Those of us who are veteran Gary Bettman watchers were fascinated by the little cat-and-mouse game the NHL commissioner has been playing with the players association these past three weeks. Nominally, it was about Olympic participation – and would the NHL go to Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the 2018 Games – but really it was about labour peace, something Major League Baseball seems to manage routinely, but hockey struggles with.
It all started after the hockey world landed in Toronto for Hockey Hall Of Fame induction ceremonies in November, with IIHF president René Fasel making Bettman an offer he theoretically couldn't refuse. All along, Bettman had insisted unless the International Olympic Committee came up with the money to finance NHL participation in the Olympics, it was a non-starter for his organization.
When Fasel said he'd come up with the money, it removed the single biggest logistical barrier to going.
Since the IOC suddenly wasn't the big, bad wolf anymore, it forced Bettman to up the negotiating ante. A wily veteran of labour negotiating, Bettman offered to go to the Olympics, if the players agreed to a three-year extension of the current collective agreement.
It was a clever tactical ploy because Bettman knew there wasn't a chance in 10,000 the players would say yes.
Olympic participation matters to the players, but it is a peripheral, not a core, bargaining issue. To expect them to unilaterally exchange one for the other was unrealistic. Moreover, Bettman almost certainly knew his offer would be rejected. What he accomplished was to shift the narrative.
Now, if the league stays home and there's a giant outcry in response, Bettman can argue the players were complicit in the decision. They had their chance to go (with only one string attached!) and said no.
The league is resisting the temptation to go to the South Korean Olympics for a variety of logistical and financial reasons. It is, however, open to the idea of participating four years later in China because of the tangible economic gains that can be made from exploring the world's largest untapped hockey market.
The players want to play, but not at any cost, and not to maintain the labour status quo at a time when the escrow provision of the current collective agreement is eating deeply into the dollar value of their contracts.
Escrow is the mechanism by which the players and the owners divide the pie, each side getting 50 per cent of hockey-related revenues. The problem is, with the sudden drop of the Canadian dollar, revenues have dipped and so the players' share is dropping, too, to the point where they are losing virtually all of the 15 or so per cent that is being withheld annually from their individual pay cheques under this system.
Ideally, the players would like to see escrow, if not eliminated altogether, then capped so their losses aren't as great as they are today.
That will be at the heart of any talks to extend the collective agreement, not the Olympics.
It's one of the more intriguing discussion points that will be on the docket when the NHL's board of governors meets in Florida later this week – and the clock is ticking.
The NHL is already in the early stages of setting up next year's schedule, which will include a 31st team, the Vegas Golden Knights. While there is nothing to prevent the league from roughing in two different scheduling scenarios – one that includes an Olympic break, one that doesn't – the matter needs to be settled by the end of January.
In the meantime, it's a fascinating shell game, and like all effective shell games, diverts attention from the two main points.
One: The NHL should go to the Olympics because it belongs there. The appetite for best-on-best competition is enormous in every corner of the hockey world. The chance to perform on so important a sporting stage should never be turned down. And there is risk of a serious fan backlash if the NHL continues to play league games during the Olympics, while a B-level hockey tournament is staged in Pyeongchang.
Two: The NHL needs labour peace, not a fourth lockout under Bettman's watch. If this opening salvo brings the league and the NHLPA to the negotiating table before things get too heated, then that has to be viewed as a positive step.
Some owners flatly oppose Olympic participation, on the grounds that it makes little financial sense to shut down the league for an event to be played in a faraway time zone that doesn't give the vast majority of viewers a chance to watch the games live.
But that position completely misses the point. The NHL went to Nagano, Japan, in 1998, facing the same logistical issues. The Olympics helped spread the gospel of hockey to an unprecedented international audience, which ultimately enhanced the NHL brand.
Brand awareness and brand protection – that might not be the rallying cry you expect to hear when considering a decision as monumental as the NHL's Olympic participation, but if that's why the players eventually go, then who cares? It doesn't matter if you make the right decision for the wrong reason. It only matters that you do the right thing in the end.