What if a hockey league died and no one noticed?

League may drop the puck in Jan.

Let’s put the same equipment on (today’s goalies) as Glenn Hall and Terry Sawchuk and Tony Esposito and Gerry Cheevers and Johnny Bower had and let’s see if they can stop the puck.

• Bobby Hull

With the NHL lockout dragging on and closing in on it’s third calendar month, America has reacted with a collective yawn…and rightfully so. Canada, however, has not been nearly so sanguine. The NHL lockout is no small story in the Great White North. In this country, we can amuse ourselves with the NBA, NFL, college football, college basketball…you get the idea. The American sporting landscape is littered with options, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Canada lives for one thing and one thing only during the winter- hockey. OK, they’ve got curling and box lacrosse, but hockey is how Canadians define themselves, and the absence of the NHL has been a heavy blow north of the 49th Parallel.

Desperate times make for desperate measures- so desperate, in fact, that one hardy soul is even planning on bringing the defunct World Hockey Association back from the dead. The fact that the WHA went tits-up 1979 seems not to discourage this brave Canadian entrepreneur.

Ricky Smith, a 47-year-old British Columbia native, purchased the rights to the defunct league in October and told The Hockey News he hopes to make an announcement by the end of November detailing his master plan.

“The amount of seriousness we’ve put into this is at an extremely high level…and time and money,” Smith said. “And it’s not just because the NHL is where it is today. The intention of this league was to work parallel with the NHL. We’re going through with our plans.”….

Smith says the league has been in contact with player agents about securing their clients’ services and will try to attract some of the 200 unsigned NHLers. In addition, he says they’ll attempt to entice some of the players who have gone to Europe to return to North America and will take another run at convincing phenom Sidney Crosby to join the fold.

“We’d be crazy not to (pursue Crosby),” he says. “His agent and his family would see we’re extremely serious. It would be a very similar situation to when Wayne Gretzky was signed by the Indianapolis Racers (in 1979).”

Smith, whose family is involved in the timber industry, is confident he’ll succeed where others have failed because his group – which he says includes New York investment bankers – has the necessary capital. He says the league, which he envisions being similar in stature to the 1972-79 WHA, has begun negotiations on arena deals and will pay for the leases up front. The league will then sublease the space to individual team owners.

Potential locales for franchises are New Jersey, Quebec and Toronto/Hamilton, Smith says.

Given that the NHL and it’s players appear to be engaging in collective financial suicide, why not the WHA? How long before some enterprising owner tries to talk Gordie Howe out of retirement? Sure, he’s got to be in his 70s by now, but I’ll bet he could still knock half the NHL on their asses.

It appears doubtful that the NHL will play hockey this year. Given that there has not been so much as a social call between owners and players since September 9th, can any reasonable person think that there is any hope for a resolution of the lockout? Forty-seven days and no meeting. So much for a sense of urgency….