accurate sentence, veteran Ottawa Citizen sportswriter Bruce Garrioch succinctly describes the absurdity<\/a> of North American professional sports.<\/p>\n The issue is as follows: Three local organizations decided they would co-host a watch party for Saturday night\u2019s playoff game between the Montreal Canadiens and Carolina Hurricanes at the wonderfully named Centre Slush Puppie in Gatineau, Que., where the Olympiques major-junior hockey team plays.<\/p>\n These watch parties have cropped up all over Quebec during the Habs\u2019 thrilling playoff run, from the Centre Vid\u00e9otron in Quebec City \u2014 were more than 15,000 showed up<\/a> for a second-round game against Buffalo \u2014 to the Saint-Jean-l\u2019\u00c9vang\u00e9liste Cathedral in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tickets were $13, and the proceeds would go to charity. Plenty had been sold.<\/p>\n \u201cNot so fast, Gatineau,\u201d the National Hockey League said. 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sens\u2019 owner Michael Andlauer, who previously had a stake in the Canadiens, is very improbably trying to expand his perennial-loser hockey team\u2019s appeal across the Ottawa River. So Habs fans will have to watch the team they actually like at home or at a local tavern \u2026 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s zoom out and look at what\u2019s happening here. The NHL is actively dissuading people from watching its product. The Senators, who want special favours, including financial ones<\/a>, in order to build a new arena to replace a perfectly good one that\u2019s only 30 years old, have at the very least not spoken out against the Gatineau watch-party ban. (\u201cThe Senators did not veto the move, according to sources, but they also did not accept it,\u201d Radio-Canada reported in French<\/a>.)<\/p>\n What sort of business would behave this way?<\/p>\n It\u2019s called a cartel. It\u2019s profoundly un-American. But it\u2019s 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\u2019ll have to fly to New York and lick NHL commissioner Gary Bettman\u2019s loafers. He\u2019ll say \u201cno,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n And so in that bizarro-world, as Garrioch says, it actually makes some perverse kind of sense to ban mass-broadcast of Montreal Canadiens games in the National Capital Region.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t make any actual kind of sense, however. The Sens have always struggled with the fact that their fans, upon the team\u2019s founding in 1992, were almost all Canadiens or Toronto Maple Leafs fans beforehand \u2026 and many still are, to some extent, especially since the Sens have steadfastly resisted being any more successful than the Habs or even the Leafs.<\/p>\n Pro tip: You can be a fan of more than one team! The Habs are my second team, after the Leafs, which Canadian folklore would tell you is impossible, but which is in fact quite common among Leafs fans of my generation \u2014 and certainly among those of us who moved to and lived in Montreal in our 20s.<\/p>\n The Habs haven\u2019t had a great 30 years, but they occasionally find ways to overachieve, and they\u2019re on a heater right now. The Leafs, since 1967, have basically been cave-diving in the Maldives.<\/p>\n And while it\u2019s perhaps unlikely anywhere in Canada, you can also be neutral and just enjoy watching the hockey games \u2014 games that have never been better. You just can\u2019t do so at the Centre Slush Puppie. Because that would be too many eyeballs on the NHL\u2019s product, in the wrong place. It\u2019s complete madness. And there\u2019s no realistic hope of salvation.<\/p>\n National Post
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