Columnists
A chalk and cheese merger
It’s merger season. Rogers is trying to take over Shaw. Air Canada was trying to take over Air Transat. Canadian Pacific Railway is trying to take over Kansas City Southern. Maybe it’s just spring that’s making these companies so frisky, Whatever the reason, we’re on the lookout for more impending mergers.
And we hear of one from an unlikely quarter—the National Hockey League. That’s right; hockey. In particular, we hear that the owners of the Montreal Canadiens and the owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs have been secretly putting their heads together and working up a merger plan. Bell Canada is the prime suspect in the move, as it owns a stake in both teams.
Why a merger now when for years the league has been focused on expansion of its franchisees—most recently in Las Vegas and Seattle? It largely has to do with the coronavirus crisis, one insider told us. Teams are finding it a lot cheaper to operate without fans in the stands. Arenas can be more profitably employed as mass vaccination sites, or torn down and rebuilt as single family housing, for which people would gladly pay way over asking.
“Consolidating will strengthen us financially,” said our source, whom we agreed not to name as he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “With Covid-19, all the fans have bought 98-inch televisions, so they can see the game much better at home than they can in person. They’ll happily fork over to pay all those extra pay-per-view charges. And of course it’s cheaper to run just one management team and one group of hockey players with their coaches and groomers and other hangers on.
“Quite apart from that, think of the potential for improvement in the quality of play. The bottom half of each team would be cut loose and voila, you would have an instant Stanley Cup contender. If you added up the points that both teams have at the moment, the combined team would top the North Division by a whopping margin. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that the Habs haven’t won the Cup since 1993 and the Leafs haven’t won it since 1967. Toronto’s fans have had to sit painfully and watch the Raptors, the Blue Jays and Toronto F.C. win championships. Habs fans haven’t had anything to cheer about. Fans of both teams deserve a winner.”
But doesn’t the history of each team demand that they never merge? You can’t break up the Original Six: surely the rivalry runs too deep. Doesn’t Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater definitively demonstrate that the cultures of the two clubs are like chalk and cheese?
“I prefer to see it as fruit and nuts,” said our source.”Together you have something special. Besides, what good is a tradition when it hasn’t done anything for you lately?”
But what will the name of the combined team be? “We’re still working on that,” our source told us. “The Habileafs doesn’t really zing for me,” he admitted, “but we have a golden opportunity to correct one of the greatest grammatical errors in the history of sport. And a new name will signify that we have our eyes on the future rather than the past. Perhaps if we call the team the Confederators we can get a large federal grant for promoting national unity. And in anticipation of your question as to what the new uniform might look like, we’re working on one of those uniforms that displays a Habs or Leafs jersey depending on the angle you look at it from. Possibly solar powered.”
As to the location of the combined team, our source told us that arenas roughly equidistant from Toronto and Montreal are being vetted .”Now that we play without fans, it doesn’t have to be spacious. If the rent is cheap enough and the ice big enough, we’ll play in Cornwall, Lachute or even Wellington.” (And why not Wellington: the County is deluged with visitors from Quebec every July, when the playoffs are just starting.)
If the merger of the Habs and Leafs starts to get serious, the NHL will have to start thinking on its skates. The merger may trigger a round of mergers, as other teams look to cash in on instant improvement. The two Alberta teams may join forces—or perhaps they will try to pull off a four-way merger involving the Jets and the Canucks. And American teams can’t be too far off the puck; just consider Florida and Tampa, New York and New York, Boston and Hartford, Los Angeles and Anaheim and San Jose.
As more teams join the merger madness, all who do so will improve the quality of their play and increase their chances of taking home the Stanley Cup —as well as becoming more profitable. Seen from that perspective, putting chalk with cheese is a small price to pay.
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