NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The National Hockey League's claim to be a major U.S. sport has long had more holes in it than a defenseman's smile. On the eve of the Stanley Cup finals, it lost at least a couple more teeth.

The league agreed Wednesday to a deal with NBC, which guarantees it nothing in terms of rights fees. The league and the network will split advertising revenue -- but the first ad dollars will go to NBC to cover production expenses, plus the money the network could have gotten for selling the bulk time to other programmers.

So it's quite possible that the NHL will end up with no money from the airing of its games on the network.

The league also reached an agreement with ESPN that will include some guaranteed money, but likely about half of the estimated $120 million it was seeing under the current broadcast deal from ESPN and its corporate cousin ABC.

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The NBC deal is similar to the one the network has with the Arena Football League. That's all you really need to know if you think the sport can still claim to be a major player in the U.S. sports scene.

Moreover, there's a very good chance there won't be any games, period -- NHL management is threatening to lock out the players if they don't win major concessions in the current labor negotiations. So far, neither side is blinking at the negotiating table.

Thanks to extremely poor planning on the NHL's part, both the TV deal and the labor contract are expiring at about the same time. That put the league in a weaker position in both talks. But even if commissioner Gary Bettman and union chief Bob Goodenow were as in synch as pairs figure skaters, it's doubtful that the league could have gotten the guaranteed rights fees a "major" sport would expect.

"I don't think there was a broadcast network interested in paying any kind of rights fee, no matter the labor situation," said Mike Trager, a sports broadcasting consultant. "Hockey has always been a long trailing horse in a four-horse race in the United States. You could say that maybe the last time around they got more money than they should have been valued at, and this is a correction."

Neither Trager nor another sports broadcast consultant, Neal Pilson, would go so far as to say hockey is now a minor sport. But they don't dispute that the revenue-sharing deal is a further sign of weakness for an already troubled league.

"I think arena football (revenue-sharing model) is a trend in regards to sports that don't have competitive leverage to get guaranteed rights fee," said Pilson, who is a consultant to the AFL.

Trager has had experience with a sport trying to sell ads in the face of labor woes. He was a former executive with The Baseball Network, which was the last time a so-called major sport entered into this kind of revenue-sharing deal, in 1994 and 1995. Baseball lost the end of the '94 season, including the post-season, and the start of the '95 season to its worst strike.

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Trager and Pilson both believe hockey viewership should come back even if it loses its entire '04-'05.

"I think historically, work stoppages do have a short-term impact on television ratings," said Pilson. "We've experienced that with all of the sports, even the NFL. In the long term, the ratings eventually return to what we might characterize as normal levels."

But selling ads will be difficult if not impossible until advertisers can be convinced that fans and viewers will come back. And the NHL will pay for that advertiser reluctance because of the nature of this deal.

Pilson said that the silver lining in this reduced broadcast deal is that it might give the two sides in the labor talks a more realistic basis on which to reach an agreement.

"The players have to recognize that the NHL has defined resources and that they are what they are," said Pilson. "The uncertainty of not having a future television deal has at least been resolved."

But the union has consistently accused the league of underestimating hockey-related revenue. The new TV deals aren't likely to put either side of the negotiating table in a better mood.

That doesn't bode well for the future of what is now the nation's most popular minor sport.