Contributing factors: franchise debt, player salaries, commissioner Gary Bettman's ineffectualness, NHL Players' Association director Bob Goodenow's arrogance, over-expansion, the Canadian dollar, and low television ratings.
What really matters: a conversation I had with my son.
That's right. I could attempt to analyze the complexities of the lockout that have sidelined the NHL this winter, and could keep them off the ice until next winter. I could dissect Bettman's spin and Goodenow's negotiating style, but what really matters is what is happening to the NHL's most important demographic.
They have moved on.
They're Christmas shopping, attending college hockey games, watching high school hockey games, groaning over Troy Hudson's shot selection, cursing the BCS.
How do I know? Because the NHL's target audience lives in my house.
We had this conversation earlier this winter:
Son: "Will you take me to a (Minnesota) Wild game?"
Dad: "They're not playing. The league locked out the players."
Son: "That's stupid."
He hasn't asked about the Wild since.
The NHL's target audience is not the hockey diehards who fill their rinks. Those people flood their back yards to skate, drive their kids to 1 a.m. practices, sharpen their blades as often as they brush their teeth.
Those people are a given.
Football fans are looking for a good time, or something to complain about other than their lives. Baseball fans are searching for the meaning of life. Basketball fans are looking for a good show.
Hockey fans care deeply about their game, its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. They are passionate and insular and, compared to the fans of the other major sports, statistically negligible.
What the NHL needs to thrive is not the interest of these fans, but the interest of the casual fan, the dad or kid who will attend a handful of games if the teams are actually playing, the homebodies who will watch on TV if the local team is winning.
The combination of a passionate fan base, the return of the NHL to a great hockey town like St. Paul, Minn., a great building like Xcel, genius marketing and a hard-nosed, competitive team resulted in sellouts.
Those sellouts were not an indication that the NHL is ingrained in mainstream American life — and that's coming from someone who would rather take his kids to a Wild game than a Vikings or Timberwolves game, because of the family atmosphere and compelling nature of live hockey.
Hockey is the fourth-most popular major American sport in much the way that Eric Moss is the second-best football player in his family.
ESPN.com lists sports on the left side of its site, usually in order of current interest. Thursday night, they were in this order: NFL, college football, NBA, men's college basketball, women's college basketball, MLB, golf, tennis, motorsports — then the NHL, ahead of Olympic sports and U.S. soccer.
When baseball killed the 1994 World Series, knee-jerkers predicted the downfall of the game. It didn't happen. That's because when baseball disappears, it leaves a void in people's lives. Perhaps 1 percent of the people who threatened to abandon the game followed through.
If the absence of baseball leaves a chasm in American culture, the absence of hockey leaves a divot.
In Minnesota, hockey fans can choose to spend more time watching the top-ranked Gophers — who may be more entertaining than the Wild, anyway — or their local high school team.
In Atlanta or Miami or Los Angeles, fans may miss the air-conditioned rink, but there is not a large segment of the population mourning the loss of hockey.
This is why, in this edition of the eternal debate between players and owners, the players are proving delusional.
Unlike in the three major sports, there are no magical broadcast deals to ensure solvency.
Hockey needs a financial system that makes sense, and many of the players who are arguing that they shouldn't have to play for peanuts are currently in Latvia, playing for peanuts.
Goodenow's offer of a 24 percent rollback of salaries was a shrewd public relations gambit, but it doesn't fix the league's problem.
Which is: The NHL doesn't earn enough money to treat its players like major-sport stars. The players should tie their salaries to league revenues, then do everything within their power to help the league succeed.
Like the wolf that chews off its leg to escape a trap, the NHL might have to kill a season or two to survive.
The good news for the NHL is when it resumes play, its core fans will be there.
The bad news: They'll have lots of elbow room.
