Gary Bettman’s meddling comes to fruition in this Stanley Cup

This is Gary Bettman’s world and the rest of us are just living in it. The commissioner is master of his domain, the Stanley Cup final his vision come to life. The NHL has conquered Las Vegas, just as Bettman said it would. There may never have been a better first-year expansion operation and experience in pro sports history.

And now, Vegas is four victories away from its ultimate conquest of the NHL, the Golden Knights’ march to the final already proof enough that anyone apparently can win in this league that is conducted within Bettman’s overarching lowest-common denominator petri dish. Even, after all these years of ignominious premature ejection from the playoffs, Alex Ovechkin’s Caps.

But before we get to the hockey, which nobody, by the way, is forecasting to be memorable, successive finals in Nashville and on the Vegas strip have legitimized Bettman’s blueprint for expanding into nontraditional markets. The NHL is a phenomenon on the strip just as it is a phenomenon outside Tootsie’s. One day, maybe Beijing.

The expansion draft was rigged, all right, and if not necessarily to guarantee that the Golden Knights would thrive in their inaugural season, then to inflict pain and punish the original 30 stakeholders who had the audacity to use existing rules to construct and maintain their teams. The league never much cared for no-move clauses. Lo and behold, clubs with a large number of players with no-move clauses were immediately penalized by protection rules.

There is no intrinsic “good” or “bad” for hockey attached to Vegas advancing to the final and perhaps winning the championship in its first year. It’s as much a curiosity as it is reaffirmation that average teams can be elevated to significant heights by spectacular goaltending. These Golden Knights or the 1999 Sabres finalists with Dominik Hasek in nets? This team or the 1993 Cup champion Canadiens with Patrick Roy winning 10 straight in overtime?

Let’s not forget the impact that the NHL’s bracket system had in yielding this final matchup. The second-round series between Nashville and Winnipeg, the teams with the two best records in the West and in the overall league standings, went seven games while yielding a tired Jets survivor. The Golden Knights, which had finished third in the West, were fresh after taking out sixth-seed San Jose in six games.

Under an equitable format, the Predators would have met the Sharks while the Golden Knights and Jets would have hooked up a round early, and without Winnipeg already weakened by having faced Nashville. Brackets have consequences, the most direct of which as dreamed and schemed by Bettman is to clear the path for lesser teams.

This is not an attempt to minimize what the Golden Knights have achieved. General manager George McPhee and his staff identified the undervalued assets available to him and grabbed them in a magnificent job of scouting and roster construction. Gerard Gallant and his assistants then pulled off one of the greatest coaching jobs in pro sports history.

The Golden Knights are as relentless as the narrative about Ovechkin not being able to rise to the moment in the biggest of moments throughout a career in which his teams had never advanced past the second round of the playoffs.

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You know what, though? Just because Ovechkin has reversed the narrative this spring does not mean it was fraudulent. In losing three, seven-game series within four years to the Rangers from 2012 through 2015 after blowing leads of 3-2 and 3-1, Ovechkin never did take control of a series or a decisive game the way he has done this season. Just because Alex Rodriguez had a massive 2009 playoffs and World Series doesn’t mean he did not fail to rise to the moment when needed in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Fact is, The Post has been told, that when the Caps lost Game 7 of the second round last year to the Penguins, a friend and one-time teammate met up with Ovechkin after the game and scolded him for getting “fat.” Ovechkin showed up fit this time around and the supporting cast has elevated its game; specifically Drive-By Tom Wilson, who is anything but just along for the ride.

Fourteen of the NHL’s Greatest 100 retired without winning a Stanley Cup, the ringless including Brad Park, Jean Ratelle, Eric Lindros, Marcel Dionne, Darryl Sittler, Borje Salming, Pat LaFontaine, Pavel Bure and Mike Gartner. Ovechkin is the 15th Cup-less player on that list.

But not for long.

Caps in six.