There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired. Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation.

Thanks goodness #HatGate resurrected a bit of the old-fashioned bile that makes Ryder Cups so anticipated. For all the polite chumminess of today’s PGA Tour, a silly pissing match is a nice diversion. After all, as Conn Smythe once said after a brawl-filled hockey game, “Much more of this and we will have to print extra tickets for the next game.”

A whole new culture has grown up within the sport so that deals can be swung. As trades have become more complicated, they have concurrently become less of a burden on the moving parts involved. We’ve come off an offseason with a surprisingly modest number of intriguing deals.  With preseason games starting, to whet the ref’s whistle, here’s a list Rating The Top 25 Trades in NHL history from our next book Deal With It: The Most Impactful Trades In NHL history and How They Changed The Game (due later in 2023).

Clearly a little PR is always a good thing for celebrity owners. But sports team ownership has also become a lucrative equity play. As BMO reports, “The average compound annual growth rate since the last purchase price…  is 15 percent, a meaningful outperformance to the TSX and S&P.  Forbes estimates the Toronto Blue Jays are currently worth US$2.1 billion or roughly C$2.85 billion. 

Some will say a bronze is nothing to get excited about. The Americans played with only nine men Sunday. Perhaps. But remember when Canada was jokingly called the bronze-medal country because of its unwillingness to be nasty and hardbitten enough to deny someone else the gold medal?  The feeling we got from Sunday’s bronze is that this tournament will be a great memory for all involved, but winning the Olympic gold is where it ends up. 

In the bigger picture, Canadians and Americans have come to accept that the people who are entrusted to keep the criminal element in their place are not doing their job. Like the Rockies staff they show up late— if they show up at all. And the perps are quickly back on the street due to new bail laws and hyper-liberal judges and crown attorneys.

How cheap is the NHL? Matthews’ “dizzying” $13.25 as NHL No. 1 would make him the 113th highest-paid player in the NBA, the 103rd highest-paid player in the MLB and the 88th highest-paid player in the NFL. As one perspective, Toronto-born Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of OKC Thunder— now starring for Canada’s national team— pays about $13.25M per year in income tax.

There’s been no apology for the outright lies about 15 days to flatten the curve, PCR tests that showed 70 percent false positives, the hotel lockdowns, suspension of civil rights, anti-vaxx hysteria.  Just a brazen shrug of the shoulders and the determination to try again this winter to keep certain people in line.

The hysterics who wanted neighbours dead because they declined to join a cult urged by medical elites are still silent as vaccines sit unused by the millions. That includes Canada’s PM who locked returning citizens into hotel jails and then declared a public emergency when truckers didn’t sign up for his bogus agenda. Crickets from him.

Scarcity drives value, and the most scarce commodity is not excellent running backs. It’s excellent quarterbacks. Scarcity is why left offensive tackles make more than guards and centres. It’s why cornerbacks make more than middle linebackers. It’s why these positions are drafted in the first round while running backs and others slide to the later rounds. 

MLB is now talking about possibly returning to Montreal as an expansion club should they build a proper ball park. Although who in Quebec has a billion to throw at a baseball stadium is unclear. And how they’d get past the Blue Jays monopoly on broadcast rights in Canada is also a huge question. Just remember, however, that you needn’t look far to see who had a large hand in killing the Expos. It was the Toronto Blue Jays and their territorial rights. 

It would be interesting to see a film about how the NHL exploited— and then squandered— its Jordan Rules moment. Parallel to the Bulls star’s ascension the NHL experienced its own Jordan in Wayne Gretzky. A once-in-a century star, Gretzky possessed all the marketable qualities of Jordan in his NHL career that began in 1979.

“Ladies, name your top five WNBA players of all time. Name five WNBA teams. Name the WNBA team in your city. You can’t do it!” You’re playing in a 20,000-seat arena — 1,500 people show up. That’s not a good night!”

The only rule with Bob was Don’t Be Boring. That meant don’t talk about the Leafs power play or how will the Blue Jays do this weekend in Milwaukee. Or else you wouldn’t be back. He wanted a take, the big picture, business talk and a healthy dose of American references.The atmosphere was all snark, all the time. And his audience loved it (the panelists did, too, unless Bob got mad at you and banned you).

Even as they bend a knee to the digital ways of doing business, NHL owners also love to hang around the legends of their franchise. So when fans get restless, NHL owners often turn to the legendary players of the franchise to take the heat off them.

After 18 months of sniping at the Saudi-backed LIV scheme for sins real and imagined— and letting top stars like Rory McIlroy get caught up in the rhetoric— the PGA Tour suddenly folded like a cheap suit last week. The men who’d led the PGA Tour into this rout suddenly realized they’d brought a pitching wedge to a long-drive contest. Their boosting of paydays for players who didn’t defect and the costs of legal cases was going to put the Tour into the poorhouse.

Fans hoping that new GMs and coaches making bold moves will bring sunny days in 2023-24 will be sorely disappointed as the crunch from Gary Bettman’s vaunted Escrow System will mean a meagre $1M bump in the salary cap for next season. Because of money lost by owners during the Covid Bubble seasons, players are working off an estimated $1.1B debt they owe owners under the terms of the glorious salary-cap win by shutting down the 2004-05 season.

It might not have exactly been Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon, but Florida Panthers glitter boy Matthew Tkachuk sitting in with the TNT NBA panel of Shaquille O’Neal, Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith might have been close to that magnitude of collision between cultures. 

The biggest difference between Brown and Bobby Hull was that the critics of the Golden Jet wanted to get tawdry clicks from his life story. With Brown they wanted him to advertise their Woke selves. That’s a huge and crucial difference in this insane world.