It’s the bottom line of any business: the owner puts up the money, therefore the owner takes the risk. But in the sneaky world of corporate management, this risk can be minimized, marginalized, or in some cases, completely obliterated altogether.

While it’s true that hockey teams can be enormously profitable if run well, the real secret to making money in pro sports is owning the arena itself. There are many ways to do this without spending a single cent, too. Simply take controlling interest of a team and threaten to move it to another city unless they build you a new arena or stadium. The city always complies, because professional sports are an economic and cultural boon they don’t want to lose (Major League baseball, for instance, hasn’t built a completely private-funded ballpark since 1962). In exchange, a percentage of gate receipts and concession sales go towards paying off the cost. With the stadium bundled with the team, everything can then be resold for up to five times its previous value before the stadium existed. Which is the point of corporate business: buy for cheap, mortgage its future, and sell for expensive.

This works in just about every sport. In fact, it is working. Since 1990, the four major sports have built or are building 72 new stadiums and arenas at a combined cost of $19.4 billion. $12.2 billion of that comes from taxes. None of those entertainment complexes are owned by their respective cities or their cities’ citizens. To safeguard the risk on top of that, cities can be made to pay a fee to the stadium—for staffing and maintenance—if attendance falls short of expectations. Essentially, the owner is getting paid the difference for not having a sell-out. San Diego and Indianapolis’ football clubs do this.

Once you own the arena, making it appear that the team is losing money is Hong Kong economics. What most owners do is set up two companies—one to run the team, the other to run the arena. The books can be cooked in any manner of ways, such as charging the team a non-existent rent for use of its own facilities, or have concession sales, beer sales, parking, souvenirs and other such things be placed on the arena's books (not the team's). Or maybe as a separate branch of the parent corporation altogether. Or simply under-report attendance figures (for 30 years, the old Maple Leaf Gardens listed its capacity as 10,000. There are 16,000 seats). The best thing about these techniques is the revenue culled from them isn't taxed. With the right creative accounting, even teams that sell out every game can be made to seem like they are bleeding money.

That hasn’t stopped NHL owners from continuously complaining about their relative small status compared to the other sports. As a matter of fact, at any one time they want to keep you in constant fear that the League is perpetually on the brink of disaster. But the players are hardly to blame for this. The structure of the NHL governors is so conservative that most of the time they aren’t fighting the players for money. They’re fighting themselves. And the risk they’re incurring isn’t from running the franchise itself, but from running against each other.

For years the owners have complained about the lack of a television contract. While baseball, basketball and football have happily enjoyed broadcast deals numbering in the billions of dollars, hockey is glad to eke in a deal worth mere millions. But the truth is the owners have no one but themselves to blame for this. Hockey was actually one of the first ever sports broadcasted on American television. CBS regularly ran games in the late 50s, but when the contract came up for renewal in 1959, Jim Norris voted to dissolve the broadcast commission altogether. New short-term contracts have come and gone, but by and large hockey has been trying to get a new stable contract ever since.

Not that they showed any inclination towards wanting one. Throughout the 60s, as the television era loomed, all professional sports gladly bent over backwards to accommodate television viewing audiences: changing dates and times of games, scheduling breaks for commercials, and even tailoring the rules to make games more exciting and palatable for television. They experimented with different colored balls (baseball had different colored stitching at one point, and football had an odd-colored pigskin that would show up on TV more. This is more than 30 years before the fandangled glowing puck). Basketball courts happily removed seating to provide for television cameras. But when Boston Bruins owner Weston Adams was asked to take out five seats to provide a better camera angle, he flat-out refused.

In 1963, CBS proposed a "hockey game of the week" tradition on Sundays, right after football, to build a viewing pattern for sports fans. The NHL rejected the idea outright, citing schedule conflicts. Where the other sports molded their schedules around prime TV viewing hours and used the medium to turn their athletes into superstars, celebrities and role models, the NHL was viciously reluctant to sell its players, denying them even from having their pictures on bubblegum cards. When the NHL finally did allow hockey cards to be made, the enterprise—and its profits—naturally was controlled, operated, and enjoyed by the owners. This trend continues today. Hockey is and has always been largely unapologetic, stubborn, and dismissive of the lucrative market of television coverage. It steadfastly refuses to compromise one bit for TV. The owners shot themselves in the foot, and they have been playing catch-up to the other sports markets ever since.

The owners also resisted expansion. As the 60s roared on and the Smythe and Norris families bled their franchises dry to pay for their other failed business ventures, the league was extremely reclusive and resistant to change. Only when it noticed the upstart American Football League nail a $35 million NBC contract and feared something similar might happen to the WHL—a rival league from the west coast that was gaining steam in terms of competitiveness and quality of play—that the NHL decided it needed to act fast to corner the pro hockey circuit. Six franchises were handed out willy-nilly in 1967, some of them for mysterious reasons. St. Louis got a hockey team, and they never even filed an application (it was later learned that it was awarded because Norris owned the St. Louis arena). Vancouver’s application was rejected, because "there was no clear owner"; they were a group of five investors, and the League did not want to deal with groups with varying interests, even though Pittsburgh’s application was granted, and they had 21 investors. The owners of other expansion teams—Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—had never even seen a hockey game before, and were granted a team based purely on their relation to someone famous or rich. This, of course, would never change, as 30 years later the NHL would still dole out franchises to people with no hockey knowledge but plenty of money, such as the oft-ridiculed Mighty Ducks franchise of Anaheim—owned by Disney Corp.—used purely as a vehicle to market a trilogy of teenage hockey movies.

Baseball has tight restrictions on just who can or can not own a baseball team. When Minoru Arakawa (of Nintendo) purchased the Seattle Marines, it took five months of paperwork, inquiries, and legal checks to complete the transaction. But hockey has always been fairly candid and loose about ownership, willing to hand a team to just about anybody who has a modicum of wealth. This tendency has come back to haunt the League on a number of occasions, like in 2002 when John Rigas, founder of Adelphia Communications Corp. and owner of the Buffalo Sabres, announced that the team was officially bankrupt and looking to fold by season’s end. In truth, the team was in no financial difficulty whatsoever, but was victim of corrupt business practices by Rigas and his sons, who stole money from his fledging cable TV empire’s investors to purchase and run the team. Operating costs, escalating player salaries and dwindling fan interest were never part of the team’s financial troubles.

When the six original owners drew up the expansion draft clause, they biased it so heavily in their favour that it ensured all but one of the new franchises decades of futility and financial ruin. They wanted the money the expansion owners gave them, but could care less about what they did with their teams after that. Improving the competitiveness and quality of play in the League was very likely not much of a factor. Such it was that for several years afterward the NHL had very, very bad hockey. For the good of the game, indeed.

Hockey owners are notoriously cannibalistic in this regard. Due to the game’s bi-national strata, it is the only professional team sport that doesn’t have any kind of major revenue-sharing agreement. It’s a mentality that stems back to the powerful Montreal and Toronto teams of the 50s and 60s, who enjoyed enormous profits from exclusive broadcast coverage. The American teams have consistently blamed the Canadian owners for not being more adamant about securing an American network contract. The blasé attitude that the Canadian hockey powers display towards the fledgling American franchises precisely illustrates why hockey does not sell well in the United States. It is because the League is not entirely sold on the idea that it wants it to. None of this is the players’ fault.

The hoarding of money did not stop at the border, either. The League was even parasitical on the other Canadian owners. One of the stipulations of absorbing the WHA franchises in Quebec, Winnipeg and Edmonton was that they sign over their broadcast rights to Molson, the major sponsor of "Hockey Night in Canada." By the 80s, Toronto was earning more in broadcast revenue than all the American teams combined. Because hockey’s epicentre is in Canada, the Canadian owners have been fiercely protective of their gains, always letting the weaker teams wither on the vine. Self-interest to the point of suicide has always been a theme in hockey. No one has ever had the League’s interest at heart. So this can’t be the players’ fault.

So what is the players’ fault?

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