[ul]
[li]Ten-year term with an opt-out at eight years. [/li][li]Year 2 salary cap at $64.3 million, with the floor at $44 million. [/li][li]Seven-year term limit for NHL player contracts (eight years if player is re-signing with his own team). [/li][li]Salary variance: No more than 35 percent year-over-year and no year less than 50 percent of the highest year.[/li][li]Draft lottery system changes in order to allow all 14 teams that missed the playoffs a crack at the No. 1 overall pick. [/li][/ul]
So, there’ll be labor peace for a decade. That’s big considering how things have gone for hockey lately. Last year’s cap was at $64.3M, this years will be a prorated $70.2M and next years will be at $64.3M again. After that the sap will be based of a 50-50 split of revenues, down from a 57-43 split favoring the players. Surely there’s a lot of nuance to that calculation though.
The agents won’t be able to screw around with contracts as much any more, lengths are capped at 7/8 years and the annual salaries can’t fluctuate more than 35% per year with a max variation of 50% to avoid creative cap manipulation. And last by not least, we have a new NBA-style draft lottery.
Yay! Now that the Colts are out I really don’t care about football anymore, and I hate basketball, so it’ll be nice to have hockey on TV again. Go Blackhawks!
Glad that the US didn’t ruin Canada’s game this year. Hopefully a few teams will move back to Canada in the next 8 years, increasing their influence in the negotiations.
I have very mixed feelings about this. On one hand I am happy to see that things have been worked out, on the other hand the greed of billionaires fighting millionaires makes me :dubious:
What really sucks besides the little guys (arena and nearby restaurant/bar workers) that got hammered financially, is the impact this will have on the sport long term. It took years for them to recover from the last lockout, and they were building up some respectability again and attracting a lot of new fans. And now they’ve taken a gigantic step backwards with the public.
Bettman and the owners were lured by the possibility of a huge TV contract to move teams to US markets that didn’t have any hockey fans. When that contract didn’t materialize, they should have made it a priority to move teams back to Canada where their attendance and local TV numbers would have been much better.
I’m drawing a lot from this paper about how many teams Canada could support:
Now, establishing the causal link between this and the work stoppages is a little beyond my knowledge. My general feeling is that the NHL leadership needed a harsh slap in the face that their sport was not going to make NFL or even NBA-type money. From this it would follow that a sport with lower financial stakes would be less likely to miss an entire season. Also, having more teams in positive financial situations would lessen the need for revenue sharing.
I saw something in the last few days, I don’t remember where, throwing around the dreaded ‘E’ word.
I will probably be done with hockey if the league expands again. For the sake of the game I think the league needs to contract a handful of teams and let others move to better markets. That won’t happen and I fear a greater dilution of the game is 5-7 years down the road.
That same link shows 13 teams (all in the states) with negative operating income (I’m not sure if this is before or after revenue sharing). I’m pretty sure that it’d be better for the teams, and the league as a whole, if some of the worst (financially) performing teams were moved up to Canada.
Old, small, shitty arena. Moving to new one in two years after lease expires.
That would be before revenue sharing, which is why we need revenue sharing!
I seriously doubt there will be expansion, but I seriously believe that a few teams will be moved north to the likes of Quebec City and another team in the Greater Toronto Area. Both markets would be very, very viable.
The game isn’t diluted now, though. The quality of play is visibly better than it used to be; watching a classic game from, say, 1978, it’s obvious the players would not have been up to snuff today. It’s not hard to guess why - the expansion of the search of talent into places aside from Canada, far more talent coming out of the USA, better training, better nutrition.
But what’s the point of revenue sharing? What are you trying to accomplish?
If your revenue sharing is for the purpose of reducing each fracnhise’s exposure to short term risk, especially as associated with the usual flucuations in a team’s fortunes, well, that makes sense.
But what appears to be happening is that some teams are permanent money losers. There is no reason to believe the Florida Panthers are ever going to do anything BUT absorb revenue sharing money, which raises the question as to why you are using a revenue sharing arrangement to support a team in Sunrise, FL at all. It makes sense to use revenue sharing to help bad times in Chicago or Edmonton, but it makes no sense at all to use it to maintain a money pit in Fort Lauderdale. What would make more sense is to INCREASE REVENUE by moving the team to Toronto or Quebec City, or Hamilton. Or London. Or Markham. Or Mississauga.
The entire reason for taking a flyer on Florida was to get a huge US TV contract, on the assumption that you had to cover US markets to get that. Frankly, though, it’s hard to believe southern Florida is the breaking point, or Phoenix, or a small market like Raleigh-Durham. You already don’t have Atlanta or Houston. Why is Raleigh important?
That was funny, though. I was thinking New York’s numbers just had more precision, but then going down the list, there were more and more numbers, and then some were negative…