NHL

Stanley Cup matchup can't get any better

It's as good as what NBA is offering, superior to regular-season baseball

Christian Petersen / Getty Images

Nicklas Lidstrom, 38, of the Red Wings is a grizzled but still sublimely talented defenseman who face the young Penguins in the Stanley Cup finals, writes Jim Litke of the Associated Press.

The Red Wings are hardly offensively challenged. Even after they lost their top playoff scorer, Johan Franzen, because of concussion-like symptoms after sweeping Colorado, they’ve hardly missed a beat. Detroit is more risk-averse, it doesn’t like to trade scoring chances as eagerly as Pittsburgh, but fireworks won’t be a problem.

In short, these are two teams top heavy in skilled players meeting at a moment when the game is set up to showcase those abilities in a way it hasn’t been for two decades or so.

Most of the “fix-it” syndromes being thrown around the last few years dropped the blame for the sorry state of affairs squarely in commissioner Gary Bettman’s lap. He came over to the NHL after a stint as NBA boss David Stern’s right-hand man and he’s never shaken the reputation he picked up when, shortly after his appointment, Pat Williams, general manager of the NBA’s Orlando Magic at the time, joked, “I gave Gary Bettman a puck once, and he spent the rest of the day trying to open it up.”

Bettman deserves some of the scorn, especially for the lockout and an ambitious plan to put the game on an equal footing with the other major North American sports by expanding in haphazard fashion. Hockey may never be successfully grafted onto locales where ice occurs naturally only in drink glasses.

But this Stanley Cup is about as good a product as can be at the moment. It’s every bit as good as what the NBA is offering, way better than regular-season baseball, and worth returning to if you get distracted by something on the fairway or racetrack.

What Bettman should be worrying about, as my friend pointed out not too long ago, is what to do next if all that turns out not be good enough.

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