Judge Redfield Baum (and that's a name so good new parents should keep it in mind when their sons are born) could barely hide his contempt at all the parties inside his courtroom when he reiterated the sanctity of the National Hockey League treehouse.
He told Jim Balsillie, who tried to buy and move the Phoenix Coyotes without the permission of the folks who run the NHL, that he can't just walk in, flash a checkbook and be given the league's nuclear launch codes. Not even if he personally built every BlackBerry in the room, which in a way he did.
• Judge rejects both offers for Coyotes
This was hailed by most folks who don't enjoy blood in the boardroom as much as we do as a victory for sanity, stability and ... well, the treehouse. And also a loss for Canada, which seems to make people in America happier than it ought to.
It was hailed so earnestly that people tended to forget the back side of the decision, which was that Baum also said that the NHL's counter-offer was so low as to be insulting, most particularly to the guy Gary Bettman brought in to run the team, Jerry Moyes, and the guy brought in to tart it up, Wayne Gretzky.
In short, Bettman and the other owners, in their eagerness to keep Balsillie out, their inability to find another suitor who couldn't look at the books without vomiting all over the conference room table and their unwillingness to find a long-term solution that did anything but keep the team from infringing on the Toronto Maple Leafs, agreed to hose one of their own, and hose one of the league's two or three preeminent icons, all at the same time.
If the league's other newbie owners (at least the ones who aren't receiving revenue sharing checks) aren't a little concerned about that, they will be soon enough. As in, the next time Bettman's term comes up.
We're not going to spend much time laughing at his failed Southern strategy; it was a disaster born of eagerness to expand the product, reliant entirely as it turned out on the team's ability to play for the Stanley Cup. There were sellouts in Miami when the Panthers were good, and sellouts in Tampa when the Lightning was good, and there are sellouts in Raleigh when the Hurricanes are good. And by good, we mean deep-into-the-playoffs good.
Now if you want to rig results so that keeps happening, the Southern strategy worked. But for the most part, no. Carolina is a probable success, and Dallas will be for as long as Tom Hicks stays out of debtor's prison. Colorado had a long run that finally ended last year.
But Phoenix? No. Nashville? No. The Floridas? No. Atlanta? No. Even Columbus after a fast start looks more and more like a no. Bettman's fascination with Americanizing the audience has done the one thing a commissioner cannot do -- it needlessly used up the dwindling supply of multimillionaires in North America on lost causes.
And that doesn't even involve the owners who went to jail for one reason or another.
The point is, Bettman had two things to accomplish in Phoenix, and he got what he thought was the bigger one -- defending the Southern strategy by keeping Balsillie out. But he also showed his remaining owners that if push comes to shove, he will cheerfully undercut one of their own to maintain that strategy. That Redfield The Baum noticed and chastised him for it ought to resonate for the other partners, because Moyes did the league a favor by taking on the mega-albatross and was rewarded with the back of its hand, middle finger first.
And Gretzky? He doesn't come out of this looking all that well, but he had $22.5M coming from his piece of the action, a piece negotiated fairly, and Baum remembered that he was getting stiffed, too. It doesn't matter that he wasn't a very good coach or administrator -- he was a part of a deal, and the league wanted to walk out on it. That, too, will be remembered, perhaps most by Pittsburgh owner Mario Lemieux the next time the Penguins fall on tough times.
The main point, then? The NHL was found to have been wildly deficient in settling its Phoenix affairs, trying to pull a fast one while keeping the treehouse safe. Maybe if Bettman had found more common ground with Balsillie a long time ago, this wouldn't be a blood feud that now keeps a billionaire who wants a team from buying in at a time when the league doesn't have enough multmillionaires to buy in.
But worse, the other owners now see how precarious their positions are viz. the league. They ought to remember how Jerry Moyes nearly got did wrong, and know that the league won't have their backs either if times get rougher. Owners typically buy teams to enhance their profile, not get taken out into the parking lot, robbed, stripped and beaten.
And therein lies the more enduring lesson here. The NHL kept out an eager potential partner and undercut a member and one of the league's biggest names, because Phoenix must be saved. And since there are other teams for which the other owners are playing to keep afloat as well, a disturbing precedent has been set that at some point may rebound to Bettman's detriment.
Maybe the owners can gather at the end of his current term and replace him with Jim Balsillie, just to see the look on his face when they try. Or better yet, they could bring in Redfield Baum. I mean, the judge didn't need very long to see clearly what most people still don't get, so he's clearly smarter than the average bear. Also the average owner. He must have something on the ball, right?
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
