The NHL season ends before it even begins.

The BBQ Pit
41

It’s a perfectly legitimate criticism against the NHL, which claims to be one of the four major pro sports, along with the NFL, NBA, and MLB. But in point of fact it is simply not at the same level as those sports in terms of popularity or revenues. They invite the criticism by inviting the comparison. Stow your traditional Canadian complex; it was the NHL that tried to make itself a Big Four American sport, in part egged on by Canadians.

Anyway, here is the thing, which neither the NHL nor the NHLPA really wants to admit:

**The NHL’s #1 problem isn’t player salaries.

The NHL’s #1 problem is that it’s not popular enough to be a major sports league.**

I have been to games in American cities where the attendance could not possibly have been six thousand people. I know most teams CLAIM attendance averages of 14,000 or more, and I’m telling you right now they’re lying. I attended a Florida Panthers game where they were giving tickets away 2 for 1. I paid $7 to see the game. And when I went inside, two our of every three seats were empty, and half the fans there were Maple Leaf fans on vacation. At best, the attendance figures are illusory rather than outright lies, from box seat estimates or corporate season tickets, and with the sport’s popularity waning, those commitments will soon dry up.

I find it utterly ridiculous to blame players when the owners have actually embraced a business model where they will move franchises from places where you can easily draw 12000-15000 fans a night, like Winnipeg, to places where you can’t draw flies with shit if it’s wearing skates, like Phoenix, or open a franchise in a place like Raleigh. I know those teams have SOME fans and it sucks if they lose their heroes, but I’m sure the people of St. John’s would love an NHL team too; doesn’t mean they should have one.

If the game was more popular on average in the cities it played in, we wouldn’t have to worry about a $49 or $42.5 million salary cap, because the revenue to team would go up. And the game would improve.

I for one am thrilled the season was cancelled, at least at this point. The NHL is in horrible shape; it’s at least four to six teams too big, the quality of play is easily the worst it’s been since World War II, and game’s central rules are no longer even being enforced, and its popularity is sinking. If the season had been saved by an 11th hour compromise, nothing would be fixed and the league would continue to get worse.

Now, at least, there is a CHANCE that the shock involved in this might cause the NHL to bring in fresh leadership with a mandate for real change, to make the hard decisions that need to be made; the elimination of weak American franchises, mandating proper safety equipment, rules changes to open up the sport, banning fighting, more scoring, fewer tie games.

Now let me really get serious. I mean every word of this:

What would be even better is the complete annihilation of the NHL. Consign it to the dustbin of history.

Let the NHL die. We don’t need it. The moment it dies, a new league will spring up in its place; let that league be formed in key, hockey-loving cities. Imagine a league of just 16 teams, in four divisions:

Northeast:
Toronto
Montreal
Ottawa
Boston

Southeast:
New Jersey
Columbus (I know, seems a weird choice, but they draw really, really well)
Philadelphia
New York Rangers

Central:
Calgary
Edmonton
Detroit
Chicago

West:
Vancouver
Colorado
St. Louis
Minnesota

You’d have TWICE the talent. Start enforcing the hooking and holding rules; ban fighting; mandate proper safety protection; automatic major penalties for all high sticking. Eliminate the red line. No-touch icing. Full overtime periods.

Now you can shorten the season. Out of 16 teams, 8 make the playoffs. Elegant, simple. Each team plays its divisional opponents 8 times, plus 4 games against extradivisional opponents, for a 72-game season - you start the playoffs sooner and wrap them up faster, playing only three rounds.

It’s all a dream, but if the NHL dies or suffers enough of a shock, maybe it’s possible, at least in part.

42

Ahhh **Melandry **beat me to it . Now broadcasts might discover college hockey, and the Frozen Five would be really nice to see on tv.

I work the UW Badgers games every friday when they’re in town, and I really love it though I didn’t grow up a hockey fan.

43

Bullshit they don’t. The NFL not only divides up the national broadcasting and endorsements, they also pool 1/3 of the gate receipts of every game played and divide them equally and 12% of every bit of merchandise sold.

Beyond that, the justification is that if the owners want the players to go along, they’re going to have to sacrifice instead of laying it all on the backs of the players. They didn’t want to do that, so the players refused their demands.

Fact is, the only team with a hard salary cap also is the only league with signficant sharing of local revenues. If the NHL wants the former, they’re going to have to suck it up and do the latter.

First, see above. Second, the NHL doesn’t even split local gate receipts. The home team gets all of it. So that’s one more bit of evidence that you are out of your mind if you’re comparing the revenue structures of the NHL and the NFL.

The player’s offers were beyond fair. The owners, as always, are greedy fucks. I can’t believe anyone defends these people. The players were the only ones during this entire episode who even made an attempt at negotiating to try and save the season.

44

[little boy] Mr RickJay, sir, can we have a team in Winnipeg in your new league please? We will love it and feed it and take it for walks. I promise![LB]

Meh - when we lost our Jets in '96, we learned that life goes on without NHL hockey. Not that there wouldn’t be a great deal of rejoicing here should the league crumble to the extent that we were considered for a franchise again. Vive le lockout.

I thought Bettman sounded particularly reasonable in the press conference today. A proposal of a soft cap linked to revenues with a profit sharing formula is a long term sustainable answer. I don’t have a problem with a wealthy team signing a player for $25 million a year if they are willing to pay another $100 million in tax to be disbursed throughout the rest of the league.

45

Clearly I’m out of my mind. I stand corrected, and apologize.

The owners are greedy? The players have been making millions, while the owners have been losing millions. How does this equate to the owners being greedy? Do you really think a cap number 62.5% of the NFL’s number is fair and reasonable? (Consider the comparative size of the rosters.)

RickJay, I love your idea. I like how the Rangers are the only team name mentioned. Fuck the Icelanders. hehheh.

46

it would certainly be an interesting exercise to watch the nhlpa decertify, and have all or most of the players launch a class action antitrust suit against the league.

(that may seem like a long shot, but will almost surely happen if the league even thinks about trying to operate next season with replacement players*.)

none of the major professional sports leagues has ever faced an antitrust case before, so i’m not sure exactly what would come of it, but i am sure that there is no better example of monopolistic business practices than pro sports. the changes resulting from this type of action, for good or bad, would likely be quite drastic.

and with bob goodenow still heading the pa, it may not take any provocation from the commissioner / bog for antitrust be the league’s main worry, far and above lack of a cba… some believe that bob has been itching for this fight a long long time.

*can’t/won’t happen. the league may try, but won’t be able to get around the labour laws. replacement workers are not allowed in most of canada {labour laws differ by province, and alberta’s two teams could legally run replacement players} though since the nhlpa is not registered as a union in bc, it’s hard to say whether the 'nucks could do it or not. still, a league without the leafs or canadiens would not be a fan favourite. another prob with the idea of replacement players is the international make-up of hockey. unless something has changed recently that i have not heard about, it is illegal to bring replacement workers from other countries in those jurisdictions where replacement workers are allowed at all. so you’d have to find enough american hockey players of an elite skill level to fill twenty four teams. not the likelyest of situations. the flames, oilers, (and possibly canucks) would have no probs in this hypothetical though.

47

I gave up on the NHL a few years ago. I used to love watching the Oilers, and not just when they were winning cups. Part of what makes someone a rabid fan is sticking with a team over the years, watching your favorite rookies grow into superstars, etc. When the team is weak, you can look forward to the ‘rebuilding’ phase.

But what’s happened in Edmonton is that the Oilers have turned into a farm club for the NHL. There’s no point in investing any emotion in a player coming up through the ranks, because as soon as he has his breakout year he’s traded for younger players with no track record and lower salaries.

Once you realize that your team will NEVER be a major contender again, there’s little point in sticking with it. That’s the fate of most of the Canadian franchises, because we just don’t have the money to compete for players with the likes of the New York Rangers and the Colorado Avalanche.

I’m all for the season being cancelled. In fact, I think the NHL should simply abandon the NHLPA and start fresh with new players. If their contractual obligations preclude that, then I hope the NHL folds and a new league forms with a salary and revenue structure that makes sense. The NHL isn’t large enough for all the teams to have 100 million dollar payrolls. But it’s not even the superstars making the 10 million that bug me (or that kill the league financially), it’s that salaries are way too high down deep in the roster. It’s simply ridiculous to pay a rookie 2 million dollars a year in a league like this.

I agree that the current state of affairs is the owner’s fault, or more specifically the league’s fault for not reigning in some of their big spending owners. But now that the situation is totally out of control, the players are being completely unrealistic about what is financially feasible. So a pox on both their houses.

48

First off, the owners haven’t been losing millions as a group. A few have, to be sure, but according to Forbes, several of these teams claiming losses have been excluding tens of millions of dollars luxury box fees and concessions from the revenue streams - another reason that the players have been rejecting the owners’ offers. This isn’t even including the numerous accounting games that get played with the books of pro sports franchises. From Forbes:

So the league hides money, and then expects the players to trust them to be fair about the numbers they use to determine the salary cap? If you were the players, would you?

So long as they don’t share revenue like they do in the NFL, yes. As long as there are several teams with revenue streams over $100M who don’t have to share any of that revenue, then the cap needs to be higher to allow for this.

49

The players have been making millions because the owners have been paying it. Noone put a gun to the owners heads and said “Pay this player 6 million to score 30 goals or else.”

The owners paid the players so that they could put a good team on the ice to increase their profit. Now they want a hard and low cap so that they can…wait for it…increase their profits. :eek:

Let’s stop flinging the word “greed” around. This is business. Arguing over who is less greedy is idiotic. As one columnist put it, “This is a battle of millionaires vs. billionaires.”

Both sides had $$ in their eyes. I just think that the owners are to blame for setting up the mess in the first place.

50

Having already called for the annihilation of the NHL (qwest, I also have a 20-team proposal, in which Winnipeg gets a team, along with Los Angeles, Hamilton, and Quebec) I’ll still jump into this salary cap thing.

The owner’s claims are transparent, utter bullshit.

They offered a $42.5 million cap, right? Here are ALL the teams who were over that number last season, if you adjust for the 24% cut:

Detroit
New York Rangers
Dallas
Philadelphia
Colorado
Toronto

That’s it. (even if you DON’T account for the rollback, it would still only be 12 out of 30 teams.) Incidentally, of those six teams, how many won the Stanley Cup last year? Or the year before?

In fact, if every team were to immediately go up to the 42.5 million cap, they would be spending more than they did in 2003-2004, adjusting for the 24% rollback. It is quite theoretically possible that, under their own proposed cap, they could actually spend more than they would under the players’ simple 24% rollback proposal.

The teams who are allegedly in big trouble are ones spending very little money. Pittsburgh is next to last in salary, Florida just after them, Atlanta, Edmonton. These teams aren’t even CLOSE to the cap; even with a cap they’d be dramatically outspent by the Rangers and the Red Wings. And frankly, the argument that you need to spend big bux to win doesn’t hold water. It sure didn’t help the Rangers and it sure didn’t hurt the Lightning. There’s a slight bias towards higher spending teams but it’s not very great. As in a lot of sports, the teams that spent the most in 2003-2004 were, to a disproportionate degree, paying for past glories; the Rangers are the poster children for that, but Detroit, Colorado and Toronto were also very old teams.

The NHL’s problem is too little revenue spread amongst too many franchises. That is the beginning and the end of it.

51

By this logic we should include the Knicks ticket sales in the Rangers revenue stream, because Cablevision owns them both and the Garden. (MSG network, anyone?)

I can’t parse this. It seems to me that the higher the deviation, the lower the cap should be. For example, if MLB were to institute a cap, I would point to the median teams and set the cap around 50 million, but you would argue that because the BoSox and Yankees spend so much, it should be closer to 100 million? What purpose does a cap serve if it is higher than most of the teams payrolls anyway?

Asking for a rough guesstimate to within 10 million or so: how much do you suspect the mean profit per franchise was last season? If the owners are hiding so much money, why did two franchises have to declare bankruptcy? And one of them had the league’s best record at the time. You seem to be saying that the owners are making money, and want to make more at the players expense. The NHL is hemorraging money. The owners want to stop losing money. Clearly, more spending on players isn’t helping to attract any new fans, so they must accept the nicheness of their sport and cinch the belts. Do you really think that all 30 teams together generate in excess of $1.5 billion dollars a year? Puh-lease. That’s what they need to break even at a $50 million cap.

But all of this talk about money has sidestepped a major selling point of a hard cap: competitive balance. There is a strong correlation between being in the top ten payrolls and making the playoffs, and an equally strong correlation between being in the bottom ten payrolls and missing the playoffs. That should be fixed.

52

Yes, soon the salary cap fairy will come and wave her wand, and teams like Chicago and Pittsburgh will magically make the playoffs. :rolleyes:

Look, the owners are still going to have to spend money to get the players to get to the playoffs. The owners of the bottom ten payroll teams aren’t willing to spend the money and are waaaaay below even their own proposed cap. Not to mention players love to go to the teams that are playoff contenders rather than going to teams “in a rebuilding mode.”

It’s gonna take a lot more than a cap to restore competitive balance to the league.

53

No. Completely wrong. The problem isn’t that only some of the revenue generated from those suites was included, the problem is that none of the revenue generated from those suites was included. Let me illustrate…you’re a hockey player, and your salary is constrained by the amount of revenue brought in by the Chicago Blackhawks. You get 50% of the revenue, the owner gets the rest (simplified, I know, but bear with me). The team says that it pulls in $100 million in revenue, so your paycheck is $50 million. But then you find out that the owner isn’t including any of the revenue from the luxury suites.

So how much is this costing you? Well, consider that the average Canadian NHL team charges a $140,000 rental fee per suite - not including concessions. The United Center is in a bigger market than any of the Canadian teams, plus they include the Bulls, so I’m quite sure they charge much higher (how much higher? Can’t say since Wirtz refuses to disclose ANY of the revenue pulled in from luxury suites). But let’s say they charge a $200,000 rental fee. That’s an additional $43.5 million dollars in revenue being brought in. Even if you have to split it between the Bulls and the Blackhawks - that’s not an insignificant amount when your salary depends on them reporting this.

The games get even more interesting when you include teams like the Rangers that are owned by a company that not only owns the arena, but also the network on which the games are broadcast. Teams in this situation routinely undersell the broadcast rights to themselves.

The reason the NFL’s cap works so well is because the NFL realized that they were going to have to be completely open with the NFLPA about their revenues. Most of the revenues come from the national broadcast rights, anyway, so it’s not that hard. The problem is that the NHL owners don’t want to work with the NHLPA in the same manner.

First, get it out of your head that caps are for the purpose of competitive balance. They’re not, they’re a cost control measure to make sure that the richest teams don’t drive salaries up too much.

Second your $50M to $100M bump is ridiculous. The NHLPA didn’t propose a cap double what the owners wanted.

Third, look at RickJay’s post for the reasoning. The salary cap doesn’t help the poorest teams, since they’re nowhere near the salary cap anyway. So it’s not helping anyone except the richest teams get richer.

In reality, or on the books? If I had to guess, I’d say $3-5 million, easy. That’s in reality, not counting the bookkeeping games these teams play.

Because a few teams really are in trouble. But the vast majority simply aren’t.

And yes, the owners simply want to make more at the players expense. Why on earth would you doubt this is the case?

Considering that the NHL claims it’s own revenues are about $2.2 billion a year collectively, yes. And remember, that’s not including any of the luxury suite revenue, and likely doesn’t account for undersold local broadcasts.

How does a salary cap fix that? Teams at the low end of the spectrum don’t receive any new revenue streams, so they aren’t going to increase their payroll. The teams at the high end of the revenue streams are going to be maxing the cap every year.

Besides, look at the NBA. It has a salary cap, albeit a soft cap, how competitive is it? Baseball has no cap and it’s a lot more competitive than the NBA, and it only has half the playoff spots as the NBA.

Hell, compare MLB with the NFL. The NFL instituted a salary cap in 1994. There have been 10 World Series played in that time, so let’s compare the number of teams that have won those last 10 World Series, with the number of teams that have won the last 10 Super Bowls.

Different World Series champs - 6
Different Super Bowl champs - 7

And that’s even factoring in the one game playoff in the NFL which makes upsets more likely, AND the NFL’s bigger pool of playoff teams, AND the NFL’s tiered scheduling that rigs the season so crappy teams have a better shot of making the playoffs.

Salary caps have nothing to do with competitive balance, and everything to do with giving the owners a larger profit.

54

Are you seriously contending that the owners, any of them, are not entitled to more of a return on their investment than what they pay one average player? What do you think the league is, a charity? Communist? The owners have a right to make money far above and beyond what the players are making, since they’re the ones taking all the risks. If you argue with that statement we don’t really have anything else to talk about.

55

The owners are not entitled to a profit any more than the player is entitled to a salary. One of the “risks” they are taking is that of losing money. Sheesh.

56

And that’s what this is all about. The players are “losing” money in as much as they “can’t feed their kids” on a million dollars, while the owners are taking a bath. The owners are now taking steps to minimize their risk of losing money, and good on them.

57

I believe that his point was that, from an investor’s POV, if your investment is structured so that you know, going in, that you’ll lose money on it, then it’s stupid to invest. While the players are entitled to a fair wage for their performance, the owners are the ones that have to front the money for the whole thing to happen…if there’s no profit at the end of the day, why would anyone want to be involved in it?

58

I saw all this coming twenty years ago, when Wirtz took the Blackhawks off broadcast TV yet cable was only getting started in the Chicago area. He still won’t allow most home games broadcast. Nice way to build a fan base, Bill!

On the other hand, the Wolves of the AHL are doing fine, generally selling more tickets than the Blackhawks, even on nights when the Hawks are playing at home! They have a good product, fairly priced and family friendly.

59

I’ve been pro-owner since the thing began, but from the way they’ve acted in the last few days, it seems like some of the owners weren’t interested in getting a deal done in the first place, but instead just busting the union. The PA still has a huge share of the blame too though.

Also, I think a deal would’ve been likely if one side proposed a solid 45 cap.

Now Goodenow is talking about a “fresh start”… They HAD a fresh start, TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO!!! Now he’s saying all that work is for nothing? Let’s see how much support he still has next year, when the replacement players come in to the NHL and the NHLPA are over in Europe playing hockey against players in the European league, who were left behind by all the half decent players that are now in the NHL. You’ll see former NHL players getting over 100 goals in those watered down leagues, but will it really be satisfying?

60

Really, they do? I’m looking in the Constitution and I don’t see any mention of a right to make money. Could you maybe point out the section?

The players have just as much of a right to hold out for a salary equal to what the owners make as the owners have a right to try and make more. That’s just the way it is. I have no problem with the owners trying to break the union and make more money, frankly, I don’t care either way. What I object to is that this whole thing is somehow the players faults, that they should just proactively give up their salaries whenever the league wants them to.

Give me a break. This whole work stoppage is the fault of the owners. They were completely unwilling to negotiate anything other than a hard cap at a certain level with the players receiving nothing in a return. The players made offer after offer after offer after offer, with the league shooting them down each time.

As for the owners taking risk, I’m going to laugh in your face right now. Owning a professional team is not a risk. The point of a team is not to generate lots of cash profits - it’s like real estate investment. The point for most owners is to resell a few years later for a nice profit. The teams that are cash cows - Detroit, NY, Philly, are the ones that have long term ownership. Consider the Edmonton Oilers. Right now, Forbest values that franchise at $104M. The current ownership group bought them for $70M in 1998. That’s a 48% return on investment.

Even the Penguins are worth more now than they were when Lemieux bought them in 1999. And they’d be worth even more if they didn’t play in the worst arena in the NHL.