That is when Snider, a man who likes arguing in the same way most people like breathing, begins to pump up both the volume and the velocity.

"You can't measure our success whether or not we're on ESPN," Snider said. "Screw ESPN. Most of our television is local and we do very well in our local markets.

"We could have gone to ESPN. They offered us bupkus. Then they acted like they had us over a barrel, that we had no place else to go. I never liked the way they treated us . . .

"Gary Bettman has done an absolutely fantastic job," Snider said. "There is no equivocation on that at all."

And, we're off. Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of Bettman's taking the job as NHL commissioner; there will be Cristal and cake in the VIP, with highlights of the grand celebration to be televised by Versus. Or not.

To really begin this discussion, you need to take out the back of the envelope and commence ciphering. It is the only way to explain this.

Under Bettman's watch, the hardcore hockey lovers have seen a half season lost to a lockout and then a full season lost to a lockout. They have seen expansion water down the product and put hockey into places that haven't exactly embraced it. In cities like Nashville and Atlanta, there has been a quick peck on the cheek and then, a few minutes later, an awkward, "Oh, you're still here?"

But then the hardcore have come back to fill arenas to 92 percent of capacity, setting attendance records 3 years running. So how angry are they?

Even as the NHL's television ratings grow this season on Versus - you still need a microscope to see them, but at least the magnification doesn't need to be quite so intense - lots of people still complain that the games aren't on ESPN anymore. Franchise cities remain isolated outposts on the Nielsen ratings map, with nobody watching in the flyover zones.

You say that this is Bettman's legacy.

I say, look at the back of the envelope.

Based on published numbers, you take the revenues that the four big sports generated in 1993, when Bettman started, and compare them with estimates of what they will generate this season. Then you figure out the annual growth rate during those 15 years.

This is what you get:

NBA: 8 percent

MLB: 9 percent.

NFL: 9 percent.

NHL: 11 percent.

The NFL still brings in three times the money and commands 10 or 20 times the public fascination. Baseball and the NBA are still much bigger, too. The NHL started in fourth place among those sports when Bettman took over, and the NHL is in fourth place today.

But if you measure by revenues - and, believe you me, the people who own hockey teams measure by revenues, especially now that player salaries are capped - this commissioner, this man who spawned the firebettman.com Web site (dedicated to "improving the NHL and hockey by helping to fire NHL commissioner Gary Bettman"), has done fine by his employers. They have seen their investments grow nicely, all in all. Bettman says that revenues this year will top $2.5 billion.

"And what's wrong with that?" Snider said, laughing now. "I can tell you that the people he works for think he has done a great job."

It is such an odd league sometimes, such a patchwork of different interests, much less homogenous than the other leagues. You have different languages, different countries, different hockey traditions within the same country. New markets, mature markets, Original Six markets, Canadian markets - there has always been the whiff of Austria-Hungary in Bettman's empire.

But he has made them money, and he has given them a salary cap that seems to work, and the fans have come back to the arenas and to the local television broadcasts.

"I think Gary is the best hire we ever made," Snider said. "The guy is a dynamo. He has saved so many franchises. He found great new ownership in Ottawa when they were in trouble. He found a great owner for Buffalo. In my mind, he saved the league with the lockout."

The lockout was disastrous for fans, but at least you can say it achieved a purpose, unlike when baseball canceled the World Series, which served only to expose the ineptitude of baseball commissioner Bud Selig.

Bettman, by contrast, played a mean game and won. He got his salary cap, his cost certainty for the owners. He used the crisis to rewrite the on-ice rules, too, opening up the game at least somewhat after years of the strangling defensive systems that had come to dominate the sport.

"It's so much of a better game to watch than it was 15 years ago, and that's Gary," Snider said. "We were where we were, and Gary led the charge to fix it."

He also got parity, it appears. Fifteen teams are in the Eastern Conference and, as of yesterday morning, they were separated, top to bottom, by 23 points total. It is insanely tight, which most people believe is good.

Today is better than 15 years ago in the NHL, financially and aesthetically. But the road from there to here has been so hard, littered as it is by the two lockouts and the four franchises wrenched away from fans in Hartford, Winnipeg, Quebec City and Minnesota (the latter since restored).

It is Bettman's road, like it or not.

"Fifteen years, lots of ups and downs," Ed Snider said. "But we are better today. I don't have any question about that." *

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