Fed Up With Hockey

Fun times over at Off Wing today, where the ongoing World Junior Championships brought up a recent aside by Canadian teenage phenom Sidney Crosby. His comments were interpreted by some as suggesting he might play in the NHL next year alongside replacement players if the current collective bargaining agreement dispute isn’t resolved by next September.

So I commented:

Replacement players? Fine by me. The NHLPA hasn’t done anything to show me its players are interested in playing hockey in North America under a sustainable, competitive economic system (as opposed to the half of them who are playing for less money in Europe), so to heck with them. Bring on the replacements, I just want some hockey.

Beau responded:

Josh — Can you explain a little more? Are you saying the NHLPA is ignoring the wishes of the players playing for less in Europe, or are you fed up with all of them? // And what was your beef with the players’ latest proposal?

Good questions, and they require good answers. (Those who know the situation already can skip the next three paragraphs.)

Most NHL teams are losing money, some quite a lot of it. The occasional NHLPA argument that the league is in good financial health simply defies reality on its face. The players’ average salary is higher than that of NFL players; meanwhile, the league just had to sign a US TV deal offering no money up front, rinks are not nearly full league-wide, and merchandising revenue is a trickle compared to that of the other major North American professional sports. Even north of the border, the French-language broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada was moving to cable this season due to waning interest and advertising dollars. So hockey is in trouble, particularly in the two-thirds of the USA where it isn’t a natural part of the sporting landscape.

This year, the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement came up for renewal or re-negotiation, making an opportune time to address the financial problems partially caused by escalating salaries and dropping revenues. The owners demand that each team’s total salary be capped at a percentage of league-wide revenues (backed by a revenue-sharing agreement), and the players refuse to accept any sort of cap for two reasons: (1) philosophical problems with an artificial limit on their earning potential and (2) they don’t trust the owners not to artificially depress revenue numbers and therefore salaries.

Neither side was willing to negotiate. So the league shut down. We’re now going on three months without hockey, and the silence in American media is absolutely deafening. Do the players and owners not realize that their sport is dying?

The NHLPA simply doesn’t care about the long-term success of the league as a whole, so long as the current top-tier players can continue making NFL/MLB-style money in the near term. The 24% one-time salary cut recently offered doesn’t solve anything five years out; the league’s financial and competitive stability will remain at the mercy of the owner with the least restraint.

The players’ position is compromised on one side by the success of the NFL and NBA with a salary cap. NBA players make insane money from top to bottom; NFL players traded some financial top-end compared to the NBA for what is by far the most stable, competitive and profitable league in North American pro sports.

On the other side, the players have compromised themselves politically with their wholesale departure to European pro leagues. Approximately half of the players in the NHL have gone overseas, most for considerably less money than they would stand to make under any deal in North America. If they’ll take a hefty pay cut over there, why not a lesser one here, under similar terms to the ones that keep everybody happy in our other cold-weather sports, and that might keep our teams alive too? I can understand European players going back to their hometown clubs. But for the Americans and Canadians, it’s tough not to conclude that the players simply don’t give a crap about the fans back home, or about the overall health of their sport on their home continent. (Canadian isolationists, suck it up. Yes, kids will always play hockey north of the 49th, but without American money, their professional prospects would be rather limited.)

Don’t get me wrong, the owners have a lot to answer for as well. They could have put revenue-sharing into place a long time ago and eased the burden on smaller clubs; they also could have been more flexible in the ‘94 CBA negotiations when the sport was on a popularity upswing in the States, instead of forcing a lockout that stopped that momentum cold. Restraint on the big-money offers is a tougher nut to crack, because owners cannot legally make agreements to limit salary offers without having it explicitly allowed in the CBA; baseball owners tried that in 1986-87 and got hit with collusion findings for their trouble.

But overall, it seems to me that a salary cap is a reasonable demand given the examples of the NFL and NBA, which puts the onus on the players to make that one concession. Negotiate on the details all you like; if you don’t trust the league’s revenue numbers, insist on an independent yearly audit in the CBA. But get it done, so we can have our hockey back. If you won’t negotiate, we’ll take replacement players next year, but the game may already be irreparably damaged by then.

This sport has established strong beachheads in Dallas and San Jose, and at least made some progress in much of the Southeast, but without the NHL, that growth is liable to dry up; case in point, Atlanta after the 1980 departure of the Flames to Calgary. Hockey has the capability to remain a going concern in the United States, and perhaps even to grow in regions where, demographically speaking, it had better do so if it wants to maintain or improve its place in this country. But somebody’s gotta give first, and in my opinion, it’s the players.