One door closed on Brendan Shanahan this week, when the Devils decided he couldn’t play on one of their top three lines and thus politely invited him to step away. If the members of the NHL Players’ Association have foresight and imagination, they seriously should consider opening their doors to Shanahan and inviting him to walk through as the union’s next executive director.
The idea of naming a player — an athlete without a college degree, no less — to direct a union rather than selecting a labor lawyer or a Fortune 500 corporate attorney or board member, may seem naive, but no one is better educated in the history between the NHL and NHLPA than Shanahan, who has endured one strike and two lockouts through a career that commenced in 1987.
There isn’t a soul who would be on the players’ side who understands the mentality of Gary Bettman and the Board of Governors more acutely than Shanahan, who played a key role in the talks that ended both the 1994-95 deadlock and the 2004-05 stalemate after being invited into the negotiations both times by Bob Goodenow.
Understand, Shanahan has not officially retired. He most certainly has not thrown his hat into the ring for the vacancy at the top of the union. When I asked him on Thursday whether he would consider joining the NHLPA in an executive capacity, Shanahan responded by text, “Haven’t had time to consider anything.”
Shanahan is not universally popular within the PA, which is in a state of crisis, and whose executive committee will convene by conference call tonight to review the matter of the recently dismissed Paul Kelly’s contract. But then, no one is universally popular among this fractured association of athletes that has been pulled in all directions by people with hidden agendas.
There are those who did not appreciate Shanahan’s intervention the last time around that swung a divided executive board toward the conciliatory position that led to the PA’s adoption of the hard cap. There are those who believe Shanahan is too political, too interested in promoting his own brand. And there are those who believe Shanahan is too close to Bettman and the folks in the NHL’s corporate headquarters.
Fact of the matter is, I didn’t embrace Shanahan’s position in the last lockout. We argued repeatedly and heatedly about the merits of this CBA before and after its ratification. Everyone knows I believe the union caved, to its own detriment, only to emerge broken in pieces after accepting a peace with little honor.
But there is no denying Shanahan’s progressive view in forming the committee that laid the groundwork for the NHL’s adoption of the anti-obstruction rules that led the league out of the quagmire in which its greatest players skated the decade prior to the 2005-06 re-launch.
There was no other individual within the sport who could have united the competing interest groups of players, league officials, on-ice officials and coaches that he did during some of the darkest days of the lockout. The people in the league office respect Shanahan.
An agent I respect mocked me the other day when I suggested Shanahan lead the union. “It would be like Tom Glavine being the head of the baseball players’ union,” he said. “You have to have a labor lawyer.”
But, I responded, if Glavine had indeed been the executive director of the MLBPA, there wouldn’t have been the steroids scandal that has stained the sport and a generation of players — a scandal, by the way, in which labor lawyer executive director Don Fehr was complicit from beginning to now.
Of course, Shanahan would need a strong attorney to ride shotgun for him. Of course, Shanahan would not draft the next CBA. But again, there is no one better educated in CBA issues, on-ice safety issues and marketing issues than Shanahan, and there is no one better equipped to bring these issue to the commissioner’s doorstep than he.
Shanahan has largely stayed out of the ongoing fracas concerning Kelly and the manner of his dismissal, though he did participate in last Monday’s union conference call and could be expected to join the conversation tonight , if invited. His hands are clean on this one.
There is no doubt that selecting Shanahan to lead the NHLPA would take a leap of faith and imagination. It would take trust. But it would be a bold move and the right move. A player leading the players. Quite a novelty. Ah, this union probably isn’t up to it.
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Perhaps it’s just a soft-sell, but deputy commissioner Bill Daly told Slap Shots this week that he does not foresee a league-initiated work stoppage at the conclusion of the CBA.
“I remain optimistic that the various items that need to be addressed in collective bargaining are not significant enough to necessitate a work stoppage,” Daly wrote in an e-mail on Friday. “Also, to the extent a work stoppage is necessary, I believe it’s much more likely to be a strike, not a lockout.”
For executive director Shanahan’s first act in office, then, may Slap Shots suggest a no-strike, no-lockout pledge?