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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on Future Shock, 12 Commandments, Closing of the American Mind, Beyond Good and Evil and The Book of Knowledge. Picking up The Neoconservative Persuasion, a collection of Irving Kristol essays. Will probably read some C. S. Lewis for Christmas.
The Leiden Synopsis.
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Finished My Brilliant Friend during the week. It was pretty good, but I'm not exactly dying to read the sequels.
Started The Unbearable Lightness of Being the other day. Much more accessible than I expected.
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Just Finished The Instigator: How Gary Bettman Changed the NHL and Remade the Game Forever. It's significantly better than The NHL, if only because the scope is sufficiently narrowed; it's not a comprehensive history of the league under Bettman but a series of case studies demonstrating why Bettman's reputation among hockey fans is misplaced. It manages to go into significantly more detail on certain things like Winnipeg's relocation to Arizona in 1996, and while it leaves out Hartford's relocation to North Carolina the following year, this doesn't seem like a critical omission. My biggest complaint is that author Jonathan Gatehouse is a writer for Canadian magazine Maclean's, and it shows. He uses the present tense and presents the interviews he conducted as such rather than just using the information they provided or quotes the way a regular author would, which gives some of the chapters the feeling of being extended magazine articles rather than parts of a book.
For the uninitiated, Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner since 1993, is widely despised among hockey fans and is regularly booed during his annual presentation of the Stanley Cup to the winning team. Canadian hockey fans are especially critical. The following reasons are usually put forth:
He was commissioner during three lockouts, one of which wiped out a whole season.
He allowed teams in Quebec, Winnipeg, and Hartford to relocate non-traditional hockey markets during his tenure.
He presided over an expansion that put more emphasis on growing the game in Sun Belt markets where hockey is a tough sell than on giving traditional hockey fans (i.e. Canadians) more teams that would always sell out.
Following the lockout, he signed a deal with the obscure Outdoor Life Network (which at the time mostly aired hunting and fishing programs, plus the Tour de France) rather than resigning with ESPN.
More recently, fans looking to watch all of their team's games often find them blacked out on their preferred platforms.
*He's not a "hockey guy", he's a New York lawyer who spent the '80s and early '90s working for David Stern in the NBA, and has no experience with the game beyond being a spectator.
*Since Montreal won the Stanley Cup a few months into his tenure, no Canadian team has won it.
Most of these arguments are seriously flawed. The most common defense of him is that he works for the owners, so nothing he does can be attributed to him other than to the extent that he's doing the bidding of the owners. But this is just a cop out. To take them individually:
The 1994–95 lockout was largely a consequence of the prior labor dispute, a 10 day strike in 1992 that was only resolved with a bargaining agreement that lasted one year and was renewed for another year. While the players were willing to begin play in the fall of 1994 while negotiations were underway, Major League Baseball players had struck in August, and at the time the lockout was announced the World Series had been cancelled. The league was well aware that, if negotiations were unsuccessful, something similar would happen, and they locked out the players to ensure that a resolution would occur earlier rather than later. There was no confidence that NHLPA president Bob Goodenow would negotiate in good faith while he had that kind of leverage. The NHLPA was successful in preventing a salary cap that year, which caused team finances to spiral out of control. By 2004 it was clear to the owners that something had to be done, and Goodenow was unwilling to negotiate. The owners were united and while missing a season was an unfortunate consequence, it was ultimately necessary. I'll grant that the 2012–2013 lockout could have been avoided.
The Canadian teams other than Toronto and Montreal had serious problems that weren't made any better by the paltry exchange rate. Bettman takes the blame for allowing Winnipeg and Quebec to relocate, but he doesn't get any credit for saving Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, and even Vancouver, simply because no one realizes how close to the brink these teams were and is unfamiliar with the behind the scenes work he did to save them. Hartford was in a bad market and wasn't viable long-term.
There was no chance that the league would be able to make any significant revenue growth without expanding to untapped markets. Putting teams in small Canadian cities may sell out a building, but something like 40% of gate revenues come from sales of luxury suites, and these don't sell in cities without a large corporate presence. The NHL would be resigned to the regional sport it was with teams in Canada, the Northeast, and Upper Midwest and would never achieve true major league status. I don't know why hockey fans wouldn't want their sport to be more popular.
The deal ESPN offered was so bad it wasn't really an offer at all. The NHL had made bad TV deals before chasing immediate cash over exposure, but ESPN in 2005 wasn't even offering much exposure. The money was low, it only called for a limited selection of games airing on ESPN2, and there was no addition of any studio analysis show. There was no reason ESPN would do much to promote it. OLN soon rebranded as Versus and later NBC Sports, and revamped its programming to be more of a general sports channel with an emphasis on covering things ESPN ignored, like Premiere League soccer and F1 racing. With the NHL as its flagship product and Comcast money behind it, the league would get serious promotion.
The blackouts are due to a complicated array of contractual obligations and aren't in Bettman's control. It should be noted that being able to watch all of your team's games on television is a relatively recent phenomenon. The gist is that if you pay for a streaming service some televised games are going to be blacked out because the networks paying the big bucks want exclusive rights.
Bettman was hired specifically because he wasn't a hockey guy. The league had been run by hockey guys up to that point who ran it like a bush league and had no business sense. When Gretzky and Mario were exploding in the '80s the league didn't even have a US network TV deal and didn't even seem to be trying to negotiate one. Prior president John Zeigler left the league in such a mess he was forced out. His predecessor, the venerable Clarence Campbell, left even more of a mess that Zeigler had to clean up.
The idea that Bettman has anything to do with which teams win is ridiculous, but there are still conspiracy theories about refs intentionally favoring teams. This is contradicted by the fact that, in most series, there's no obvious evidence of this (Bettman certainly wouldn't have picked Edmonton–Carolina to be the first Stanley Cup final after the lockout, and Sidney Crosby would have a few more cups).
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Sir John of Joinville’s biography of king Louis IX. I just finished the chapter where he meets the assassins, and they do not come off well- they’re cowards who are easily bullied by small numbers of crusaders, accept bribes readily, and seem to have effect mostly through bragging rather than actual ability.
I need to reread that! I'll never forget the priest who got fired for grabbing a crossbow to chase down and shoot the guys who robbed him. Only for Louis to rehire him as a soldier.
Wonder if the poor guy survived the whole thing. Probably not.
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Highly recommended CS Lewis, I do wanna upload my review of the great divorce somewhere. I'll pick up the ramayana next as Faust is way too difficult for a noob like me. I'll give it a fair shot this time though.
I listenend to the Collected Essays as an audio book followed by Bishop Barron's commentary on Lewis (After Humanity) a few months back and highly recommend.
How was After Humanity? Any new insights based on recent developments, or just an exposition of the core theses of Abolition of Man? I've never heard of the author, Michael Ward.
No insights i would call new or ground breaking, but still a solid read. Mostly it contextualizes and expands upon various bits. IE "this is what Lewis was going through when he wrote that", and "chapter A is a effectively a reply to essay B written by so-and-so", that sort of thing. Fascinating for those who enjoy the "inside baseball" perspective, but far from essential.
Cool, I'll probably check it out then. I'm interested in the context in which the book was written.
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