Understand this. Gary Bettman is huffing, puffing and threatening to blow all of the NHL houses down over a difference of about $3 million per team per season over the life of the six-year CBA proposal offered on Thursday by the NHLPA.
This is the language spoken by the NHL commissioner not only to the players, 18 of whom he treated with disdain and disrespect while they shared a room with him in Toronto, but to the owners.
He is telling the Rangers they can’t open the doors to the transformed money-printing Garden because of $3 million season — at most, given the negotiable nature of the NHLPA’s “50-50” proposal and the prospect of annual revenue growth well beyond the league’s conservative five-percent projections.
He is telling the Predators — who already have paid Shea Weber $13 million for this season on a signing bonus — they can’t begin to collect gate receipts or enhanced revenue sharing dollars as proposed by the union.
He is telling the Coyotes there will be no money coming into the operation. He is telling the Maple Leafs, Canadiens, Flyers, Canucks and all of the NHL’s economic powerhouses he would rather close up shop than negotiate over a difference of $3 million per year for those ownerships, which, by the way, would reap windfall gains if the PA’s latest proposal were adopted.
But that’s Bettman’s history. He canceled the 2004-05 season, remember, over a hypothetical difference of $2.5 million per year per team when he rejected the NHLPA’s proposal of a de-linked $45 million cap after the league proposed a de-linked cap of $42.5 million per.
This isn’t someone whose first instinct is to close a deal. This is someone whose first instinct is to close the league.
* It’s true. The players are asking the league to guarantee 100 cents on the dollar of all existing contracts when the players never had that protection in the expired CBA. The players lost an average of 3.2 percent of their salaries to escrow over the course of the CBA, approximately 4.5 percent over the final six years of the agreement.
So it’s there to be negotiated. It’s there for the league to propose paying 92 or 94 cents on the dollar, for the union to counter by asking for 96, for the parties to reach an agreement under which the owners live up to the spirit of a signed contract and the players don’t wind up paying deferred money to each other.
Bettman loves to cite the NBA and NFL within the context of the 50-50 split he now seeks. But it is worth repeating again and again and again. The value of existing contracts in those leagues remained untouched even as the players agreed to take smaller cuts of revenue after being locked out.
It is only the NHL among sports leagues that uses the expiration of labor agreements as a tool to empower owners to welch on their collective word. To NHL owners, it’s monopoly money.
* The NHL’s latest proposal is as much an attack on big-market teams and creative general managers as it is on the players — perhaps even more so.
The five-year contract term limit accompanied by the severe restriction on the annual salary variance is aimed straight at the heart of those franchises, as is the proposal that players earning in excess of $105,000 in the AHL or Europe (after being waived) be counted against the cap.
The latter might as well be known as “The Wade Redden Rule,” in honor of the Rangers defenseman who has played the past two seasons — the middle two of his six-year, $39 million deal — in the AHL and thus has not counted against the cap.
Ironically, “The Wade Redden Rule” would harm Redden himself if adopted as written. An amnesty buyout would allow the 35-year-old to sign with another team as a free agent. But denied that opportunity (there is no amnesty buyout provision in the NHL’s proposal), Redden will be consigned to the AHL for the next two seasons while the Rangers operate with $6.5 million of dead cap space. They are not adding him to the roster.
Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it, that the NHL made its not quite “50-50” offer on Oct. 16, when the NBA made its “50-50” offer a year ago to the basketball players during meetings of Oct.18-20, or is it instead simply off a script?
The vindictive nature of Bettman and the board is reflected by the proposal under which teams would be charged with dead cap space for players currently on contracts of at least six years who retire before the end of their respective deals.
This is the league attempting to impose punishment for business that was legal when conducted and for contracts that the league registered. It is about Bettman and allies on the Board using collective bargaining to settle vendettas.
It is as if the City of New York could issue summonses today to an individual for smoking a cigarette in a bar in 2000.