With the opportunity to create one unified league with teams on each aspect of the border, women’s hockey is at a crucial crossroads. It’s where it always should have been to identify how to make one league work and construct from there.
How can suspending operations for the Canadian Women’s Hockey League be an effective, bullish game commercial enterprise second for women’s hockey? Clearing the decks and permitting one unified league to emerge from the ashes. Just one week after the Clarkson Cup saw the Calgary Inferno defeat Les Canadiennes de Montreal to claim supremacy of the CWHL, the league introduced its closedown on May 1, 2019. That’s manifestly a terrible information tale for the proponents of the six-crew CWHL. Yet it’s also an opportunity for ladies’ hockey stakeholders to finally get it properly.
Women’s hockey in North America is usually fragmented as long as two factions vie for company, media, broadcast, and network guidance. That’s exactly what occurred, with the CWHL on the only facet and the U.S.-primarily based National Women’s Hockey League on the opposite. Women’s hockey is at an important crossroads with the opportunity to create one unified league with groups on each aspect of the border. It must constantly identify a way to make one league paintings and construct from there.
The NHL can now focus its sponsorship assistance on one league, investing $ hundred 000 or greater within the NWHL rather than $50,000 in a single and $50,000 inside the other as it has in current years. The NHL Network and NHL.Com can function as a broadcast platform for the best gamers in place of puzzling hockey enthusiasts with a bit of CWHL and a little bit of NWHL. Corporate partners should buy into one consolidated league. Neither the CWHL — which took the ill-advised step of adding a Chinese-based crew to its league — nor the NWHL had the form of a business version that would inspire funding for growth. Now, if women’s hockey leaders can look at their egos on the door, a better model should emerge from the frustration beyond the week.
Bears of the Week
There will almost certainly not be a Phoenix-like emerging from the ashes for the Alliance of American Football. Just eight weeks into its lifestyle and only three Saturdays away from its inaugural championship sport, the Alliance closes down football operations this week.
The plug was pulled by way of Tom Dundon, the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes, who became controlling Chair of the Board of Directors of the Alliance six weeks in the past in exchange for his commitment to inject US$ hundred and fifty million into the coins-strapped league that was reputedly near missing payroll after just weeks of play.
Dundon did not want to throw accurate money after bad—and that’s understood. He is out $70M of the $150M he pledged. Yet in my books, folding only some weeks away from a championship recreation on CBS Sports will cost more than the additional monies it’d have taken to limp to April 27 and crown a champion, and then it will take some time to revamp and reboot for the future.
The way the Alliance folded — telling its players they were accountable for their very own tour charges to get domestic — goes to make it tremendously hard for the league to return lower back in any form in 2020, especially with the XFL 2.0 scheduled to make its debut inside the spring of next yr. The Sport Market on TSN Radio rates and debates the bulls and bears of recreation commercial enterprise. Join Tom Mayenknecht on Saturday from 7 a.m. To 11 a.m. In the back scenes, game commercial enterprise stories count to the maximum number of stakeholders.
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