The last time around, Gary Bettman pledged that NHL “cost certainty” in the guise of a percentage-of-the-gross hard cap would, in no particular order, make ticket prices more affordable, increase franchise values across the board, and give small-market clubs every opportunity to become profitable.
Seven years later, the CBA won from the ashes of the canceled 2004-05 season has accomplished none of these objectives. And yet the commissioner, the Board of Governors and the NHL are doubling down on their own flawed concept with a collective bargaining strategy amounting to little more than reaching as deep as possible into the players’ pockets.
A system in which the payroll of revenue-poor clubs is linked to the amount of revenue generated by the league’s powerhouse franchises is fatally flawed — incoherent and doomed to fail no matter how low the league wants the players to go.
And yet here we are again, the league right out of the gate having proposed the players take 22 percent less (a much smaller percentage of a much smaller pot) without any sort of plan or inclination to funnel additional dollars to the small market franchises that cannot economically keep pace with the big boys.
This is a plan designed to produce another windfall for big-market ownerships in the guise of competitive balance, this time without a pledge from the league office that such an agreement would equate to lower ticket prices.
If this is simply a case of owners being owners in a society in which the wealthiest are increasingly empowered by the day, then beginning today in New York when the sides convene for the first of three consecutive days of meetings, it is up to Donald Fehr and the NHLPA to immediately recast the negotiating landscape of givebacks the league established with its initial proposal Friday in Toronto.
If it is not already too late, that is.
By the way, I fully recognize that NHL players are not minimum-wage laborers, but for anyone to equate Jeremy Jacobs with Zdeno Chara or Ed Snider with Claude Giroux or Jim Dolan with Ryan Callahan is a sign of willful ignorance meant to obscure the issue.
There is no question a soft cap/payroll tax system in which tax dollars would be funneled to low-revenue clubs would have the best chance of achieving the objectives to which the NHL only pays lip service. Yet the league and commissioner will not even consider it, married as they are to this percentage-of-the-gross system that is meaningless beyond its value as a campaign slogan.
This is what Fehr faces in his first and only confrontation with Bettman and the Board, yet he must have known this is what he was signing up for when he took on the assignment to lead the NHLPA out of the rubble that followed its 2004-05 cave-in.
The league’s first proposal, a Declaration of Economic War against its putative partners, is not a serious document. It not only fails to address the disparity of wealth among its franchises, it guarantees to exacerbate that imbalance. The rich will grow exponentially richer. The poor will not grow at all.
Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
A union counter off the initial proposal is folly. Talking the league’s talk will only lead the NHLPA on a walk to nowhere and would be an admission of weakness, with only the ultimate terms of surrender remaining to negotiate to avoid cancellation of another season.
Beginning today, Fehr’s play isn’t as much to the NHL as it is to his union’s rank-and-file as the NHLPA somehow attempts to establish a credible foothold of strength where little is evident and good faith is every bit as much an opponent as the people across the table.