RYAN MCDONAGH Arbitration ahead? (CSM /Landov)
Look, everyone needs to understand that it’s all within context. NHL players could have their pay slashed by 50 percent and lead marvelous lives. We get that.
But at the same time there isn’t an owner extant who had the slightest need to take so much as an additional nickel out of the pocket of a single player in order to live their own lives of luxury and yet that didn’t stop the No Honor League from conducting this disgraceful dance of power, ego and greed that has played across the landscape for the last six months.
Owners’ Lockout III appears on its way to a resolution. The 2012-13 season seems likely to commence no later than Jan. 19. That is, if negotiations between the NHL and NHLPA don’t break down over the next week and the framework of the collective bargaining agreement on the table is adopted, as it must.
For what the players — who have fought the good fight every step of the way — must weigh is whether a deal that better serves the rank-and-file will be available in the ashes of a canceled season and whether players whose NHL windows are closing could possibly recoup the losses that would accompany cancellation.
It’s time, for the first time, for these players to be selfish and put themselves first, ahead of the generation that will follow. Some locked out three times, many more locked out twice, these world-class athletes have paid enough of a price.
This is going to be a bad deal (again, all within context) for the players, a very bad deal for players whose contracts expire at the end of this season, and a worse deal for the fans in big markets who pay the freight for their small-market cousins, but whose teams will be limited by a tightening cap and the NHL’s commitment to genetic engineering.
It’s going to be a deal that enriches big-market owners exponentially, puts money in the bank accounts of the small-marketers too, but ultimately will fail to solve the league’s problems because the entire percentage-of-the-gross concept by which Canceler-in-Chief Gary Bettman lives is a fraudulent one applied to a confederation in which little money is shared among franchises of widely disparate value.
Small markets that cannot produce sufficient revenue will still fail. Mismanaged teams will still fail. No amount of scheming on Sixth Avenue meant to redistribute personnel wealth around the league will succeed in transforming losing operations into winners or loony owners into intelligent ones.
Over the first seven years of the hard cap era under which teams were allowed to maneuver with dramatic front-loading, 19 of the NHL’s 30 teams advanced as far as the conference finals. In the last seven years of the uncapped era under which teams operated without legislated constraint, 17 of 30 clubs made it to the conference finals.
That is hardly a dramatic difference. As such, the web of enhanced restrictions within what will become the new law of the NHL land is not likely to produce a dramatic competitive difference, either. Whether operating in big markets or small, foolish people will still make foolish decisions.
Success in the NHL has, is and always will be predominantly determined by front-office acumen; by scouting, player development, coaching, and commitment to excellence accompanied by constructing and maintaining team identity.
The focus for the NHLPA in the face-to-face negotiations that are expected to begin here today or tomorrow should and must be on 2013-14. The union’s need in this regard is consistent with the needs of teams (even with one amnesty buyout) that will be pressed up against the NHL’s proposed $60 million cap for next year that represents an immediate decrease of 14.53 percent unheard of in the history of hard-cap pro sports.
Such a decrease represents a triple threat in the form of guaranteed double-digit escrow losses plus limited options for free agents and cap teams alike. The Rangers wouldn’t be anywhere close to being in the most difficult shape in the NHL, but Group II’s Ryan McDonagh, Derek Stepan and Carl Hagelin, all coming off Entry Level, would be boxed into one-year bridge deals awaiting arbitration, with eventual deals perhaps costing the Blueshirts more in the long run against the cap, and this with a potential 2014-15 offseason disaster looming. Lose/lose.
The NHL has no right to engineer a transition in which teams that have invested in building winners under the rules of the expired CBA are systematically stripped of their assets and thereby punishes those franchises’ season subscribers who essentially fund the league and have funded the lockout.
The cap must be at least $65 million next season to prevent Sixth Avenue from rigging the system. The floor could remain at the proposed $44 million. There is precedent for deviating from the $16 million cap/floor band, for in Year One of the expired CBA, the cap was $39 million while the floor was $21.5 million.
An increased cap, though, would mean greater escrow. The NHLPA’s charge is to negotiate a cap on escrow for next season, even if it is as high as what likely appears an unpalatable 10 percent.
Next year should be what this next week is about. Once that is settled, this year can begin.