Archive for the ‘Editorial’ Category

Blake Geoffrion, in better times. (Hockey: where "that time a guy grabbed you with a stick and shoved you down and the ref caught you" actually does constitute "better times")

The worst thing about playing pro hockey is this: the end might come at any moment and there’s a good chance you won’t even see it coming.

You might say that that applies to all of us. No one knows the day nor the hour, right? Any one of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow. There is a level of chaos inherent in existence, and some of that chaos is potentially fatal to both livelihood and life.

But be realistic: the chances of a random, catastrophic accident befalling an ordinary individual are pretty small. For most people, the changes that might wreck us are the kind of changes we see coming a little ways off. If I work a dangerous job, I know the moments when accidents are most likely and what direction the risk lies. If I have a health problem, I know a fair bit about my trouble, treatment, and eventual prognosis. Maybe I couldn’t tell you precisely what will lay me low or when, but I could probably give you the gist of it. The risk in my life, and likely in yours, is within the realm of predictability.

The risk in hockey, however, is not wholly predictable, and often unpredictable in sudden and devastating ways. In fact, given all the rules, all the training, and all the padding, the most horrible damage is often of the accidental variety. The game provides equations for expected damage- the puck to the nuts you risk from facing down a slapshot, the concussion that’s likely to result from having your head low in the presence of Raffi Torres- but there is so much trauma left outside the arithmetic of risk. Taylor Hall never laced up his skates thinking, tonight perhaps a teammate will stomp on my head with a skate blade. Richard Zednick never thought, well, sometimes you battle along the boards and your carotid gets cut open, that’s just part of the game.

And I rather doubt Blake Geoffrion expected that a perfectly clean, ass-to-body hipcheck would leave him with a hole in his skull the size of a silver dollar and a hole in his hockey future the size, perhaps, of forever.

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As long as nobody on either negotiating committee drops a Skyfall spoiler, I expect good progress in the labour discussions this week, even if the reporting is more negative after a rough ol’ Sunday.

Tracking the various leaks the National Hockey League and the Players’ Association have sent out to media outlets is a tricky business. Everything got confusing Friday as various reports conflicted with the internal memo sent out by union boss Donald Fehr that was intercepted by NBC’s Pro Hockey Talk and TSN.

First, here’s an excerpt of that memo:

In addition, we received a revamped proposal covering players’ share and cap issues, their so-called “make whole”, and player contracting issues. The owners finally did formally give us their “make whole” idea, which in dollar terms is similar to the discussions Bill Daly had with Steve Fehr a few days ago. While a step forward, a significant gap remains. Moreover, at the same time we were told that the owners want an “immediate reset” to 50/50 (which would significantly reduce the salary cap) and that their proposals to restrict crucial individual contracting rights must be agreed to. As you know, these include – among other things – losing a year of salary arbitration eligibility, allowing the team to file for salary arbitration in any year that the player can file, extending UFA eligibility to age 28 or 8 seasons, limiting contracts to 5 years, and permitting only 5% year to year variability in player contracts. Individually each is bad for players; taken together they would significantly reduce a player’s bargaining power and give the owner much more leverage over a player for most if not all of his career.

Obviously, there’s some poor communication in there, probably because Donald Fehr doesn’t know how to properly paragraph. It could be argued that the NHLPA failed to relay the specifics of the proposal to players because it’s buried in a 190-word wall of text Michael Russo, a respected member of the PHWA and Minnesota Wild beat-writer for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, quoted some un-named sources in a story shooting down the Fehr memo and clarifying the NHL’s apparent proposal from last week: Read the rest of this entry »

So I’m reading this article via the Canadian Press about how the National Hockey League is pressing against the passage of Bill C-290, which would “make it lawful for the government of a province, or a person or entity licensed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council of that province, to conduct and manage a lottery scheme in the province that involves betting on a race or fight or on a single sport event or athletic contest.”

The bill has been sent to the Canadian Senate, apparently. I don’t really care about whether sports betting his legal, but I’m dumbfounded by the NHL’s reaction to the bill. It’s easy to share their concern for match-fixing, or that the potential outcome of a game would be affected, but I don’t think that the people who participate in match-fixing scandals do so because there’s a legal way to make money on the game.

They came out with this:

“If single-game sports betting becomes a publicly fostered and sponsored institution, then the very nature of sports in North America (including in the National Hockey League) will change, and we fear it will be changed for the worse.”

I think I’ve been over it before, but the NHL has a money problem, and it had nothing to do with the fans, or the nature of the sport. Rather, it’s the nature of sports leagues, who, at some point in the 1980s, decided that they wanted to make a whole pile of money.

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Woah, this picture owns

Let’s say that the Forbes valuations of revenue and team value (they aren’t) are correct, and that Capgeek‘s assessment of player salaries (they aren’t) are also correct. Just fitting the numbers in the general ballpark, we can say that the Phoenix Coyotes contributed less than 2% of total National Hockey League revenue in 2011-12 and were to pay about 2.8% of the player salaries in 2012-13.

Conversely, the Toronto Maple Leafs,  were slated to pay their players a little over $10M more: They were effectively going to pay 3.3% of all player salaries despite contributing about five times the revenue the Coyotes did.

See the gap, there? Brian Burke, who prides himself on good business sense, has never really had the luxury of spending in a big market with an unlimited money pit. Since the team he runs is corporate-owned, and thus more likely to run the team as a business and not as an art piece with tangible value, from one angle you could say the Toronto Maple Leafs are a successful organization.

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I think I lied. Expanded revenue sharing via a luxury tax isn’t the only way for the National Hockey League to fix its core economic issues.

The reality that nobody in these negotiations wants to touch is that the league is too big. It grew too much in the mid-1990s, the John Ziegler expansion an obvious sign of greed. The best market to apply for a team, Hamilton, was passed over for Ottawa and Tampa Bay because both of those places had owners willing to cough up a $50M expansion fee.

If there was a clear moment in time the NHL had become too big, that was it. That was when owners realized that they could use expansion as a quick cash grab. When the possibility of two new expansion teams was brought up earlier this week, the thought was “expansion fees” and also “there’s no way this can be right.”

It’s a way to quickly inject the league with cash. Expansion and relocations fees don’t count against hockey-related revenue, so these work as a one-time payout. The name of the game is greed, at the expense of diluting the talent of NHL, further divvying up of the league’s star players and making fans even less likely to be able to watch them in person.

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