WHY GARY BETTMAN IS THE WORST COMMISSIONER IN SPORTS

When former NBA executive Gary Bettman took over the job of commissioner of the NHL on February 1, 1993, he wasn't exactly the most seasoned hockey mind. Bettman's lack of experience, in fact was so well known that famed hockey writer Pat Williams stated "I gave Gary a hockey puck once and he spent the rest of the day trying to open it." Nearly two decades later, Bettman is still hockey's head honcho, and it's not really clear how much he has learned. What is clear though, is the multitude of problems facing professional hockey, all of which make Bettman the worst commissioner in pro sports today.

Bettman started to ruin the sport by watering down the NHL with too many teams and moving existing teams into markets that clearly don't give a crap about hockey. While the Florida Panthers and Mighty Ducks of Anaheim had already been announced as expansion franchises when Bettman came into power, he has since added the Nashville Predators (1998), Atlanta Thrashers (1999), Minnesota Wild (2000), and Columbus Blue Jackets (2000). Minnesota, colloquially known as "the State of hockey", needed a team after the state's beloved North Stars moved south to Dallas in 1993.

Bettman further attempted to shift the NHL's focus into the American south by relocating teams from the hockey hotbed in the great white north. The Quebec Nordiques packed up and moved to Denver in 1995, the Winnipeg Jets became the Phoenix Coyotes one year later, and a year after that the Hartford Whalers moved to Raleigh and became the Carolina Hurricanes.

Furthermore, Bettman has been accused as having an anti-Canada bias, a seemingly ridiculous stance for the leader of a sport so popular north of the border to have. But when multi-millionaire Jim Balsillie reached a tentative agreement to buy the Predators with the hopes of moving them to Hamilton, Ontario, Bettman wouldn't allow it. The Preds had just finished their best regular season in team history, yet were ranked 21st in the league in average attendance. When Balsillie went to put season ticket orders for the Hamilton Predators on Ticketmaster, he received more than 7,000 deposits on the first day alone. Despite having somewhere around 12,000 deposits from Hamilton fans (more than the Nashville season ticket base), Balsillie, who had done this to prove Hamilton as a viable NHL market, had his bid rejected by the league for not putting forth "a good faith effort" to keep the team in it's current location.

Bettman, who was tabbed as commissioner primarily to end the league's labor problems, has been forced into lockouts on two separate occasions, in 1994-95, and again in 2004-05. The NHL became the first major professional sports league to cancel an entire season of play after the second of the lockouts could not be resolved in time to start the regular season in early October.

The league is still feeling the effects from the lockout, and may not fully recover for years to come. One major problem that has since developed is the lack of suitable television coverage. Hockey is probably the best sport to watch in high definition, yet nationally televised NHL games primarily appear on Versus, a small network that is hard to find for non-hockey fans. It's not something anybody is going to stumble across while channel surfing. Not a good way to attract more fans.

Now don't get me wrong, Bettman has done some good as commissioner of the NHL. His work to create a better salary cap has helped bring some parity to the league, and he has stabilized some of the league's financial troubles. On the whole though, Gary Bettman has been an overwhelmingly negative influence on the game of hockey.

Let's hope that one of these days he'll finally stop trying to open the puck and just drop it already.