Mixed in between those offerings are short vignettes focusing on a single player's career. You'll see plenty of Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Paul Coffey, Darryl Sittler and Guy Lafleur. Heck, there even have been short tributes to lesser lights who are still great hockey talents, such as Tom Barrasso and Ed Belfour.

But as I've been watching, I haven't been able to help but ask: Where are the Islanders? Of course, I'm not talking about the sad sack into which the once-powerful franchise has degenerated. I'm talking about the team that won four consecutive Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983.

Today, five players from the team that won those 19 consecutive playoff series over five seasons -- Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy, Clark Gillies, Denis Potvin and Billy Smith -- have a place in the Hockey Hall of Fame alongside their coach, Al Arbour. Bossy makes a brief appearance during one vignette, but he's just there so we can be reminded how the Great One eclipsed his run to 50 goals in 50 games with one of his own. But outside of occasional glimpses it's as though the franchise that arguably enjoyed the best run of success of any one based in the lower 48 is something of a hockey afterthought.

I need to reveal more than a bit of bias. Though I've lived in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia for more than two decades, my formative years as a hockey fan were spent on Long Island, just across the border from Queens and a 15-minute ride from Nassau Coliseum. When I first stepped on the ice in 1975, it was an action in part propelled by the emergence of the Islanders as a power in the NHL.

Granted, part of the reason the Islanders get overlooked is simply due to bad timing. Like it or not, that Islanders team was sandwiched between a Scotty Bowman-led Canadiens squad that won four Cups of its own from 1976 to 1979 and an Oilers team that won five Cups in seven seasons from 1984 to 1990 and is arguably the greatest in the history of the sport. When you're competing for attention while historically situated between teams of that caliber, it's easy to see how the Isles could get lost in the shuffle.

Still, you'd think there would be room for a vignette about Trottier, a 1,000-point scorer who won six Stanley Cups (two more with Pittsburgh) and was one of the most physically punishing centers in NHL history. While Bossy's achievement of 50 goals in 50 games was indeed obliterated by Gretzky's accomplishment, he's the only player to have scored 50 goals or more in nine consecutive seasons. At the time Potvin retired, he was the career leader in goals, assists and points for a defenseman. As for Gillies and Smith, if either played in the NHL today, he'd command a generous salary that would lay ruin to the cap of just about any team.

It's also important to reveal that after so many decades away from Long Island, my bona fides as an Islanders partisan are well in my rearview mirror. As one of my blogging friends has reminded me, I'm something of a journalist now and ought to be above such petty attachments. Still, it's hard for me not to look at the Isles as an old girlfriend with whom I had a lot of great times. And while I might not love her anymore, I'm sure not going to sit by while others pretend she doesn't deserve respect.

Here's hoping the folks at the NHL Network do something to correct the record.

Eric McErlain runs Off Wing Opinion, included in Forbes' Best of the Web in 2003. He is a regular contributor to Sporting News.

3

For someone like me who spends the better part of nine months of the year with my nose proverbially pressed to the glass watching the NHL, the moment came as something of a revelation. Here was a massive knot of some of the most dedicated fans of the sport of football -- anyone who makes their way on their own dime to Canton for the induction ceremony probably had their ticket to fanaticism punched years ago -- and they didn't capitalize on the chance to give the NFL Commissioner a public rebuke?

What was wrong with these people?

Of course I jest, but compared with the abuse regularly heaped on NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman by the hockey ticket-buying public, the welcome Goodell received on Saturday might as well have been a standing ovation. By now, most of us know the drill -- Gary Bettman gets introduced, Gary Bettman gets abused. It's gotten so bad that in 2006, the Canadian movie Bon Cop, Bad Cop -- actually a pretty serviceable thriller if you turn your brain off for a little while -- satirized him as "Harry Buttman," the vertically challenged commissioner of a fictional hockey league intent on moving its Canadian franchises south of the border for good.

It doesn't matter the time or place, whether he's presenting the Stanley Cup or kicking off the NHL Draft, Bettman is going to be held accountable for all the sins of the game, real and imagined. It's gotten so bad that I couldn't help but notice when the Stanley Cup was presented to the Detroit Red Wings in the aftermath of Game 6 in Pittsburgh this year, Bettman and the Cup suddenly appeared on the ice without the commissioner's name even being announced.

When you're the front man for not one, but two labor stoppages, I guess some things just come along with the job.

The ire in public is only a reflection of the ire that exists in the online world, and let's be honest, in the hearts of the game's most passionate fans. Over at Puck Daddy for the past few weeks, my friend Greg Wyshynski has been holding a contest asking his readers to indulge in their loathing for the commissioner by photoshopping his face into compromising positions. The results have been hilarious, with even my compatriots at FanHouse joining in the fun.

But when the laughter dies down, a pretty serious question remains: How long can the NHL go on doing business with a public face that is so universally derided by the people who pay the bills?

The answer: Well, probably just about forever.

I've gone on record before writing that Bettman doesn't deserve half the scorn he gets from the game's fans. Lord knows that the league -- like any other business -- is faced with plenty of challenges and competitive threats to its existence. But what so many fans seem to forget is that Bettman serves at the pleasure of the league's owners, not the fans.

Don't like expansion? You can blame Bettman, but the fact is the spate of expansion that brought the game to the American Sunbelt started before Bettman took office, and probably would have happened even in his absence thanks to the fat expansion fees that the league's owners got to split. Angry that he's standing in the way of moving additional teams to Canada? Luxuriate in that anger if you will, but the stand against bringing another team north of the border has got more to do with market dynamics and the intractable opposition of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment than Bettman's personal opposition. Don't like the salary cap? Indeed, Bettman helped devise the salary cap in the NBA, and after a little more than a decade in office finally got one installed as the law of the land in the NHL. An entire season was lost to the lockout, but Bettman would have never pursued that course if a solid majority of the league's owners weren't on the same page.

That's part of the reason why I got a little laugh after reading the latest from Larry Brooks on Sunday in the New York Post about how the Commissioner is about to embark on an investigation of some of the chicanery behind William "Boots" DelBaggio's purchase of a share of the Nashville Predators -- a purchase that was enabled by a pair of loans from NHL owners Phil Anschutz of the LA Kings and Craig Leipold, late of the Predators and now safely ensconced as owner of the Minnesota Wild. By now, most of the world has surmised that both owners had very real reasons for wanting DelBaggio in on the deal: Leipold wanted to find a way out of Nashville after pouring millions into the team; while Anschutz was probably happy to loan DelBaggio a few million if it meant making a new friend who might be willing to move the Predators to Kansas City if and when he took control of the team.

So if you have a complaint about the way the NHL is run, it might be more appropriate to make your case before the league's owners. But that's problematic in its own way too, isn't it? After all, if you're a fan, it's a lot easier to have a solitary and easily recognizable figure to serve as the target for your ire than 30 owners of all different shapes and sizes and differing public profiles, isn't it?

Hate on the Commissioner if you must. Something tells me there are a whole lot of other folks who are happy to keep things that way.

Eric McErlain runs Off Wing Opinion, included in Forbes' Best of the Web in 2003. He is a regular contributor to Sporting News.

17

Thanks to all of the readers and bloggers who have been chewing over my columns on the brewing player war between Russia's nascent Kontinental Hockey League and the NHL. North America once sat unchallenged at the top of the world's economy. It's that sort of economic dominance that helped the NHL become the world's best, and most valuable, hockey league.

But today we live in a world with multiple economic power centers. And thanks to a resurgent Russian economy boosted by skyrocketing energy and commodity prices, plenty of KHL franchises have money to burn when it comes to signing players. Granted, things change fast in the global economy, and there's no guarantee that energy prices will stay high forever. Still, there's little doubt that the Russian economy is back, and that at the least, KHL teams will help drive up the price of Russian-born hockey talent for the foreseeable future.

My previous two columns (on the NHL's dwindling options and the legitimate threat posed by the KHL) have also generated a couple of questions I want to address today. The first comes from one of my editors at Sporting News who asked me about the other five players--Fedor Fedorov, Jason Krog, Nikita Filatov, Viktor Tikhonov and Tomas Mojzis--who were suspended from international play along with Alexander Radulov pending an investigation by the International Ice Hockey Federation. "If the NHL makes a stink on Radulov practicing with the Russians, what will the Russians say about Filatov, Tikhonov and Mojzis doing offseason work with NHL players?"

According to the people I talk to in international ice hockey circles, the other five players were included in the IIHF investigation to give the investigation an appearance of evenhandedness. The only person who really matters at this point is Radulov, because he's the most talented player involved. I get the impression there's not a lot of respect for the IIHF in Russian hockey circles, which I guess shouldn't be much of a surprise. After all, any authority the IIHF wields is really only the sort of authority that has been invested in it by outsiders. And with just about all of international hockey at odds over the player transfer market, the IIHF is really just a toothless bureaucracy when it comes to enforcing sanctions against individual players.

When it comes to fighting back over the Radulov signing, the most potent option open to the NHL might be one mentioned by ESPN.com's Scott Burnside a little more than a week ago. For the second year in a row, the NHL season will kick off in Europe, with the Rangers and Lightning opening in Prague and the Penguins and Senators in Stockholm. But before the Rangers play the Lightning in Prague, they'll take a side trip to Berne, Switzerland, to play Metallurg Magnitogorsk for the Victoria Cup on Oct. 1. The meeting will be the first between an NHL squad and one from the top flight of Russian professional hockey. Make no mistake--this game and what it represents is very important to Russian hockey. That's probably why Burnside suggested that the NHL should call it off if the KHL refuses to cancel Radulov's contract with Salavat.

As for the second question that's arisen from my previous columns, Calgary's Brian Sambirsky asked: "Can you ask your legal pal if the Radulov signing puts guaranteed contracts at jeopardy for the NHLPA? I would argue that if players don't honour their contracts then why should NHL owners?"

Granted, it's an interesting question, so I put it to sports law expert Michael McCann. He was happy to respond:

"It's an interesting question, but the key difference between Alexander Radulov breaching his NHL contract with the Nashville Predators by signing with Salavat Yulaev Ufa of the KHL and, say [hypothetically], the Predators breaching their NHL contract with defenseman Ryan Suter by deciding to not pay him would be the capacity of Suter to have a civil judgment enforced against the Predators should Suter successfully sue the Predators in a U.S. court for breach of contract.

"Suter would also enjoy the protection of the NHLPA, which would undoubtedly file a grievance. That same dynamic would be in place for other NHL players if owners decided to not honor their guaranteed contracts. Just as important, if the Predators failed to abide by a civil judgment entered against them, they would be vulnerable to much stiffer sanctions by a court. Bottom line: The Predators couldn't get away with not honoring their contractual obligations to Suter.

"Unfortunately for the Predators, it's not necessarily a two-way street when it comes to players breaching their contracts to play for the Predators, at least when those players breach by signing with foreign teams. Take Radulov. The Predators could successfully sue him in a U.S. court for breach of contract, and also successfully sue Salavat Yulaev Ufa and the KHL for intentional interference with contractual relations, but the Predators would likely be impaired by the need to rely on Russian authorities to enforce any civil judgments entered against those defendants. Now, those defendants may have assets in the U.S. that could be recoverable to pay off civil judgments entered against them, but it's not clear that they do.

"So while it would be relatively easy for Suter [in the hypothetical] to recover against the Predators, it would be a lot harder for the Predators to do the same against Radulov, Salavat Yulaev Ufa, and the KHL. That's why, in my opinion, the Radulov situation should not endanger the contracts of other NHL players."

Eric McErlain runs Off Wing Opinion, included in Forbes' Best of the Web in 2003. He is a regular contributor to Sporting News.

5

Now, here we are just a week later, and the brewing competition between the leagues over hockey talent -- in particular Russian-born talent -- is threatening to escalate into a full-scale war.

First, we ought to recap what's happened since last week's column.

On July 15, the NHL and the KHL announced that the leagues had come to an interim agreement to respect one another's contracts -- an arrangement that would seem to indicate that the deal winger Alexander Radulov signed with Salavat Yulaev Ufa while under contract with the Nashville Predators would be null and void. But that's not the understanding of KHL president Alexander Medvedev, who told everyone willing to listen that Radulov's deal with the last champions of the Russian Super League would stand because it was signed well before the NHL and KHL completed the latest agreement.

A couple of days later, the International Ice Hockey Federation announced that six players, including Radulov, would be suspended from international play pending an investigation into their status -- an announcement that was responded to in kind by the KHL, which reiterated its intention to allow Radulov to play this season. The KHL statement was quickly followed by another issued by NHLPA executive director Paul Kelly, who protested the IIHF's action, writing that it had "no basis in law or fact" in the absence of a player transfer agreement between the NHL and KHL.

Meanwhile, Radulov is acting a lot like a player who knows he'll be spending next season in Russia. He has already started training camp with Salavat Ulaef in Finland.

So what happens next, and what options does the NHL have? For some answers, I picked up the phone and called an old blogging friend, sports law expert Michael McCann. McCann is scheduled to teach next semester at Boston College Law School before taking up a full-time position at Vermont Law School. Better yet, he's the founder of Sports Law Blog and is the in-house legal expert at SI.com.

According to McCann, the Predators could sue Salavat and the KHL for contractual interference in the U.S. courts, where the team would have a "very strong claim that their rights were infringed in an intentional way," a notion that would have to be reinforced by the fact that the KHL has announced that players signed away from the NHL who were under contract wouldn't count against the league's salary cap.

But the problems would start for the Predators and the NHL when they went looking for a Russian authority to enforce their claim. The Russian political system is more or less 100 percent behind the activities of the KHL, and any Russian judge who decided to prevail against the KHL would find it to be a "really unpopular move," McCann told me.

"U.S. courts can say whatever they want, but it takes two to tango ... If the Russian courts or other authorities aren't enforicng our civil judgments, they become meaningless," McCann said. "There's no point in sanctioning leagues in Russia. It's going to be difficult to get the player back through legal channels. The only way to do it would be for the NHL to come to an agreement with the KHL -- and that's not on the horizon."

But where our conversation got a little more interesting is when we began to look down the road a few more years -- something that I believe too many North American observers of this story have neglected to do. For the most part, those who have tried to discount the impact of the KHL on the NHL's operations have looked only at the near-term implications. But as I noted last week, teams like Salavat, Ska St. Petersburg and Lokomotiv aren't the weak sisters many WHA franchises were. Instead, they're established brands with growing international followings.

Here in Washington, it was hard not to notice the sprinkling of sweaters from KHL teams appearing in the crowd during the Washington Capitals' development camp earlier this month. Moreover, two of the most popular T-shirts you'll find in the pro shop at the team's training facility are ones embossed with the names of Alex Ovechkin and Alexander Semin -- with their names spelled in Russian.

The real trouble could start if fewer Russian prospects make their way to North America and more European talent opts to play in the expanded KHL. "Perhaps a trend of players going to another league [could reinforce the notion that] the NHL isn't the premier hockey league on earth ... The more and more we're seeing this, it reinforces the impression it isn't the best in the world," McCann said.

What's worse, McCann added, is that competition for players -- especially those who make up a disproportionate number of the league's most skilled players -- could drive up the cost of doing business and force NHL owners to re-evaluate their priorities. Essentially, McCann said, NHL owners may well conclude that they'll be forced to spend more for players or be forced to put an "inferior product" on the ice.

If that comes to pass, McCann said that we shouldn't be surprised if a growing number of NHL owners look to put their teams on the market.

And as for those who charge that most talented North Americans would always choose to stay home and play in Canadian juniors or the NCAA, it might be high time to think again. Four years ago, I interviewed a player agent who represented a number of American basketball players in Europe. At the time, I asked him if there was a chance that the European professional leagues might eventually offer an alternate development path for American players who would normally opt for at least a few years in the NCAA.

At the time, he told me no, and that the cultural gap was probably too wide for an 18-year-old American kid to bridge. Yet just last week, one of the top American high school basketball prospects, Arizona recruit Brandon Jennings, opted to play at least a year in Europe for Virtus Roma. And that's a year he won't have to worry about dealing with NCAA investigations just because he wants to make sure he gets paid for what he believes he's worth.

But Jennings isn't the only American to have opted to ply his or her trade in Europe. For years, American female basketball players like Diana Taurasi have opted to play for big bucks in Europe when the WNBA isn't in session. And Europe is still the optimal destination for the top men's talent in American soccer, with young players like Freddy Adu, Jozy Altidore and Jonathan Spector eschewing a life in MLS for a chance to compete in Europe at the sport's highest levels.

There was one point that McCann and I couldn't agree with more -- and that's the impression that the longer the dispute between the KHL and NHL persists, the more likely the KHL will obtain greater and greater leverage in their negotiations if more European players choose to stay home. What's worse, if the KHL follows through on plans to expand throughout Europe, it could very well turn out to be a rather attractive destination -- even if only temporarily -- for top North American hockey talent.

Laugh if you must. The KHL and the threat it represents are no joke.

Eric McErlain runs Off Wing Opinion, included in Forbes' Best of the Web in 2003. He is a regular contributor to Sporting News.

5

While you're pretty much convinced that most of the best players in the world will still want to come to the NHL, live in North America and have a chance to play for the Stanley Cup, the new league, built on the chassis of the old Russian Super League, has been making threatening noises since it hung out its shingle for business a few weeks ago.

Come to think of it, the actions of the new league are really nothing but more of the same from Russian hockey officials, who have been giving the NHL fits for the past couple of years. First, the Russian Hockey Federation refused to renew its player transfer agreement with the NHL a few years ago, an action that has led NHL teams to draft fewer and fewer Russian prospects. Then, working with willing allies in the Russian government, a raft of reforms in Russian employment law have gone into effect, all with the aim of making it more difficult for young prospects to play overseas.

What's worse, the Russians have managed to convince every other European hockey federation of the justice of their cause, and now the entire continent stands united against the NHL on the player transfer issue. The ultimate goal: to create an international player transfer market in hockey that more closely resembles that of international soccer, where players are bought and sold for millions of dollars before you even start paying a salary.

In the past few weeks, the noises out of Russia have gotten more ominous. In interviews with the Western press, KHL president Alexander Medvedev let it slip that KHL teams that sign NHL players currently under contract won't have their salaries count against the league's cap. Then, a steady stream of fringe players started signing contracts with the new league, capped by the signings of Ray Emery, a goalie who one season ago was playing in the Stanley Cup Finals, and future first ballot Hall of Famer Jaromir Jagr.

Then again, you must think, Medvedev and the Russian Hockey Federation are businessmen who can be reasoned with. So your team jets to Switzerland to hammer out an agreement where both leagues respect each other's contracts. An NHL official steps to a podium and declares player peace in our time.

Not so fast. Not even 24 hours after the agreement was official, Alexander Radulov, a winger for the Nashville Predators who fought his way to the NHL through Canadian juniors and the AHL and scored 26 goals last season at the tender age of 21, announced that he was headed back home to Russia to play for Salavat Yulaev Ufa in the KHL -- this despite the fact that he has a year remaining on his contract with Nashville. When asked about the Radulov signing, Medvedev told a Russian newspaper that it was fine by him, as the agreement with the NHL had yet to be signed.

For a commissioner who shut down the NHL for a year in order to achieve "cost certainty" in player salaries, this is starting to look like an awfully big headache.

Over the past few months, I've talked to plenty of Russians about the new league, including one of the few interviews Medvedev has granted to the North American media. I've come away with a few general impressions.

1. The Russians are angry. In the wake of the Cold War, Russian hockey officials believe the NHL took horrible advantage of them and more or less raided the country of hockey talent without paying a fair price, leaving their player development system in ruins. These are prideful people, and they're determined to get the NHL to treat them like equals this time around.

2. Russian hockey is connected. Senior Russian hockey officials such as Slava Fetisov and Vladislav Tretiak are on speaking terms with former Russian president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. They've already managed to get the changes they needed in employment law, and it's safe to say the government is on board with their plans to use the KHL as a vehicle to raise the standards of Russian hockey. Tretiak (head of the Russian Hockey Federation) and Fetisov (Russia's Minister of Sport) are national hockey heroes. It's also safe to say that whatever other changes they believe are needed, they're going to get.

3. Russian hockey has the money. The KHL has the financial backing of several parties, including the treasury of Gazprom, the state-owned energy company. Given the incredible run-up in global energy and commodity prices, the league has money to burn and can most likely match any contract in the NHL. Toss in favorable income tax laws that wouldn't get out of Congress or the Parliament of Canada, and the thought of spending a couple of years in a city like Moscow or St. Petersburg doesn't look half bad.

In short, this is not the Russia that was struggling after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is a Russia that is resurgent, confident and unafraid to flex its muscles.

So what's next for Bettman and the NHL? For starters, I would expect long, hard rounds of negotiations with a very determined opponent that has deep pockets and a long memory.

Over the past few weeks, a number of observers have noted that the KHL represents a challenge to the NHL not unlike the one presented by the World Hockey Association in the 1970s. Thanks to the WHA, player salaries skyrocketed, the NHL was forced to expand to blunt the growth of the WHA, and the trickle of European players arriving in North America turned into a flood.

While I think it's an apt comparison, there are a number of significant differences that have led me to conclude that the threat posed by the KHL is greater than the one once posed by the WHA. Most importantly, most WHA owners were severely undercapitalized. That's not a problem for the deep pockets backing the KHL. Further, Russian franchises like Dynamo and Ska St. Petersburg have been around for decades. They won't be passing into hockey history like the Minnesota Fighting Saints or the Birmingham Bulls anytime soon. And the long-term threat they represent to the NHL won't, either.

Imagine you're NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. When it comes to the KHL, I'll bet you'll want to imagine that you're anybody else.

Eric McErlain runs Off Wing Opinion, included in Forbes' Best of the Web in 2003. He is a regular contributor to Sporting News.

12