Maybe morale was as low when Alan Eagleson was representing the players in a felonious manner. Maybe it was this bad when the players regretfully recognized that Bob Goodenow had been right when he told them they would have to be willing to stay out into a second full season in order to withstand the NHL’s demand for an imposition of a hard cap. Maybe it was this bad when Ted Saskin violated the union’s trust, and maybe it was this bad last year when Paul Kelly was thrown out the door at 3 a.m.
But according to a variety of individuals familiar with the current state of NHLPA affairs, morale within the union and among the players never has been worse than it is now.
The search for an executive director essentially has hit a wall. The fact of the matter is that the five-player search committee that has been in operation for eight months simply has been unable to attract the caliber of candidates for the job that the union expected.
The situation with the PA is the equivalent of situation with the Rangers, where Erik Christensen, Vinny Prospal and Todd White are the leading candidates to center the team’s first line — well meaning, somewhat productive, but hardly a match lining up against Sidney Crosby.
When three of the leading candidates all have backgrounds that feature extensive involvement with the NFLPA — the only sports union weaker than the NHLPA and from the only sports union that negotiated a worse CBA than the NHLPA — it is no wonder why morale is so low, no wonder why one level-headed informant called the situation “a disaster.”
Donald Fehr, once perceived as its savior, has been so disengaged during the Ilya Kovalchuk case that it is clear that the one-time omnipotent leader of the Major League Baseball union has no interest in taking a lead role with the NHLPA.
The fact is that with all of the varied ramifications spinning off from Richard Bloch’s decision in the Kovalchuk arbitration, including the possibility — if not likelihood — that the league will use the outcome to bolster cases to de-register the contracts of Marc Savard and Roberto Luongo, if not Chris Pronger and Marian Hossa, the players should be most distressed by the lack of urgency with which their union approached the case.
Indeed, Slap Shots has learned that union front-office personnel, including Fehr, expressed concern over the cost of attorneys’ fees in the Kovalchuk arbitration before turning to John McCambridge, a Saskin loyalist, who had been part of the 2004-05 negotiating committee but had not been involved in union business in years and who was no match at all for the estimable Bob Batterman, the league’s Crosby/Ovechkin among its stable of all-star lawyers.
It is stunning that Fehr was unable to recognize that the price of victory would be nothing compared to the cost of defeat. It is outrageous that the union would have quibbled over the equivalent of pennies when weighed against the nullification of a $102 million contract of one of its dues-paying, escrow-contributing marquee members.
It is, however, indicative of the headless operation that seems simply to be awaiting the slaughter in the next round of collective bargaining two years hence.
This is what happens when the union spends its resources looking behind and fighting old battles instead of preparing for the future and a new engagement against an all-powerful commissioner who remains ruthlessly committed to his vision of a hard-cap, lowest-common-denominator league.
Slap Shots has been told by several sources that the NHL likely is to present a new version of the hard cap next time around where what has been the midpoint will actually become the ceiling and in which the band between high and low will be as narrow as the low-revenue, floor-hovering teams will permit.
In other words, instead of the cap this season being $59.4M based upon a $51.4M midpoint, the cap itself would be $51.4M.
But wait, it would be significantly lower than that, even, because the league is believed prepared to demand that the players’ percentage of the gross be reduced from 57 percent to 50-52 percent, with all one-way contracts within an organization counting against the cap.
This in addition to strict term limits on contracts, controls relating to front-loading; and changes in the manner cap charges are calculated on multi-year deals. Plus, who knows what other give-backs?
The league will attempt to divide the union by pointing out that a cap calculated this way would eliminate escrow even as it would dramatically drive down payroll on about half the league’s clubs that will spend to the cap this season.
This is going to be hardball. Already is, Gary Bettman already has delivered the first high hard one that the umpire called a strike. The PA’s baseball person, the guy who always hit it out of the park following a brush-back, isn’t all that interested in digging in this time.
If this is what the players have, if their repose in the face of a $102M defeat is an indication, if their inability to attract the best and the brightest to their cause is a reflection of how they are perceived by the outside world, they might as well bend over now and save everyone the aggravation in two years.