Sports is dead

During my time as an immodest, big-time sportswriter, I covered the Montreal Canadiens 1993 Stanley Cup victory.

I arranged tickets for two brothers in law, both Habs fans, to see the Cup clinching game.

“I hope you two bastards enjoy this,” I said, climbing back into the car after my night’s work. “Because this is the last time in your lifetime this is going happen.”

Same goes for the Toronto Raptors and the same goes for professional sports as a whole.

Pro sports is writhing in plain sight and the reason isn’t so much the fragmentation of the sports fan into smaller consumer smaller tribes because of e-sports, Fortnight, Netflix and online porn as well as gargantuan ticket prices.

It’s because the central conceit of sports - that everybody is trying to win - is being shredded.

Winning, it turns out, isn’t worth it. 

The Raptors giddy story has given way to a bleaker reality. The players decide who wins not by what they do on the court but by the levers Kawhi Leonard and Paul George pull to create superteams.

Even the mighty NBA has plateaued, attendance - 21 million, is basically the same as it was a decade ago.

Not so much for baseball, freefalling to its lowest attendance rating in 15 years and down 6.6 from last year alone.

Consider this from a piece in Sports Illustrated.

“Nobody wants to go to Blue Jays games. On Monday night against Minnesota, Toronto drew a mere 12,292 fans into Rogers Centre, despite the appeal of Marcus Stroman on the mound and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at the plate. That’s in line with the season as a whole up north: The Jays rank just 19th in average attendance at 20,451 per game—and that represents a massive drop of close to 9,000 fans each contest compared to 2018.”

The Jays are 28 games behind first place New York and Stroman, easily the Jays best starter, was dealt to the Mets for a couple of prospects.

More than two thirds of MLB baseball teams have virtually no chance of winning a title. That means a whole lot of fans better like hot dogs.

That number looks spectacular to NBA fans, who face a massive redistribution of power that means perhaps five clubs, the Los Angeles Clippers among them, have any chance whatever of winning a title.

Even if a non-destination city wins a title, salary cap considerations mean a teardown before the last piece of confetti hits the street. 

I worked for the Maple Leafs and Raptors for seven years and it used to drive CEO Richard Peddie mad when fans told him the team wasn’t interested in winning. The Leafs, Raptors and TFC wanted to win…they just weren’t very that proficient at it.

Never mind the financial folly, winning can have disastrous consequences. Only one team has won two consecutive Stanley Cups since the owners were willing to sacrifice a season to gain a salary cap that prompted teams to disassemble their roster as soon as it showed itself championship capable. Winning is great. Having won sucks.

The disembowelling of the Raptors only reinforces the truth: the games, as surely as if run by drug cartels, are fixed, not through illegality but through the too much power in too few hands.

The real money in professional sports is through franchise appreciation. Increasingly winning has less and less to do with that value gain. By eliminating contracts, which generally go to good players, the owners increase enterprise value. Winning has nothing to do with it.

No surprise then that in Canada, hockey participation continues to dive and a recent Angus Reid poll showed only 18 per cent of Canadians planned on following the Stanley Cup playoffs assiduously. 

What does it say for the industry when the teams that want to win can’t and the teams that can’t don’t care? And how can anyone expect the fans not to follow suit?

It makes you wonder: why do they even bother keeping score?