Parity is stifling the Stanley Cup final

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The NBA got its final match-up on Saturday night. It’s the biggest franchise in the sport (the New York Knicks) vs. the most talked about athlete under 25 (Victor Wembanyama). It’s blue vs. red, old vs. young, Timothee Chalamet vs. the most famous person in Texas, whoever that is. This one is a talker.

Earlier the same day, the most lavishly funded outfit in pro sports (Paris Saint-Germain) took out the most popular team in the world, since about six weeks ago, when the hipsters glommed on to them (Arsenal) in the Champions League final. David Beckham was there, and only appeared on the main broadcast for about 10 seconds. The match-up was that hot.

Meanwhile, the Stanley Cup final will start on Tuesday. Is it good? I guess. Is it hot? No, you’re quite safe to pick it up. It’s room temperature.

This one features Carolina vs. Las Vegas. I’m not sure you could get a watch party together if you lived in an apartment at the Bellagio, never mind up here with people who obsess about the sport.

In terms of stars, this final has … let me make sure I spell this right … Logan Stankoven vs. … oh God … Mitch Marner. So the target demographic is tobacco farmers and embittered Leafs fans, neither of whom will bother watching.

Cathal Kelly: All the way from Las Vegas and the Stanley Cup final, Mitch Marner is the Leafs' worst-case scenario

The point of running an entertainment business isn’t to produce the fairest result possible, which this is. It is to titillate, and thereby maximize, your audience.

Every league occasionally has problems in this regard, but the NHL is a special case. It routinely produces main events that draw like re-runs of Mama’s Family. That trend was papered over for a couple of years by Connor McDavid. However, now that the Oilers have crushed his spirit, we’re returning to a string of low-interest bombs.

You know whose fault this is? Parity’s.

Parity is a great idea, like socialism. Also like socialism, it works better in some cultures than others.

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Parity works well in the NFL, where every team is a local monolith, has stars, and can keep them. It works okay in the NBA, where one lucky draft can turn a no-hoper into a white-hot comer in extremely short order, a la Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs.

It does not work in the NHL, where it creates systemic disadvantages for the teams most people are interested in.

If we use the Forbes valuation list, nine of the last 10 Stanley Cup champions are not amongst the 10 most valuable franchises in the league. It’ll be 10 of 11 once this year’s final is over.

It’s not rocket science to figure out why. First, most teams, like most legacy businesses, are run by people who have no clue what’s going on. They’re just guessing.

This is why they’re suddenly so hot for AI. Now, there is a computer which will guess for them, which means – you guessed it – that it’s the computer’s fault when things go wrong.

In future, we’ll have press conferences where the team president sits mournfully beside a buzzing keyboard and announces that – even though it’s one of the most quality keyboards he’s ever known, and a great family keyboard – they have to part ways. And now, meet the new buzzing keyboard.

Since capital has no idea what’s happening, labour is the deciding factor in the NHL. It migrates where conditions are best. Which is to say, where the weather is good and where the fans are not insane.

If Silicon Valley did franchises and had a salary cap, do you think anyone would choose to live in Sacramento? Have you been there? It’s a parking lot with traffic lights.

If the U.S. tech corridor was a sports league, all the computing talent would migrate to San Diego or Chicago for something to do besides head to the Cheesecake Factory. But Sacramento’s where the money is, so Sacramento’s where the best and brightest end up.

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This is the NHL’s problem – it is nicer to live in Carolina, where no one bothers you – than it is in Calgary, where they do, but you make the same amount of money in both places.

Unlike, say, soccer players, NHLers don’t even pretend to care about legacy or history. None of them are pushing to play for the Canadiens or the Red Wings. You won’t hear anyone invoking Rocket Richard or Gordie Howe. They all want to go to a ‘quality organization’, which is hockey-player speak for ‘a place I can drive to practice in flip flops’.

The longer this institutionalized promotion of inferiority continues, the more desperate the legacy outfits become, the more unattractive they become as workplaces, What’s Toronto’s biggest hockey problem? That it’s Toronto.

Who amongst us doubts that were McDavid traded to Tampa, he wouldn’t get better? Or were Macklin Celebrini traded to Vancouver, he wouldn’t get worse?

This framework is great for owners. The legacy losers still make money hand over fist, while the newcomers in moribund markets get the trophies. It’s good for players, too. They can work at a variety of speeds – hard and fast, or slow and steady. Try one when you’re young, and the other when you’re older.

The only people it’s not good for are the ones who actually watch hockey. They’ve been brainwashed into thinking this is the best way of doing things.

We’ve just seen a great example of this mass coercion. Look at how worked up Montreal got over watching the Canadiens get their doors blown off in a conference final. Forty years ago, that result would have been a civic disaster. Now, it’s the prompt for a street party.

The NHL has turned its best into a Yeats poem. As long as they lack conviction, and the salary cap holds, what you’ll continue to get at the end is the worst, minus the passionate intensity.