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Tuesday, February 11, 2003

It's easy to feel sorry for the great hockey fans of this city after they were betrayed beyond belief yesterday by the Alexei Kovalev trade. The ones who pay the exorbitant ticket prices to watch the Penguins at Mellon Arena and get what even team officials all but admit is a second-rate experience in a decrepit building. And the ones who watch the games on television or listen on radio. Their numbers might have dwindled drastically this season and last, but those who remain are a passionate bunch. Of course you feel for them. They're left with a team that not even the players' mothers could love.

But don't you feel just a little sympathy for Craig Patrick, too? Yes, Craig Patrick. The man might be deceitful, a liar, even. But he's not an idiot. He knows the type of player Kovalev is. He also knows he has to get more for him than the four no-names he got from the New York Rangers. But, just like the Jaromir Jagr trade, Patrick had no choice. He had to go for the money and savings instead of equal talent. The guess here is the Penguins need the nearly $4 million he received from the Rangers, not to mention the savings from dumping the big contracts of Kovalev, Janne Laukkanen and Mike Wilson into the deal, to meet payroll for not next year or next month, but next week. Why else make the trade now, a full month ahead of the NHL trade deadline?

Forget Patrick's unconscionable nonsense about the trade making the Penguins better for the stretch run. It must have about killed him to make it. It must all but kill him that not just his team, but the entire NHL, is in such a rotten state. This deal is further proof. It should go right next to the bankruptcies of the Ottawa Senators and Buffalo Sabres. There's something terribly wrong when the Penguins, with their $30 million payroll, have to trade Kovalev to the New York Rangers, a disgraceful, underachieving team with a league-high $70 million payroll and a willingness to take on more.

And how about the other Penguins? Especially the good players such as Marty Straka and Johan Hedberg? Don't you feel sorry for them? Yes, they're going to get paid. There's something to be said for that. But with so little return for Kovalev, they're doomed to play the rest of this season and all of next in front of a small crowds for a team that -- despite Patrick's absurd spin -- has no chance of making the playoffs. If they're smart, they'll knock on Patrick's door today and ask to be next to go. Actually, they might not have to ask. He might have to trade them, too.

And what about all of the Penguins' other employees? Not just Rick Kehoe and his coaching staff, but the many off-ice employees? Their long-term job security seems a lot more tenuous today than it did yesterday. To survive here, the franchise is going to need a salary cap and revenue sharing in the NHL's next collective bargaining agreement before the 2004-05 season. That's far from a given, at least not without a long work stoppage. It's also going to need a new arena. That would have been a difficult sell with the team winning and drawing sellout crowds. It will be almost impossible with what's ahead on the Mellon Arena ice and in the stands.

Yesterday might not have been the day hockey died in Pittsburgh, but it surely seems that day is coming soon.

That brings us to Mario Lemieux, who probably deserves the most sympathy in this sad, sad tale. He'll always be remembered as the greatest athlete this city has known. But now he also seems destined to be remembered as the owner who couldn't save hockey in Pittsburgh one final time.

That just doesn't seem right.

It's ridiculous to give Lemieux god-like status, as so many in town have done, because he saved the Penguins as a player in the mid-1980s and then again as the owner in 1999. His motives weren't entirely altruistic. Taking over the team out of bankruptcy was his only chance of recouping any of the $30 million he was owed by previous owners Howard Baldwin and Roger Marino.

Still, Lemieux doesn't deserve to see his franchise die a slow, painful death. Forget the grief that this will cause him as the owner and a full-time resident of this city. Look at it from the perspective of the game's best player, which he clearly still is. Do you think he's going to enjoy finishing his career on a team that has no shot of winning? Even if everything breaks right, he'll be 39 by the time the NHL has that new basic agreement and he has that promise of a new building. By then, it will be too late for him.

That's why Lemieux had to have plenty of regrets when he signed off on the Kovalev trade.

It's not hard to guess his biggest.

He must have wished he could have gone to New York, too.