2008 Woodie Awards
Ladd on sports: lockout continues to discourage NHL diehards
Issue date: 2/18/05 Section: Sports
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While that age old philosophical question may seem odd in a sports column, it's becoming clearer by the day that it may have some relevance regarding the ongoing National Hockey League (NHL) labor dispute.
The NHL lockout has lasted over 150 days and wiped out nearly a thousand games. As no monumental, eleventh-hour compromise was reached, the inevitable - feared by many people - occurred.
Commissioner Gary Bettman decided to scrap the rest of the season.
For the first time since 1919, Lord Stanley's Cup will not be awarded. Back then, it was a flu epidemic that wiped out the NHL Finals. This year, unsurprisingly, the epidemic is the dismal financial outlook for the game.
The chief sticking point between the two sides is the implementation of a salary cap. The owners locked the players out in September of last year, when the old collective bargaining agreement (CBA) expired, with the chief goal of placing a cap in the new CBA.
The owners' perspective is a pretty easy one to see. The NHL claims that its 30 teams have lost a combined total of over $500 million between the last two seasons.
Furthermore, player salaries have spiraled out of control. ESPN reported on a study commissioned by the owners that showed players' salaries taking up 75% of the league's total revenues.
While the players' union contests the preceding numbers, it's hard to believe that the NHL just made them up. Losses like that don't just come from accounting tricks. There are obviously some grounds for them to claim such losses.
Even if the figures aren't as bad as the league claims, they still paint a daunting picture nonetheless.
Also reported by ESPN was a sports banking analysis. It claimed that ten teams would lose money, even with a salary cap of $30 million dollars, a number lower than any the league has proposed. Included in that list of franchises are the New York Islanders, one of the most storied in the NHL.
The NHL Players' Association (NHLPA) adamantly opposes anything remotely resembling a salary cap. Their counter proposals to the league have reflected this, as none of them have had even the slightest hint of one.
From their viewpoint, it is in the players' best interest for the NHL to continue to have an open market, naturally continuing an upward drive for player salaries.
While such an idea may be great for the players in the short term, in the long run it is a suicide pact. The NHL simply cannot survive without a salary cap.
While blame for the demise of the 2004-2005 seasons rests mostly on the shoulders of the NHLPA, plenty of blood stains the owners' hands. The mistakes that led the NHL to the dubious status of being the only major North American professional sports league to lose an entire season to labor strife can be pinned upon management.
The salary problem is the easiest to dissect. In an uncontrolled market, salaries are allowed to escalate, because financially healthy teams, like the Detroit Red Wings, will pay. It's the same as in baseball, where the New York Yankees drive salaries through the roof.
What this creates is an environment where fewer teams can afford to remain competitive. In a lot of ways, a salary cap is meant to protect the teams with lower revenues from the ones with the wherewithal to spend freely.
The other problem is that the league over-expanded. In the 1990s, the NHL made the mistake of believing that they had more than niche market. Teams popped up in Atlanta, Florida, and Nashville, as well as other places that were new markets for ice hockey.
The NHL has found the new markets more hesitant to accept ice hockey than they first thought. There have been talks of a post lock out NHL with as few as 22 teams, however the issue of contraction is still very abstract.
Yet the possibility of numerous team bankruptcies looms in the not so distant future.
Which brings us back to the philosophical question I brought up at the beginning of this column. Does the tree make a sound?
After flirting with the mainstream throughout the 1990s, the NHL has fallen to the periphery of the American sporting consciousness. In a poll run on Valentine's Day, Yahoo Sports asked if there would be a 2005-2006 NHL season.
The poll had over 100,000 respondents, with more than two-thirds of them saying they didn't care.
That kind of fan apathy should speak volumes to both sides of the labor dispute. With the season now lost, it will only grow louder.
