The owners broke the players, true. Good for them. I’m not a shareholder, so I don’t really care, but whatever.
It’s insane that the players get blamed for both strikes and lockouts. They literally cannot win with you idiots. Maybe if they played for free, but I’m sure the owners->their media shills->you’d find something to complain about.
No one is saying (ok well some nutballs on the forum are) that the players are at fault for this.
You can say though that if your employer was going under, and they came to you with a deal where if you take a pay cut you can still make millions of dollars a year, then you turn it down, lose your job, then come back to a worse deal than you were originaly offered that you are a short sighted idiot.
Well, yes, clearly the PA did a poor job of negotiation. The members should be upset at their leadership.
But greedy? A moral failing? “man, this just feels so good to see those greedy fucks get what was coming to them.”??
That’s just ridiculous.
Uh, greed IS a moral failing. You know, seven deadly sins and all that.
The players wanted too much money compared to league revenue. They did not prove in any shape, way, or form that the league or teams were cheating on income. The players were earning over half NBA-level salaries with 25-30% of that revenue. Ticket prices went up year, after year, after year, far outstripping the pace of other sports - more than doubling in 11 years.
As a fan, a salary cap is a good thing for me. In fact, the entire CBA is a good thing. And that’s ALL I care about - what’s good for me as a fan, because ultimately, as a fan, I’m the one who decides the livelihood of this business. Thus, it a-fucking-mazes me that you actually think you have a point.
Are the players allowed to shoot for the stars with the contracts? Sure. But with this reasoning, I’m allowed to enjoy their humiliation and catastrophic failure.
The fact was the NHLPA thought they could be just like the basball players union. They don’t budge and the owners will eventually collapse. Well they guessed wrong…badly.
Yeah, I never understood the weakness of the NL and AL owners. Are they just not united? Making so much money they don’t care?
It’s got something to do with getting smoked in court a few times. That, and baseball makes money. It’d like to make even more, but there’s nothing damning like the Levitt Report floating around to encourage any sort of cap system or revenue sharing between the league and players.
Ben, it’s not that the players did a poor job of negotiating – they were actively, greedily trying to screw over the entire league and its fans by demanding a continuation of a salary scheme that wasn’t affordable. The PA was even attempting to screw over a good chunk of its rank and file, as the execs knew (and often even said publicly) that at least seven or eight clubs would fold (including at least three in Canada) and over a hundred NHL jobs would be lost if the new CBA didn’t include a cap and profit sharing.
The anger at the PA has little to do with its members being “greedy.” It’s got more to do with the selfishness and incredible shortsightedness they displayed while grabbing with both hands. Any deal on the PA’s terms would have killed the NHL completely within a decade.
Brett- Owners crying poverty is as old as professional sports.
Baseball makes money? That’s a relatively recent development, I guess. Selig et al., published a Blue Ribbon Report that conclusively showed that nearly every team was losing millions in the runup to the last CBA negotiations. The poverty lies have slowed down, but in the year before the CBA expires we will once against see non-stop whining about how salaries are too high and how they will have to contract the Twins if the taxpayers don’t build them a new stadium.
The owners generally win these labor battles because they are wealthier, fewer, and have the media to spread their message. That’s why they won this battle. Labor negotiations are not a test of virtue.
Jakub- In a battle over who gets what part of the money pie, why is any side more greedy than the other? The players merely wanted the owners to live up to the contracts the owners had given of their own free will and were willing to give up a tremendous amount of labor freedom from the default state(The labor laws of Canada and the United States). The owners wanted concessions, not the players.
And what’s the relevance of the ticket prices factoid?
I don’t really understand how you guys think. Owners were losing money by the bucketload, allegedly. Generally money-losing businesses stop trying to operate. The players have no say in a team folding. So if the situation was as you say(7-8 teams on the brink of folding), why lock the players out?
Why not simply ditch the 8 losers and go on about their business?
Cutting 8 teams without breaking the PA doesn’t make the remaining owners any money. Breaking the PA, now, that locks in delicious lower salaries for everyone.
Someone needs to make a Koontz gif for Ben.
Because the NHL can’t ditch eight teams, genius, without:
Turning the NHL from a national professional league into a regional one, and thereby killing whatever chance it has at any sort of national TV exposure in the US.
Killing the grassroots support for the NHL in Canada, because under the old agreement, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, and quite possibly even Montreal and Vancouver would fold. That would eventually kill the entire league, because the NHL can’t survive without this presence in Canada; it powers the league.
Anyhow, even the NHLPA has conceded that the numbers in Levitt were either accurate or damned close. Otherwise, why make a profit-sharing deal? But you keep making up these arguments and responding to yourself, big guy. Also, how the hell are the owners greedy to set up a profit-sharing system where the players get well over 50% of the revenue?
BTW, when has MLB ever produced anything like the Levitt Report? And I don’t recall baseball salaries jumping 400% or more in the past decade, either.
Brett, let’s just give it up.
Ben enjoys being stupid to aggravate people.
Brett- How can franchises that “power” the league be losing money? If the NHL requires them to survive shouldn’t they be turning a profit?
Also, going back to 22 teams would make it a regional league? Was it a regional league in 1992? This is getting sillier and sillier.
Re: Baseball
Average MLB salary now is about 2.6M, 1990 it was under $600K. Not quite the past decade, but close.
In 2000, there was the bally-hooed Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Report showing that only three teams made money over 1995-1999: http://www.mlb.com/mlb/downloads/blue_ribbon.pdf
Jakub- You so clever!
The owners losing money is largely the fault of the owners and Bettman who haven’t spent any effort or money on trying to improve the product. It started with the last labor situation. The NHL was at an all time high in popularity just having come off a fantastic 7 game finals where the Rangers won. It was a great end to end kind of series and no one had heard of the word trap yet. Even better baseball goes out on strike right before the next season is ready to start. While football is obviously around for the weekends the NHL will have no competition from the best part of the baseball season for at least a month or two. The iron is hot yet instead of striking it and reupping the current deal the owners lock out the players, drag out the negotiations for a few months, and then ultimately get minor concessions. By now the NBA has started, college hoops is in high gear, the NFL playoffs have started, and all the momentum from the previous finals is gone.
But wait it gets worse. In the shortened year the Devils win the Cup playing the trap in one of the most boring playoffs ever. Almost all teams see this as a way to be competative with the increased dilution of talent from expansion. The trap era arrives in force over the next few years and the game slows to a crawl.
Do the owners make any significant rule changes to get the game back to free skating? Do they have a competition commitee like the NFL to improve the game? No they dicker with minor rule changes that do nothing to hamper trapping gameplay and don’t improve the game at all.
The owners then decide to do idiotic things like sign a guy like Bobby Holik (a 3rd line center at best) to a $9 million dollar a year contract. I don’t blame Holik for taking it, hell I would have, but the guy is not worth 1/3rd that.
Oh and when was the last time anyone saw an NHL promotion on anything other than a channel showing an NHL broadcast? Where is the marketing?
It is like the owners wanted to fuck up the league just so they could get a good labor agreement. Essentially the owners are like like a partner in a business that spends all the company’s money on booze and hookers then rolls in the next day hungover and asks the other partner to take a pay cut to get the company back on it’s feet.
The players should have settled quicker but honestly when presented with a situation where someone else screwed everything up I can see where their hesitation comes from. The owners didn’t help the game out worth crap over the past 10 years, what are they going to do over the next 6?
– Xaroc
Brett- How can franchises that “power” the league be losing money? If the NHL requires them to survive shouldn’t they be turning a profit?
Also, going back to 22 teams would make it a regional league? Was it a regional league in 1992? This is getting sillier and sillier.
The Canadian teams are said to power the league because the sport is far more popular here than in the US. More Canadians (total, not per capita) watch the NHL than Americans; however, the US teams get a hefty share of Canadian broadcasting royalties. Also, it’s a huge problem for Canadian owners that players are paid in US dollars but revenues come from Canadian currency. This isn’t quite as bad now with $1CAD being about $0.80USD, but when the Canadian dollar was at $0.65 or below it was really hurting the Canadian teams.
Seriously Ben, educate yourself on the issues of the NHL lockout before you embarass yourself any further.
The owners then decide to do idiotic things like sign a guy like Bobby Holik (a 3rd line center at best) to a $9 million dollar a year contract. I don’t blame Holik for taking it, hell I would have, but the guy is not worth 1/3rd that.
Don’t blame that deal on “the owners”. It was one owner specifically, that of the Rangers, and they could afford to spend money like that. The problem, and one that was specifically rectified by the new CBA is that when a team like the Rangers makes a terrible deal like Holik’s, it sets the bar for the entire league. What’s a small market team like Calgary supposed to say to Iginla’s agent when his contract is up? “Well, we’d love to pay Jarome that kind of money, but we don’t spend like drunken sailors in this town”? (Calgary’s GM was quoted last week saying “For years we’ve been calling a budget what is now called a cap.”) So all the quality free agents end up signing with the same four or five clubs, reducing most small-market franchises to glorified farm teams.
The salary cap was mandatory to save the league from a few idiot owners. When you have 30 teams, and 27 owners make smart business decisions but three don’t, those three morons affect everyone negatively. It’s not the players’ fault that the league got to the position it was, but they should have accepted it far earlier, agreed to a cap last summer, and never lost the season. They had their heads in the sand for the entire duration of the lockout and they – and more importantly us fans – lost an entire season for nothing.
Boston signed Marty LaPointe (a grinding winger who broke 20 goals one time in his career) to a $5 million a year salary, not as outrageous but still well overpaying him. I realize it is not all the owners but this wasn’t caused by the players. I agree they should have accepted earlier but I still see why they were stubborn for so long. You can’t just fold immediately to everything your opponent wants.
– Xaroc
The owners were the ones paying and setting those salaries, not the players. They had the purse strings solidly in hand and went ahead and agreed to contracts that were far higher than they could afford.
I cannot shed a single tear for money they lost last year during the lockout and I sure as hell don’t blame the players for taking those salaries and negotiating them as high as they could. Certain owners can’t control themselves and they need rules to enforce control. That’s really the bottom line.
And there ARE too many teams and teams in markets that are no longer profitable. Hockey is not a sunbelt sport except in a very few places. It makes no sense to have two Florida teams, etc. The problem there is that Bettman made a promise to expand hockey’s reach and he did it without any regard for the reality of interest in a sport played on ice in cities where the only ice anyone’s ever seen is in their freezer.
And Xaroc’s right about everything else he’s said.
–Dave
Again, it wasn’t “the owners;” it was a fairly small group of them. Problem was, all it took was the idiot on Long Island giving Alexei Yashin $100 million or whatever over ten years, Jacobs in Boston giving Marty Lapointe $5 million, the new guy in Washington giving Jagr $9 million, and Sather giving fucking Bobby Holik $9 million per in NY to screw up the salary structure for the entire league under the old deal. If you wanted to really compete – both on the ice and off, as fans get pissed when everybody seems to be buying big-ticket FAs but your club – you had to spend. So you quickly got to a point where maybe seven or eight teams could really compete (although there will always be smartly run small-market clubs fluking their way to some playoff success, like Calgary and TB in 2004, Anaheim in 2002).
Pro leagues can’t operate without caps these days. It’s incredibly bad for business all around and sets up “rich market-poor market” unfairness. MLB will go through its own labor armageddon to get a cap some day. There are too many small markets getting shafted under the current system by the likes of the Yankees and Red Sox. The “I have a $200 million payroll, you can’t even scrape together $50 million! Nyah-nyah, I can pick up Al Leiter and you can’t!” crap to go on forever.
That report contained thoroughly cooked books, as has been documented by the late Doug Pappas (the earlier articles in the series are linked at the top). Briefly, baseball is notorious for underreporting income. For example, the Dodgers and Braves both report low TV revenue because their parent companies own the television stations. Many teams do not technically own the parking garages next to the stadium so they don’t have to report that income. The Cubs have started their own ticket scalping company. In general, you should never believe what the Commisioner’s office says regarding the league’s revenues.
As for a salary cap in MLB, I’ve come to decide it’s necessary, but the spending disparity in baseball was never really a problem until this century. In the 90s, the Yankees and Red Sox were among the leaders in player salaries, but there were always plenty of other teams nearby like the Braves, Mariners, or Mets. It’s only been in the past few years that those two teams have separated themselves and created a problem. Fortunately, in the Yankees case, they don’t know how to spend the money wisely.
Jagr was a superstar when he got that contract and it was exactly the same amount per year he was making before ($11 million per year). That contract had 0 to do with salary issues. Paying a lot for a player who is really good makes sense. Paying Holik $9 million is idiotic. The two deals are not even on the same planet.
– Xaroc
But the overall spread in baseball is appalling, and has been widening for a decade now. You’ve got the Yankees at the top with an incredible $208 million and the Devil Rays at the bottom with $29 million. It’s not like there are just two teams driving all this. And say what you want about the Yankees not spending the cash wisely, the Bronx dynasty was only revived when Steinbrenner really kicked open the vault in the mid-late 1990s.
MLB is a lot like the former NHL, with too much disparity in team markets and payroll. I’ve lost almost all of my interest in baseball the past four or five years or so, as the league seems to have zero interest in providing something of a level playing field. Yeah, I know – this is the time that Steve or somebody comes in and starts screaming Minnesota Twins! or Oakland A’s. But we all know in April who’s most likely going to win it all in October, flukes notwithstanding.
Plus, the “that team can afford better players than my team can” perception means a lot, too. Even if the Yanks, Sox, Braves, Dodgers, etc. don’t win it all every year, they can still afford to gather up MLB’s biggest stars and showcase them for their fans 162 games a year. For casual fans, what’s the point in following the Pirates, Blue Jays, Indians, Devil Rays, etc., when you know you’re very likely to never see a superstar in your starting nine? Or, even if you luck out and develop one, know that he’s going to flee for a bigger market while he’s still in his prime?
Saying that money issues have only been a problem in MLB for the past few years is ridiculous. Teams like the Pirates and Expos have been serving as farm clubs to richer rivals for well over a decade now. There would be a lot more MLB franchise movement, if only the existing small-market teams had anywhere half-decent to go.