I think this is the place to point out that the last two times the Red Sox have won the World Series, the Stanley Cup has not been awarded the following year.
And people thought the Curse of the Bambino was dead. Hah!
I’m more than a little annoyed about having to spend the first 15 minutes of every Sportsnet News looking at the future of the NHL. For no other reason than shutting people up, I hope they come up with a deal this weekend (like most experts say they will).
http://www.thn.com/en/headlines/detail.asp?id=27358&cat=954945254360
We are definitely in business!!
Are you seriously suggesting that MLB has anywhere near the competitive balance of the NFL? If you are, then you’re dreaming. Or smoking something that I want a hit of.
Realignment has all but eliminated the “strength of schedule” parity effect, because only two games per season are based on strength of schedule, and these two games aren’t as helpful as you might think, due largely to the fact that there is real parity. For example, the worst teams in the NFC last year got to face the Falcons this year; not much of a free pass for the scrubs.
The main contributors to the parity in the NFL are the salary cap, (whether you want to admit it or not), the draft order, and the shared revenue. I agree that a cap is mostly moot without revenue sharing, because the latter ensures that all teams can spend up to the former.
But MLB? Please. How many worst-to-first stories are there in MLB? The Carolina Panthers went 1-15 two years before making the Superbowl. Since 2001, two teams have gone from worst to first in their division in the same season twice. That’s 25% of the league reshuffling worst to first twice in four years. That’s unbelievably effective parity. Before the salary cap, there was still draft order parity, and there was much stronger strength-of-schedule parity, and there was simply no parity. The 49ers outspent everybody in the eighties, and dominated handily.
In the NHL, you can simply look up your local team’s payroll rank and make a reasonably accurate prediction about whether or not your team will make the playoffs. You used to be able to do this in the NFL, as well. You can still do this in MLB. (Yankees and BoSox? High payrolls. Make the playoffs? Check.) Thus, when someone says that caps have nothing to do with parity, I have to disagree.
The NBA has so few players that individual talent gets in the way of parity. How can you normalize teams when one or two players is the difference between cellar dwellars and national champions? No amount of parity measures will give a team enough ammo to counterbalance Shaq. MLB, the NHL, and the NFL especially have enough different positions (or lines, or rotations) that overall caps can be effective parity measures.
I’m in the unique position of arguing for a cap because it will help my team become competitive, when my team is already the biggest spender in the league. I figure they will never stop buying name players, because that’s what sells the overpriced corporate seats. Thus, only a cap will stop the Rangers brand name fever. If they can’t just buy every name on the market, they’ll have to start trying to put together an actual team, as opposed to a collection of ticket sellers. Unlike MLB, where this approach is highly effective, hockey is a game of teamwork. Individual prima donnas simpy won’t cut it in hockey like it they can in baseball.
The 2003 World Champions, the Florida Marlins, were coming off six consecutive losing seasons and had a very low payroll.
The 2002 World Champions, the Anaheim Angels, had a losing season the year before and hadn’t made the playoffs in sixteen years.
The 2001 World Champions, the Arizona Diamondbacks, were a fourth year expansion team.
It’s not terribly uncommon to have surprise winners, evidently.
So, it sounds like “none” would be the answer to my question? As in, no teams went from worst in their division one year to first in their division the next? Because that was the question I was asking.
How much hope, really, do fans of the Expos, Brewers, Blue Jays, Diamondbacks, Royals, and Mariners really have? Everyone outside of San Francisco has hope for their NFL team next year. Even the lowly Browns and Dolphins could pull it together and make a playoff run.
Can the Diamondback fans really say the same? More to the point, would the Diamondbacks have a better shot if there were a cap? You bet your ass they would, because the Evil Empire wouldn’t have been able to buy Johnson this year, and the BoSox wouldn’t have been able to buy Schilling last year, as neither would have had the cap space available to make an offer.
If you want to convince me that there is parity in MLB, you have to show me how the Yankees and BoSox don’t always make the playoffs, (even the mighty Pats missed the playoffs completely in 2002), and how the Diamondbacks and Royals are able to stay (or get) competitive. Neither of which can be done.
I strongly disagree with your postion that salary caps do not foster parity.
On more question. Who was the other team in the three examples you gave? They didn’t happen to have huge payrolls, did they?
How about the NHL Stanley Cup teams since 2001? I know what would be a telling number. The average payroll of both Stanley Cup teams and where that number would rank in the league for each year since 2001, and the same numbers for the NFL and MLB. Only being 4 years, it can’t be that difficult to dig up.
I might try on Sunday, but it’s already late tonight and tomorrow I won’t be online.
1991 Atlanta Braves and Minnesota teams both went from worst (1990) to first (1991) and met in the World Series. Minnesota becoming the only team ever to win the World Series the year after finishing in last place. And both of these teams, AFAIK, are the only two in MLB history to do the worst to first thing.
Well, okay; how many worst-to-first stories are there in the NFL? Does it really happen THAT often?
For all the blather about the NFL’s parity, I have a trivia question for you; in the last twenty years, how many teams have won the Super Bowl the year after having a losing record (never mind even finishing LAST.) The answer, of course, is one; St. Louis. I cannot help but notice that the New England Patriots have won the Super Bowl three of the last four years, and the league historically has gone through runs of dominance by a few critical teams. Much has been made of the fact that St. Louis won the Super Bowl a year after going 4-12, but in fact, bad teams becoming champions is exceedingly rare.
MLB’s record on parity in the last five-seven years isn’t great, but frankly it’s no worse than the run the NFL had when a few NFC teams were winning the Super Bowl every year, and the NFL’s run of semi-flukey champions like Baltimore, St. Louis and Tampa Bay is no more impressive than MLB’s run of parity in the 1980s.
http://www.nhlpa.com/Content/Feature.asp?contentId=3431
Translated, “We are against linkage unless we benefit from it. Give us money!!”. Unbelievable; these people are not negotiating in good faith. In the short term it will hurt the fans, but in the long run they’ll be up shit creek. Fuck 'em all!
I haven’t done the statistical research but I don’t think that’s a fair measure of competive balance. Once a team makes the playoffs in baseball the results of a given playoff series are a crap shoot. I think the results of the regular season are a much better indicatator of competitive balance than baseball playoff results are. I think that the Braves and Yankees have both made the playoffs for the last 10 years, while the Brewers, Tigers, Royals and Pirates haven’t made it once during that time, is very strong indicator of a lack of competitive balance in baseball.
Huh? Don’t you think it follows that if you’re going to link salaries to revenues, that if revenues go up, salaries would increase as well?
That was part of the initial offer made by the owners, that salaries would be tied to the amount of money that the league made IIRC. The players rejected it. Now the owners reject it and the players want it?
The owners didn’t “reject” linkage except to pull it off the table as a demand, temporarily. That’s like saying the players rejected a $52 million cap when they dropped to $49. And if I’m reading this right, the linkage was to revenues -now- and didn’t change during the contract. The players seem to me to be saying, OK, if we’re going to accept linkage, it’s got to go up with revenues.
That would be true if the NHLPA accepted the bad with the good. When the season restarts, the league is going to take a major dip in popularity for awhile, but the cap would’ve stayed the same. If it did regain its popularity or get even more popular, then I hardly think it’s fair that the cap would also rise along side the increase in revenue, without falling with it in the first place.
Then there’s the owners who act like the salary cap itself would be a magnet, and force teams to spend the limit. If a team is able to keep its payroll at around 30 million without a cap, then why would they suddenly feel compelled to spend 45 million with one?
The same as what?? There’s no cap now; the cap starts upon the resumption of hockey. You can’t compare it to anything before, because there was no cap before. Any cap is a “dip” as compared to no cap. The absolute fact is that under any plan proposed thus far the players are giving up at least a quarter of their income. They’re taking a big hit. They’ve VOLUNTEERED to take a big hit. That initial drop is a done deal.
But as you yourself point out, there’s no REQUIREMENT that teams spend $45 million a year. If hockey does in fact suffer an even larger drop in revenue than is already expected, teams can simply opt to spend less. The cap isn’t designed to, and based on current spending never would, affect all teams; it’s designed to
A) Save money for the big franchises by driving down salaries, and
B) Help the small franchises by preventing the big from going really nuts on free agents.
It’s a given that Detroit, Toronto and New York are going to spend more than Nashville, Edmonton and Florida. This just prevents them from spending so much more that competition becomes unreasonably difficult.
Based on that, why would the players NOT expect to have the cap increase? Presumably revenues will in fact increase moving forward; if they don’t, hockey is dead and they’ll all be out of jobs soon enough.
Harborwolf, and anyone who does this: C’mopn now, you know darn well that he didn’t mean that in a literal/legal sense. The topic was their profit making ability, and A-D is rigfht that they have the right to make money - or they ishould* shut things down. You were deliberately misreading him in order to “play gotcha”.
Always the weaknes of the Union. If they hold out for too much, they sometimes fail to notice that capital can move.
Anyway, can anyone explain more about why they started to put teams in Arizona? Even with Gretzky’s popularity in, say, LA, I don’t get this part.
There’s never been a requirement that teams spend a certain amount of money. Nonetheless, once salaries increase there is that expectation, which is why salary inflation occurs. If the increases don’t happen the way the players want them to happen that is enough evidence, in their minds, that the owners are holding out and can be sued for collusion. Therefore, the creation of an upper limit is also the target number, so following the institution of a salary cap the owners will be expected to get as close to that number as possible. It’s like the speed limit: if it says 55, you’re expected to go 55, not 45.
So yeah, there’s no requirement. Instead it will be an expectation.