You can see some frustration rising to the surface in a recent piece on the NHL lockout from Jeff Gordon of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: NHL Takes Fan Abuse To A New Level
This is so typical of the National Hockey League. Not only has the league shut down its business -- due to the collective incompetence of its owners -- it continues to string along its fans. The NHL refuses to cancel the season.
Instead, we get more meetings that go nowhere and more posturing. That's doubly aggravating for those diehards who just want to know, once and for all, whether they should move on with their lives.
Not satisfied to stiff those loyal souls who feed their industry, the NHL owners choose to torture them as well. What a league!
If the owners never intended to settle for anything short of a hard salary cap, then they should have canceled the season weeks ago. If you're going to play hard ball, play it.
Gordon is absolutely right here. All the pussyfooting around is nothing but a PR game, and a PR game for which there is absolutely no logical reason to play.
What the owners need to do is A) Cancel the season, B) Give their "no retreat from" position, C) receive the players notice of rejection, & D) Start hiring new players, those who will sign on to the new rules, for next season. Everyone knows that the NHL wants to bust the players association, and Lord knows they deserved to be busted. Why waste time pretending otherwise?
Total revenue sharing. The owners don't want a free-market system, which is odd. Most of these U.S. owners are Republicans, right?
But it's their business. Since the owners want a collective, then let's form a collective. Every last penny goes into the pot to be shared equally by all the franchises.
This line of thinking is complete garbage. No professional sports league in the United States operates on a free market system. It is a closed cartel of owners, and the players, especially on the top end of the pay scale, benefit mightily from such a system. If, instead of a closed league system where franchises have to be "awarded" by existing owners after a bribe - I mean "franchise fee" - has been paid to the league, you had a system that allowed anyone with the money to start a team, good players would be so spread out that very few would be making anything like the money they have been making. So this "free market" whining from sports writers just won't fly. And it really isn't as if the NHL owners are asking for something that isn't already being done in the NFL or the NBA. When is the last time you heard Gordon, or any other writer, complaining about the "communist" NFL? Never is when.
Where the NHL is different from the NFL or NBA is the lack of large TV revenue, which is exactly why revenue sharing shouldn't exist in the NHL. If you offer a crappy product and nobody comes to the games you will not be bailed out by shared revenue, which in this case would be other teams ticket revenues. And why should you? It may make sense in the NFL, where the Arizona Cardinals can still make money hand over fist with half empty stadiums, but how does it make sense in a league without such TV revenues? The fact is it doesn't make sense.
Gordon falls into the trap of thinking that since the owners have more money than the players, it is the owners who are automatically in the wrong. It just isn't true.
I still miss my hockey though.
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