Boudrias Posted December 19, 2012 Share Posted December 19, 2012 Coming out of the player/owner meetings, what 2 weeks ago, I said the NHL would cancel games to the end of December, the following week, which they did. That the NHL would state a 'drop dead' date before x-Mass, Bill Daly did that today. Jan.15th. I think the message is clear to the PA. There is a end date for negociations and it appears to be Jan.3 - 4th. While I thought there was a high probability this would happen I thought cooler heads might prevail. A cancelled season will force this situation into next fall. I expect the NHL to become even more aggressive in their demands. I see no upside for the PA. As I stated many times they have not handled this dispute in a smart manner at all. I am not agreeing with ownership either as they have damaged their businesses with some probably not surviving. I do not agree with those who feel that ownership are fat cats who simply want more in a dollar grab from players. Their numbers have to be telling them something that commits them to this position. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikey2Dope Posted December 19, 2012 Share Posted December 19, 2012 Is that a legit quote? He said "we will have a season"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SamJamIam Posted December 19, 2012 Share Posted December 19, 2012 The season will be saved when the NHL makes concessions. Fall games are worth far less to most American teams, especially those that want a lockout. Stadiums fill up as various other sports wrap up for the winter, peaking after the Superbowl. This is why the NHL quotes REVENUE lost from the lockout. They don't quote profit or even HRR because those figures are far lower than many fans (and perhaps players) understand. The NHL's drop dead date was never the date that signified the season was being scrapped. It's the date that the cost-benefit ratio of this lockout has grown too large, the NHL takes its winnings and makes the necessary concessions to save the season. The NHL has been throwing Monopoly money on the fire as proof of their financial need for concession. Expect games January after the Bettman claims he was being the bigger man by returning to the table and enabling a deal to finally be made. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnews Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 One thing I don't understand is why the public/media isn't making a bigger deal about the owners wanting to rollback salaries without reimbursing the players for the money guaranteed by their contracts? Personally, I think that is unethical. I realize in the case of Zach Parise, its not like he would be hard hit, but considering the Wild owner was negotiating with promises of a huge contract with huge amounts of moneying, knowing very well when the CBA was up, he'd be arguing to cheat his way out of paying them the money while keeping the 13 years. I think players salaries need to be rolled back, with a reasonable contract limit and max variance on new signed contracts, but the owners should have to reimburse the players fully. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxiebrown Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Re: the amnesty buyout, if a player got bought out, they would still get their salary from the original team, it's just wouldn't count against the cap. That's why Bettman is opposed to it, because it would be money paid by owners, but not counted against any cap. And that's why it's actually not bad for players, it would actually give some of them the opportunity to make two salaries, and increase the overall amount owners can spend slightly. If getting amnestied meant you lost your salary, it would be an absolute dealbreaker for the players. That is going down the road to non-guaranteed contracts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Bookie Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Google is once again telling me -loudly- that the season started on the 15th. Stupid Google. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elvis15 Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Is that a legit quote? He said "we will have a season"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeNiro Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 If Daly said no he didn't think there would be a season, then he'd basically be admitting that the NHL was bargaining in bad faith. They better believe that there's going to be a season, or else what the hell are they even doing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmo2337 Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 If Daly said no he didn't think there would be a season, then he'd basically be admitting that the NHL was bargaining in bad faith. They better believe that there's going to be a season, or else what the hell are they even doing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Smashian Kassian Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Best reasoning I've seen so far. This was probably planned as usual. Its easy enough to say wooops... it didn't work out the way we hoped and then fight it out in court Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmo2337 Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 "We have kept giving and giving and giving" That one really cracked me up once again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Smashian Kassian Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Giving isn't in their vocabulary. The most classic moment was the owners almost making whole the contracts signed and expecting a happy reaction and thank you pat on the back. (just before talks broke down). Owners perspective from players "thank you, we'll take that". Players perspective "ok, this was a signed promise you should have honored anyways, and not a concession". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmo2337 Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 So, I saw somewhere that "the hill we will die on", was originally an owner comment and passed on by the messenger Bill Daly. So, which owner? Jeremy Jacobs (Boston), Murray Edwards (Calgary), Ted Leonsis (Washington) and Craig Leipold (Minnesota)? I can't find the link now, but I'm looking for it for the source. Calgary has had no trouble signing Iggy for five years. Jacobs? Leonsis...maybe? However, I'm leaning very heavily toward Leipold and the promises he would like to break. Anyone have any info on the owner that would die on a hill for this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poetica Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 .... Anyone have any info on the owner that would die on a hill for this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnews Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 LOL if it was Leipold... He hasn't got a hill to stand on - (aside from the fact that there are any in Minnesota.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin-B Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 My apologies if this has been posted already Hockey’s Wealth Redistribution Problem: What’s Really Behind The NHL Lockout You may not have noticed that the NHL hasn’t started its season yet, which is arguably Problem #1 for the wannabe major league: Ice hockey is fourth in a three-horse race of pro team sports vying for the affection of casual U.S. fans. Problem #1A is the lockout of players that’s been in force since Sept. 15, which has resulted in the cancellation of nearly 550 regular-season games to date. But in the event you are following the inaction rinkside, don’t be fooled when league officials or anyone else claims that the main issue is greedy players. The real problem in hockey is not in the locker room, but in the owners’ suites and commissioner’s office. The NHL would like you to believe that owners give too much money to players. That was management’s position almost a decade ago—the last time the league locked out its talent—when players were getting three-quarters of total revenues. After an entire season was voided, the NHL Players Association caved, agreeing to lower its members’ share of revenue to 57%. Peace and harmony have ensued since, but now the owners want an even bigger piece of the pie, claiming financial hardship. Don’t believe them, not for a minute. First, as I’ve written about before, sports team accounting is misleading at best, given that club owners can claim to be losing money when a) the losses are on paper only; there are tax benefits from whatever losses happen to be real; and c) the value of their teams continue to rise. All this is true for NHL owners as a group. The average NHL team, according to Forbes, is worth $282 million, an 18% increase from one year ago. It’s true, certainly, that sky-high values for a handful of mega-successful teams (Toronto Maple Leafs, $1 billion; New York Rangers, $750 million; Montreal Canadiens, $575 million; Chicago Blackhawks, $350 million; Boston Bruins, $348 million) raise the overall average, while some struggling teams (Carolina Hurricanes, $162 million; New York Islanders, $155 million; Columbus Blue Jackets, $145 million; Phoenix Coyotes, $134 million; St. Louis Blues, $130 million) are worth much less. But it’s also true that $282 million is higher than the price tag Forbes placed on the most valuable team in the league just a decade ago (Rangers, $277 million). And the average value for the bottom five teams today ($145 million) is nonetheless higher than the price tag for fully half the league’s team in 2002. Few teams have struggled financially in the past decade as much as the Coyotes, for example, and yet their valuation over the past decade has increased 69% ($79 million to $134 million). Businesses don’t increase in value if the underlying model isn’t sound. None of which is meant to say that the NHL doesn’t need tweaking. It does, in two ways. First, there’s a strong argument to be made that there are too many NHL teams, or at least too many in places where ice hockey is not exactly a native sport. i.e., the American South. This is the fault of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, long a champion of NHL expansion. But hockey in the U.S. is not a national sport; it’s a collection of regional enthusiasms, and not enough fans in the American Southwest and Southeast are as enthusiastic about hockey as they are about football, baseball, and basketball. Is it any wonder that the Atlanta Thrashers’ fortunes improved after they relocated to Winnipeg last year (changing their name to the Jets)? With a rabid regional fan base, management could raise ticket prices and secure a more lucrative local TV deal. Forbes has the franchise’s value increasing by a fifth in just a year (to $200 million). Alas, there aren’t that many large markets without an NHL franchise left north of the border, or in the northern U.S. Likewise, contraction isn’t a likely prospect. Major (or even minor major) sports leagues reduce their ranks of teams about as often as owners speak honestly about their finances. More to the point, contraction might not be necessary if NHL owners would only grow up. The problem in hockey, as ESPN The Magazine‘s Peter Keating recently explained, is that NHL owners don’t share enough of their own money with each other. And share they must, because the nature of the NHL’s “popularity” in the U.S.—intense interest among small pockets of local fans, consistent disinterest otherwise—translates into paltry national TV contracts. As a result, Keating writes, NHL teams “share a far tinier proportion of their revenues than teams in other sports do, because NHL clubs rely much more on local media deals for money than on national TV contracts.” So big-market teams, with lots of local TV money, spend more on player salaries, forcing small-market owners to choose between paying their players more than they can afford or putting a subpar product on the ice. Either choice has unpleasant financial consequences. This has long been a problem, of course, for all major sport leagues. But we’ve known for a while that the way mature owners and strong commissioners have to deal with this imbalance is to share revenues between teams. Practically, this allows all teams to be competitive, ensuring a consistent and popular product. Philosophically, this recognizes the we’re-all-in-this-together aspect of professional sports leagues, one of the more curious economic constructs in history. It’s not a coincidence that the most successful North American sports league also has the most rational approach to revenue sharing. Some 60% of the NFL’s $11 billion revenue pie is shared, which is why tiny Green Bay, Wisconsin can compete with big bad New York or Chicago. The other two Big Three leagues aren’t quite as egalitarian but have improved their models in recent years: MLB teams share nearly a third of local TV revenue, while NBA teams reportedly approach a 50% total revenue share (give or take a few complex calculations). The NHL, meanwhile, has been sharing 4.5% of its $3.3 billion revenue (with not much more on the table in current talks.) So greed is the issue, alright: owners’ greed, specifically owners in larger markets who refuse to recognize that sports leagues are in many ways socialist enterprises, in which the needs of the many fat cats should outweigh the few obese cats. At least if the obese cats want to keep purring. Again: NHL owners with struggling teams, to the extent that they are actually struggling, are largely in the shape they’re in because of their fellow owners, not because of NHL players. And all NHL owners would be wise to recognize their own culpability ASAP, rather than engaging in more legal maneuvering. (At the moment, the league is busy filing lawsuits and complaints, while the NHLPA is trying to decertify itself, so players can sue owners for anti-trust violations.) The urgency is not because NHL fans will give up on the sport; hockey fans are absolute gluttons for abuse and incredibly desperate to watch pro hockey. (Seriously, check this out.) No, NHL owners should get their act together because their league faces something none of the other major sports do: Russia’s KHL, an aggressive and surly rival league that has long resented how many European players in general and Russians in particular choose to play in North America rather than staying on their home continent. The KHL’s finances, like most things Russian, are a little murky, so it’s hard to know if the league could seriously compete with the NHL for top talent in the long run. But a surprisingly large number of iced NHLers are now playing in the KHL while they wait out the lockout, including a lot of North Americans. You have to worry that at some point many will simply decide to stay for the long haul. Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/12/19/hockeys-wealth-redistribution-problem-whats-really-behind-the-nhl-lockout/#ixzz2FZjcQeAa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boudrias Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Re: the amnesty buyout, if a player got bought out, they would still get their salary from the original team, it's just wouldn't count against the cap. That's why Bettman is opposed to it, because it would be money paid by owners, but not counted against any cap. And that's why it's actually not bad for players, it would actually give some of them the opportunity to make two salaries, and increase the overall amount owners can spend slightly. If getting amnestied meant you lost your salary, it would be an absolute dealbreaker for the players. That is going down the road to non-guaranteed contracts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
canucksnihilist Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 The NHL, meanwhile, has been sharing 4.5% of its $3.3 billion revenue (with not much more on the table in current talks.) So greed is the issue Read more: http://business.time.../#ixzz2FZjcQeAa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poetica Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 NHL contract rules could lead to more sign-and-trades If the proposed limits on NHL contract lengths would have been in place last Fourth of July, the most talked-about day in Minnesota Wild history would not have had the same sizzle. Maybe Zach Parise would have still signed in his hometown, but the Wild would not been able to afford his buddy, Ryan Suter. Instead of signing Parise to a back-diving, 13-year, $98 million contract, an average of $7.538 million, the Wild might have had to give Parise $60 million over five years, or $12 million a season. If you believe the NHL Players' Association is thrilled by a proposal that could raise stars' salaries, you haven't been closely following the last couple of weeks of the contentious collective bargaining negotiations. The 95-day-old NHL lockout has come down to a few issues, but each is very important to both parties. From a fan standpoint, the issue that will change the game the most is the owners' request for a five-year limit on free agent contracts or seven years from teams re-signing their own players. Although no one can be sure exactly how that would play out, the educated guess is it will mean even fewer stars entering free agency and more sign-and-trade situations. "You are going to exactly what you see in the NBA," said former NHL general manager Craig Button. "You will sign your player for the longer deal and you will trade for assets." If a team was planning to try sign Suter last summer as a free agent, and these rules were in place, would it have been willing to give up a first-round pick, or another player, to Nashville to have the Predators sign him for the two extra years and then trade him? "I think you would do that," Button said. "But what the players really lose here is the ability to go out and really have people compete for their services. This would be a big loss for players." Essentially, the sign-and-trade would force a player to decide where he might want to sign when his contract expires and then see if his former team could work it a deal. That's not the same as opening up yourself to the highest bidder. "And the other potential problem is how do you mitigate against tampering," Button said. If a star goes to free agency, he likely will receive a higher salary because a signing team can't woo him with a long-term deal. Next summer, Anaheim Ducks winger Corey Perry could be the hot unrestricted free agent. If this 5/7 rule was in place, the Ducks can sell him on the idea of a seven-year contract. Maybe they offer him $8.5 million per season over seven years. But what if another team offered him $50 million-plus over five seasons? If he accepted that, he would be 33 when the contract expired and might be able to get another big deal down the road. If he took the seven-year deal, he would be 35 afterward, at the age when teams become skittish about giving term because NHL rules say you must take the full cap hit even if you buy out the player. But even the strong possibility that stars will be paid more doesn't mean the NHLPA has any desire to accept the owners' proposal. The NHLPA's primary concern is that higher salaries for stars will mean less for the middle class. About 13% of full-time players have contracts of six or more years, but they are primarily the higher-salaried players. The players have offered an eight-year cap on contracts, and the situation is made more complicated by the fact that owners are also seeking a maximum 5% variance on year-to-year salaries to prevent teams from using back-diving contracts that place low salaries at the end to lower the cap hit.. The NHLPA's proposal has a much wider variance. "I would say if you get the right variance in between years, I'm not so sure you even need term limits," Button said. Owners also are trying to limit contract lengths is to preserve franchise values and make it easier for the teams to get loans if needed. Lending institutions don't like the current NHL model of having players under contract for a decade into the future. The contracting issues are complicated, to say the least. But they don't affect owners' bottom line because their share of hockey-related revenue will be established. Whether stars receive more or middle class receives less, the owners' financial picture doesn't change. But there appears to be some room to negotiate on this issue. "I've said this dozens of times," Button said. "There is not a CBA that will ever be designed that's fool-proof. … There is no perfect solution. Every situation creates a reaction or something that wasn't anticipated." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poetica Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 Union wants to restart talks with NHL The head of the NHL Players' Association says his side in hockey's labor dispute is set to resume talks anywhere, anytime, but is waiting for league negotiators to feel the same way. Speaking to a large throng of media here before an NHLPA charity hockey game at the former Maple Leaf Gardens, NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr was asked why bargaining has not resumed this week. "Because the owners have not indicated a desire to resume," Fehr said. "We've indicated any number of times that we're willing to resume whenever they are without pre-conditions.'' NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly, reached by ESPN.com via email Wednesday evening, said the league is willing to resume talks under the right conditions. "We haven't said we won't meet, but we certainly would want to know what the agenda is and how they intend to proceed,'' Daly said. Daly created a buzz earlier Wednesday when during a Hockey Night In Canada radio interview he was asked for a simple yes or no answer to whether he thought there would be a season this year. He responded, "Yes.'' "That's good news," Fehr said when told of Daly's affirmative answer. "I'm glad to hear that. I certainly hope he's right. That's the players' goal; that's what we want to try and do. "Hopefully, we'll get back together and negotiate out the remaining issues as soon as possible." The two sides haven't officially met since last Thursday when the presence of mediators in New Jersey didn't produce any movement or progress. On Tuesday, NHLPA bargaining committee member Ron Hainsey told ESPN.com's Scott Burnside that he believed it might be a good idea for the two sides to bring back the group dynamic from two weeks ago when Penguins owners Ron Burkle led a fresh approach in talks from the NHL side, leading to apparent progress in a group session with players. Fehr seemed open to that idea as well, mentioning Hainsey's comment in his scrum Wednesday evening. Anything to get talks back under way, Fehr said. "We have to find a way to have discussions, because it's very hard to come to an agreement if you're not talking to one another," Fehr said. "It's very hard to come to an agreement if you set pre-conditions to the negotiations, too.'' Asked about the fans' growing impatience with the ongoing lockout, Fehr said he understood their pain. "Any time you have a dispute like this ... any time you are preventing the fans from watching the sport, which provides the business we're all involved in -- it's not a good thing," Fehr said. "And it needs to be ended as soon as possible. We certainly hope we can do that. We certainly want to tell the fans we're doing everything we can to do that.'' Fehr declined to shed any more details on the possibility of the NHLPA filing a disclaimer of interest that essentially would dissolve the union. "That's an internal matter which the players will discuss,'' Fehr said. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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