The NHL hockey season has been cancelled. This is sad to any Canadian no matter how unsurprising it was. In the final negotiations, it was just math - but a strange math from another planet which I don’t understand. Apparently the major stumbling block was salary caps since everything else had been conceded to. The owners wanted team salaries capped at $42.5 million, the players wanted $49 million. Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, tried to highlight this as a major difference.

“We weren’t as close as people were speculating … We were still very far apart,” Bettman said, noting the gap of $6.5 million multiplied by 30 teams is close to $200 million. (from the CBC)

Excuse me? What kind of half-assed extrapolation is this? Did Gary suddenly expect every team in the league to start using the entirety of the cap all of a sudden? According to 2003-2004 NHL Team salaries (from USA Today), only a third of the 30 teams had salaries over $42.5 million, and only 4 had salaries over $49.0 mil. (By the way, Vancouver would have missed both caps. Go thrifty Vancouver!) Take into account the 24% salary rollback both parties agreed to, and the number shrinks to 7 teams over $42.5, and the same 4 teams over $49.0 mil.

I quickly crunched some numbers in Excel, and it looks like both parties were off by just $41 million. Chart below. That’s still not chump change, but that’s definitely not $200 million. All we had to do to keep the season was to get rid of one of the redundant Detroit goalies (Joseph or Hasek: $8 or 6 million, your pick), force early retirement on aging New York Rangers (Leetch: $6.6M, Messier: $3.3M, and thrown in Lindros since he’s one concussion short of permanent brain damage: $3.3M, and yes I know Leetch is now an ex-Ranger, but bear with me), and for good measure, get rid of the expansion Nashville Predators since there’s no ice in Tennessee ($21.9 million) - and that alone would have saved the season right there (total: $41.1 - 43.1 million).

Never underestimate the greed of the owners and players of the North American sports leagues, and how much they just don’t care about the fans.