Will Bettman tear down Sun Belt wall?

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National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman spoke to reporters at a news conference at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. (RYAN REMIORZ / THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES)

Why wouldn't he?

Why wouldn't NHL commissioner Gary Bettman want to put the Phoenix Coyotes in Winnipeg? Why wouldn't he want to shed the league of a team that they own by default and which has cost the league this season, by one estimate, $4 million a month in losses?

Why wouldn't Bettman want to trade a hockey backwater like Phoenix for a hotbed like Winnipeg, while simultaneously getting increasingly grumpier league governors off his back?

Hell, why wouldn't Bettman want to do it just for the pure redemptive poetry of having the franchise go from an arctic desert in Winnipeg to a real desert in Phoenix and then back again?

It's a great question.

And the answer? Because Gary Bettman is Mikhail Gorbachev, 2010 is 1989 and Phoenix is Poland.

And should Bettman agree to tear even the tiniest hole in the iron curtain he has built around his league, he will quickly find himself in precisely the same position Gorbachev did when he allowed the trade union movement Solidarity to be freely elected to the government in Poland in 1989.

Bettman will be besieged and his wall will come down, just as surely as The Wall came down in Berlin months after Poland was free. Followed by Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Moldavia...you get the picture.

Once he yielded once, it was impossible for Gorbachev to stop people clamoring to be free. Just as it will be impossible for Bettman to stop his money-losing owners in the Sun Belt from demanding the same freedom should he allow the Coyotes to move to Winnipeg.

Just imagine the optics of doing otherwise :

After years of steadfastly refusing to allow money-losing franchises to relocate -- after even taking the Coyotes to court to prevent them from being moved by Jim Balsillie last year -- Bettman suddenly steps forward and announces that he's actually going to move his own money-losing team to Winnipeg.

But the rest of you guys -- sorry. You have to stay put.

Yeah, right.

So, to wrap it all up, what's at stake here isn't whether it makes sense for the NHL to move the Coyotes to Winnipeg. That's been clear since at least 2004, when the MTS Centre opened.

Rather, the decision Bettman has to make -- and soon, if reports Friday are true that the Ice Edge Holdings bid for the Coyotes is collapsing -- is whether Bettman also wants to move the Nashville Predators to, say, Houston; the Atlanta Thrashers to, say, Quebec City; the Florida Panthers to, say...you get the picture.

NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly this week told Ed Willes of the Vancouver Province that "under the right circumstances and should there be a need or an opportunity, we would love to return to Winnipeg."

"Love," as Willes pointed out, isn't a word you usually hear from the NHL offices.

Of course, Daly also told Willes the NHL would have to do a bunch of work and due diligence before that could happen and "that's not something we have the need or reason to do at this point."

They might very shortly, however, if a story in Friday's Globe and Mail is accurate. The Globe detailed how a $150-million bid by Ice Edge Holdings to buy the Coyotes and have them based in Phoenix but play some games in Canada, is in jeopardy because the guys behind it don't have much of their own money and bankers are leery of buying a team that's going to lose at least $20 million in Phoenix this season despite having one of the best young lineups in the league.

Winnipeg bid

Money, for a change, is not a problem with a Winnipeg bid, of course. True North chairman Mark Chipman has lots all by himself. But more importantly, Chipman's partner -- Toronto billionaire David Thomson -- is the 23rd richest man in the world and has, at last report, more money than the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

According to Willes, someone from True North met with Bettman during the last week of the Olympics in Vancouver. I'm told Chipman was in Vancouver at that time but his spokesman Scott Brown, said Friday that Chipman categorically denies having met with Bettman.

"No individual at all from our organization met with Bettman at the Olympics," Brown said.

Look, Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost set more people free than probably anything ever, except The Pill. The short, awkward-looking guy -- speaking of parallels here -- was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and history will forever view him very kindly.

But what has already been largely forgotten is that just two years after Solidarity was allowed to take power, the Soviet Union was in tatters, Gorbachev was arrested by his own forces, ultimately removed from office and replaced by a drunk named Boris Yeltsin.

Perestroika came with a stiff price. The question that will decide if NHL hockey returns to Winnipeg is whether Bettman is willing to pay it.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 13, 2010 D1