During the next five seasons, Gretzky took the Kings to division and conference titles and the Stanley Cup Final. But more important, he proved hockey could thrive in the Sun Belt when average attendance at Kings games jumped more than 27% in his first season.

Three years later, the league, which hadn’t grown in a dozen years, began a spurt that added five teams in eight years, expanding to nontraditional markets in San José, Tampa, Miami, Anaheim and Nashville.

Today, no professional sports league in North America has more teams than the NHL’s 32. And while that process started under John Ziegler, it grew rapidly when Gary Bettman became commissioner in 1993, with Sun Belt teams winning eight of the last 24 Stanley Cup Finals.

Which brings us back to Messi, Garber and MLS. The league concedes it is at an inflection point and with Messi it has a generational opportunity to capture new fans and build enthusiasm. But time is short — Messi’s contract expires in 2025, six months before the World Cup returns to the U.S.

That leaves the commissioner and his league a little more than two years to win over the kinds of fans that packed Dignity Health Sports Park on Sunday, with the crowd of 27,642 breaking stadium records for attendance and gross revenue. Instead, those efforts are being undermined by unnecessary distractions that threaten to undermine the league’s potential for growth.

Less than a week before the MLS season opener, the union that represents the league’s on-field officials overwhelmingly rejected a tentative labor contract from the Professional Referees Organization (PRO), the organization that employs and manages the league’s officials. PRO, with backing from MLS, responded by locking out the referees and using backup officials, many of whom had never worked above the lower levels of U.S. soccer.

The results were predictable: With the world tuning in to watch Messi, what they saw instead were overwhelmed officials who struggled mightily on the big stage. In fact, Messi’s game-tying goal probably wouldn’t have happened had Gabriele Ciampi not given two extremely questionable yellow cards to Galaxy midfielder Mark Delgado, leading to his expulsion and opening the field up for Inter Miami.

Garber and the league need to pressure PRO to resolve the lockout immediately.

The second distraction is one Garber brought on himself by promising to pull MLS teams out of the U.S. Open Cup, the longest-running soccer competition in the country. The tournament has been plagued by low attendance and an even lower level of interest in recent years and many MLS teams had already begun using reserve team players in U.S. Open Cup games.

But saying the quiet part out loud was a huge unforced error on the commissioner’s part, making it appear as if he was turning his back on two things soccer supporters care about: tradition and history. This is a fight the league can’t win and shouldn’t even be waging.

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