So long, Montreal. Thanks for showing up, Ottawa. Wait till next year, Calgary. Good luck in the draft, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton.

Since the Montreal Canadiens hoisted Lord Stanley’s Cup in 1993, no Canadian National Hockey League team has won the Stanley Cup – and Canada is the country that hails the sport as its national pastime.

Now, the casual fan may think this is a simple drought, such as the kind that many franchises go through, but a more precise reason is that the NHL has a worthless commissioner – a commissioner who has an agenda of globalizing the sport rather than sticking with what made hockey a major sport to begin with. Hockey is a blue-collar sport, not a white-collar business meeting.

Gary Bettman took over the NHL in 1993. Two years before he was named the league commissioner there were only 22 teams in the league. The talent pool was such that any team could make the playoffs in any given season. But when he began marketing the great players in the league (Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, etc.), Bettman saw fit to expand the league and capitalize on the success that Gretzky brought to a non-traditional hockey area like California.

The result was an expansion that led the league to balloon to 30 teams and Bettman’s single-handed attempt to assassinate the NHL in Canada, leading to the slow death of hockey in America.

In 1992 the league was booming with nine Canadian teams and 15 in the United States. Today? There are now 24 franchises in the U.S. and six in Canada.

How can Bettman believe that moving teams from Canada into the U.S. will help save the sport? Or that adding new franchises in hockey “hotbeds” such as Nashville, Columbus, Miami and Tampa Bay is a good idea?

And how can the owners continually support the commissioner when at one point during the last playoffs, their sport lost a ratings battle with The Food Network’s “Build a Better Burger?”

When Bettman took over the league in 1993, he could have turned the emerging league into a top-two sport in the country. With the NBA losing Michael Jordan to retirement and the MLB headed for a strike, Bettman did something no rational person would: alienate an entire fan base by sending his league into its own lockout and over-expanding and diluting a league full of world class athletes.

Getting back to the point, the NHL needs Canada to save itself.

As of December 2007, there were 733 players in the league. Out of that number, 377 of those players were Canadians.

The league gets most of its talent from up North, where the sport seems to mean more to most people than the NBA, MLB and the NFL combined.

A market cornered by the NHL, almost untouched by the other three sports and a way to gain revenue that would be more than enough, seeing as the Canadian dollar was worth more than its American counterpart, the solution is simple: contraction and the relocation of teams to Canada.

The league doesn’t need this many teams. It may work for the other major sports, but it doesn’t work for the NHL. The sport was able to survive for so long because of the great rivalries it accumulated over the years.

The NHL may be on the rise again, but this is clearly in spite of Bettman. And until he is taken out of power, it seems that without Canadian success, hockey will be an afterthought in mainstream America.