WITH VEGAS AND FLORIDA IN THE FINAL, WE SHOULD APOLOGIZE TO CANADA

Our neighbors to the north haven’t won a Stanley Cup, in their national sport, since 1993 — and the Americanizing of the NHL never has been more obvious than during a Sun Belt series watched by few

     No wonder Canadians are so grumpy in the company of Americans, so quick to flash provincial stinkeyes. We have desecrated their religion, set fire to their symbolic maple leaf, spit in their poutine. Look what we’ve done to poor Wayne Gretzky, reducing him to a talking head on TNT long past his bedtime.

     Imagine living in the country where hockey was originated and developed, where pucks on ponds are sacred, where the first indoor game was played in 1875, where mental health in Toronto and Montreal and five other NHL towns depends on the success and failure of their local teams. Imagine knowing no Canada-based club has won Lord Stanley’s Cup in three decades.

     And imagine the national horror of watching a Final this week between the Vegas Golden Knights and Florida Panthers, realizing one or the other will win a championship in a place that can’t freeze water. In one arena, mere steps from the neon-doused Strip, the stands are filled with Elvises, Marilyn Monroes, jugglers, showgirls and Chippendales dancers. In the other arena, mere steps from alligators in the Everglades, fans throw plastic rats during games.

     If we’re not careful, Alanis Morissette is REALLY going to get mad. They’re going to want Seth Rogen and Michael Buble back. Joni Mitchell will stop singing about Laurel Canyon. They can have William Shatner, I suppose.

     This is the fruition of Gary Bettman’s grand design, like it or not. Poached from the NBA in the early ‘90s, the commissioner has stretched the league into a 32-team sprawl across North America. He never subscribed to traditions that insisted hockey was a cold-weather sport, with Zamboni machines and players who grew up in polar outposts called Flin Flon and Medicine Hat. The Original Six? Ancient history. Following the lead of pro basketball czar David Stern, he corporatized and Americanized his league, filling in the metropolitan holes regardless if they were located in the Sun Belt. This has infuriated Canadians who think Bettman has wrecked their mother lode, but north-of-the-border outrage is only part of the story.

     Even with as many franchises as the almighty NFL, the NHL remains a niche sporting attraction in America. While hockey always will be bigger than life in Canada, it’s still considered specialized entertainment here, important to a vocal minority that raises lungpower when a local team advances far in the playoffs. Many people in South Florida don’t know the Panthers exist, but just enough will show up in distant-suburban Sunrise — assuming they can find it — for Games 3 and 4. It’s a different sociological story in Las Vegas, where the Golden Knights have gifted a small market its first communal identity that doesn’t involve casinos, DJ raves, musical residencies and “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” bacchanals. We’ve seen giddy Cup celebrations in Colorado, Boston, Chicago and Pittsburgh, but they pale in comparison to championship fever involving their NFL teams.

     What Bettman has done is mushroom the No. 4 sports league into a $5.3 billion operation, which generally brings smiles to those who pay him: the owners. You can’t tell me hockey doesn’t have traction in Pittsburgh, where I couldn’t hear for hours after attending a Penguins game in March. Or in Chicago, where there is nothing to do in the winter, especially when the Bulls continue to suck, and a core following rejoiced when the Blackhawks won a No. 1 draft selection that should result in savior Connor Bedard. There are very good hockey towns across America. It’s just that very few Americans watch hockey in June, even when the NBA leaves a programming gap with a ratings-challenged Finals involving the Denver Nuggets and another South Florida team, the Miami Heat.

     When Bettman gave TNT a piece of a new broadcast pie that includes ESPN, he gambled that a Cup Final airing entirely on cable would gain a reasonable audience. It’s safe to say that isn’t happening with school out for summer, families traveling after too much Covid hibernation and quiet-quitting employees roaming the world. Sports fans are aware of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, and are getting to know Connor McDavid, but only diehards are familiar with Florida’s pesky Matthew Tkachuk and Vegas goal-sniper Jonathan Marchessault. In 2020, in the beginnings of the pandemic, a Tampa Bay-Dallas Final averaged 2.03 million viewers on NBC. If the Golden Knights romp in four or five games, TNT ratings could be as low, if not lower. In Ontario, of course, two million people would watch a telecast of a Maple Leafs practice skate.

     If the league’s growth strategy was good for the bottom line, it hasn’t helped hockey’s appointment-viewing appeal. I am not alone in this assessment, joined by veteran puck scribes such as Helene Elliott. No sport is more exhilarating in person, but when Vegas is playing Florida with warm temperatures upon us — no matter where you live in America and Canada — there’s more than a cultural disconnect. It’s an apathy sentence. Not that the commissioner cares.

     “It’s more about the footprint. You do better in terms of interest at all levels of the game where you have franchises,” Bettman said last week, when Sports Business Journal — must have been a slow news day — gave him its lifetime achievement award. “Creating a more national footprint, both in Canada and the U.S., is important for growing the game. Some markets will always be bigger than others, but to me, it’s more about the game and how entertaining it is.”

     Get used to warm-weather cities advancing far in postseasons. It’s not what Canada and cold-weather U.S. markets want to hear after the eighth-seeded Panthers stunned regular-season record-crusher Boston in the first round and another high seed, Toronto, in the second round. But many free agents don’t want to play in media-intensive, cold-weather markets. They like Vegas and Florida, even Nashville and Dallas, for reasons that include no state income taxes.

     “For me, every box that I wanted … checked,” said captain Mark Stone, explaining why he remained in Vegas as a free agent. “Do I get to play in front of a sold-out crowd every night? Yes. Is it a great place to live? Yes, it is. Yeah, obviously, (no) income tax is great. But what are we building here is what I wanted to know. We’ve built a great team, a great fan base, an awesome place to live. So for me, that’s why I love playing here.”

     Said Panthers coach Paul Maurice: “Players, yeah the weather is great, but they want to win. And they want to be in a place where they can enjoy your life. I don’t mean casual. I mean, enjoy your professional life.”

     As long as McDavid is in Edmonton, wearing No. 97 decades after Gretzky wore No. 99, there’s a chance Canadians finally will stop cussing at us after he wins a Cup. There’s a chance Border Patrol officers won’t grunt and inspect our vehicles for illegal substances.

     But for now, I think we just apologize. We stole their reason for living and parked it beside a freeway in Sin City. This just in: They do want us to stop playing “O Canada” before the games.

     Only one song works, anyway. “Viva Las Vegas,” Elvis version, with Gary Bettman singing background vocals.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.