An audacious proposal was made this week to buy the National Hockey League’s 30 franchises for $3.5 billion. A private-equity firm started by the man who is now Massachusetts’s governor made the offer, in conjunction with a second company.

Bain Capital Partners LLC, founded in 1982 by Mitt Romney, and a sports advisory company, Game Plan LLC, proposed the purchase to the NHL’s board of governors in a meeting Tuesday afternoon in New York, a league spokeswoman, Amy Sweeney, said yesterday. She declined to offer specifics.

The league has been inactive since the owners, in an impasse in negotiations with the players union, locked the players out during training camp. Cancellation of the 2004-05 season was announced February 16. It was the first time an American sports league canceled a season as a result of labor strife.

The $3.5 billion offer valued the league’s 30 franchises at an average of nearly $117 million, sharply below the $163.4 million average calculated by Forbes magazine in a November analysis the of NHL’s finances.

The move was unexpected, and there is no precedent for a major sports league to be run by a single owner. The closest analogy would be Major League Soccer, in which a Denver investor, Philip Anschultz, owns six of the 12 teams.

Theoretically, the hockey deal would bring both deep pockets and experienced professional sports management to a league whose teams collectively lost $224 million last year, according to the owners, and is widely considered to have over-expanded in the late 1990s. The NHL Players Association contests those figures. Forbes’s research indicated that the NHL had an operating loss of $96 million last year.

Game Plan brokered the sale of the Ottawa Senators in 2003. Its chairman, Robert Caporale, said the deal would give the league a structure similar to that of a corporation, with the teams being the operating units. Mr. Caporale told the Boston radio station WBZ that the plan was to keep in place team management and let the teams’ presidents and general managers be “completely autonomous.”

A call to Bain Capital was not returned. Bain has a $17 billion portfolio of investments in 225 different companies.

The deal itself drew jeers, not cheers, from sports bankers. The broker for the recent $80 million sale of the Anaheim franchise, the Mighty Ducks, Sal Galatioto, said: “It’s an incredibly creative deal. But there are two hurdles that are very hard to get around here that the deal does not even touch upon: Canadian anti-trust issues and the Players Association.”

Canadian business law, as Mr. Galatioto said he understood it, would seem to prevent such a concentration of ownership, especially given that the ownership of what is that country’s national pastime would be based in America.

Moreover, he said: “If the Players Association had a problem with 30 owners, what leverage are they going to have with one owner who will never have an incentive to boost payroll?”

The NHL Players Association’s senior director, Ted Saskin, told The New York Sun: “Given that I have no firsthand knowledge of what was proposed, and since the NHL has expressed no interest in pursuing the offer, I see no reason to comment on it.”

Another sports banker, Sportscorp.’s Marc Ganis, said the deal as proposed “is certainly not going to happen.”

“But,” he said, “there will be a point where owners are going to be motivated to sell.” That, Mr. Ganis said, would come as the strike dragged on.

Mr. Ganis also said the league has some daunting structural problems, which are being amplified by the lockout, including a long-running disparity between profitable teams and those that are not, a “horrendous labor-management problem,” and weak press and broadcast interest in the sport, particularly in America.

“I’m not certain that new owners could overcome these right away, no matter how deep the pockets,” he said. “It would require a longer time horizon that many Wall Street investors often have.”

Mr. Galatioto said the legal wrangling over correct valuations of their team, already a source of strife, might reach epic proportions if a sale appeared viable.

Locally, the ownership of the Rangers, the Islanders and the New Jersey Devils would seem to have little to gain from agreeing to a sale at Bain’s proposed prices. Forbes estimated a value for the Rangers at $282 million, the highest in the league, followed by the Islanders at $160 million, in 12th place, and the Devils at $124 million, in 20th place. But franchise valuation does not tell the entire tale, given that all three franchises reported losing money last year – $3.3 million for the Rangers, $9.5 million for the Isles, and $13.9 million for the Devils – despite having cable-TV deals.

Experts said, however, that they envisioned scenarios in which the deal could happen. One Wall Street analyst, who declined to comment on the record given his firm’s investment-banking relationship with Cablevision – owner of the Rangers and Madison Square Garden, their home ice – said the status of the Rangers is considered the most interesting component of a possible deal. He noted that Cablevision is in the midst of a boardroom feud between the company’s founder and majority owner, Charles Dolan, and his son James, who is CEO and runs the Rangers, over what to do with Voom, its satellite TV subsidiary. That strife, the analyst said, might cloud judgment over what to do with the Rangers, a property that has gone from mildly unprofitable to non-operating.

The lockout is certainly hurting Cablevision’s bottom line, with the company’s Madison Square Garden unit’s fourth-quarter revenues, reported last week, dropping $22 million to $298.2 million. The company attributed the loss to the loss of hockey games.

If the company’s loss of perhaps $1.4 billion on satellite TV is painful to Cablevision, the analyst said, the company will have to take seriously an offer in the hundreds of millions of dollars for its hockey team.

Another factor to consider, a source said, is that many of the owners of the hockey franchises have lucrative cable-TV deals or own the arenas their team plays home games in. Bain might be willing to structure deals to allow current owners to maintain control of the arenas, and perhaps even participate in some component of the cable rights, according to that source, who said he had some familiarity with Bain’s strategy.

Indeed, some of the real-estate holdings of hockey owners are likely to prove more valuable than the franchises themselves. An example is the Phoenix Coyotes, whose owner, Steven Ellman, built the arena into a commercial and retail development called Westgate. The arena alone should generate close to $27 million in cash flow this year, not including hockey games, according to Forbes.