Amnesty Targets History

So I lost the good fight on amnesty clauses -- I guess it was too attractive a dumb idea to not get tapped. Teams will get two amnesty buyouts each -- one this year and one next.

Which brings us to this article listing potential amnesty targets for each team.

What gets me is that if you read down the list, it reads like a whos-who of Ottawa Senators history:

• Marian Hossa in Chicago
• Anton Volchenkov in New Jersey
• Alexi Yashin in Brooklyn New York
• Wade Reddin in the other New York
• Dany Heatley in Minnesota
• Martin Havlat in San Jose

I suspect if you look at it, you'll see more Senators alumni on that list than any other team.

Man, those glory days were something, eh?

And really, who on today's roster is going to attract the same kind of reminiscing?  Spezza?  Yes.  Karlsson?  Absolutely.  Alfredsson?  Without a doubt.  And after that?... does anyone seriously think we are going to be remembering the glory days of Colin Greening?

It was fun while it lasted.  Now we're just trying to not be Toronto.

Chirping The CBA: Contracts

Puck Daddy says the NHL's concern is around four player contracting issues. Let's pretend that these are the real issues and have a look at them, shall we?

1. Cap circumvention in which contracts are buried outside of the NHL, be it Wade Redden in the AHL or Cristobal Huet in Europe.

2. Cap circumvention on long-term deals that front-load salaries and then "back dive" later in the contract, with annual salaries dropping by a large percentage in order to influence the cap hit.

I'm listing these two issues together because they are A) related and B) ass-backwards -- the first is a direct consequence of the second. The only reason that universal whipping boy Wade Redden is buried in the AHL is because Rangers idiot GM Glen Sather signed Redden to that ridiculous contract in the first place.

I understand that the league is concerned about both these issues because of the negative impact they have on running franchises, but the problem isn't the players. Wade Redden wouldn't have been able to hold Sather hostange if Sather wasn't buying. I'm sure that Redden would have happilly signed for $25 million. Or $20 million. Or maybe if that was Sather's threshold of sanity, then maybe someone else would have signed Reddin to some other amount, and he'd be someone else's problem now.

This whole thing is like situations where bus drivers don't pick up passengers, and the bus company says to the passengers, what can we do to make this situation better? How about have the bus drivers stop the bus and pick up the passengers when they should?

If the league has a problem with the way that their owners and GMs are behaving, well then fix your owners and GMs.

Maybe the grownups should start acting like grownups and A) stop doing stupid things, and B) live with the consequences of their actions.

3. There is $5.7 billion in future contractual liabilities to players, i.e. long-term contracts that have already been signed. How can NHL owners deal with those commitments and still have the freedom to, for example, refinance their stakes or sell the team?

Ugh. See the whole rant above about "living with the consequences of your actions". That $5.7 billion hole has been dug, now you have to live with it. Trying to make it hard to make the hole bigger is a different problem.

4. Rewriting the contracting rules for young players, from contract term to arbitration rights. The idea is to shift the money from a player's "Second Contract" to his third contract. It's a way to create a little more fiscal sanity when it comes to big money thrown at still unproven players. It's also not a money-grab by the NHL — rather, it shares the wealth with established players in a way the system doesn't encourage at the moment.

I go back and forth on this issue.

One the one hand, keeping young players cheap is good business sense (for the owners). It also builds in space for the inevitable cap drop in the future, in that the younger players won't be paid as much while the cap space to pay them also drops. This helps protect the older contracts in a reduced cap world.

On the other hand, many -- most? -- of these guys won't see a third contract. At the end of the day, we watch the game to see the game played. We don't tune in to watch the owners and GMs make money. So it would be nice to see some more of these guys get a bit of a payday before they lose their spots.

The whole message behind these "issues" that the league has is that the individual owners can't control themselves, so they want the players to fix the problem that the owners made.

Same story as last time. Same story as next time.

The situation is exasperated by the fact that there are some teams that make a lot of money (ie Toronto) and this is pushing league revenues up, which lifts the payroll requirements for the poorer teams. This makes it harder for these teams to continue financially, which leads to the kinds of ownership debacles that we've seen (Nashville, Phoenix, etc).

Some of these teams are not viable. They won't be viable unless either A) there is a substantial cash infusion from the more successful teams (ie Toronto) or B) they get moved someplace where there is a population willing to support them. However the league's refusal to contemplate either of these possibilities just compounds the problems that they've continued to make.

So what is it going to take for long-term viability?

1) Move or close some of the financially weaker teams. Phoenix, I'm looking at you. Find someplace viable or shut them down.

2) Real revenue sharing -- something like 20% of all revenues go into a pot, which is then distributed by proportionally inverse revenues. Ideally break-even teams like Ottawa break even. Phoenix and Nashville get a ton of money. Toronto just pays. (Everybody wins!) But that's a problem for the league to solve with its franchisees. As long as the players get paid, they really shouldn't care where the money is coming from. (Or going.)

3) Real limits on contracts. Like five years max. Like "the money you pay in a July-to-June calendar year -- including bonuses -- is the cap hit." Like a cap tax for contracts signed but not active with the big team (ie the Wade Redden clause).

My guess is that in the end we might see some limits on contracts. The league is actually making some steps in this area with previous offers.

But the rest of these issues? The league has had its collective head in the sand for so long, I don't see them changing now.

And in five or seven years when this CBA expires, we'll do it all again.

Taking A Run At Fehr

Elliotte Friedman talks about the NHL's disdain for NHLPA head Fehr:

Rightly or wrongly, even moderates among the teams question his true devotion to the players, believing he has invested nothing in the sport and will damage it, simply walking away once this is all over.

Thing is, in the long run a disinterested 3rd party is what you do want to help you come to a fair, workable settlement. Those who think Fehr is damaging "the game"* are the same ones who think that if the players just relax and become indentured slaves to the individual teams, we could all just get on with playing hockey. And isn't that what everybody wants?

It is in Fehr's best interest to get the best deal possible for his clients. That is the business he is in, and that's the reputation he needs to continue to maintain and build. He won't be in the NHLPA for ever, but he will have to work afterwards. And standing aside while his clients get a bad deal does nothing to enhance his future employment prospects.

I hope the NHLPA holds firm behind Fehr. Completely folding for the owners last time round didn't buy lasting labour peace, and it won't this time either.

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*= by which they mean the owner's pocketbook

Optimistic Penguin Is Optimistic

Anyone else amused by the fact that after all the lockout-fanboys went through a couple of cycles of optimism-to-pessimism over the press releases, offer exchanges, and instant-refusals -- now they're all getting optimistic again because there hasn't been any new press?

Up until now, offers and public negotiation was good.  When the press stopped, everyone got depressed, until someone made a new offer, and then optimism spiked again.

Now we've gone through a couple of weeks where there's been nothing public happening.  There are rumors of secret negotiations, and guess what?  Everyone's optimistic again because this means that "they've decided to stop posturing" and "they are getting down to business".  I'm sure once these negotiations collapse everyone will get depressed again.

It's just amusing that the media in general takes any excuse to be optimistic.

Chirping The CBA: Confusing Punishments

I'm starting to think that the NHL actively dislikes its own owners, and has frankly stopped pretending otherwise.

One of the clauses in the text of the NHL's latest offer (which has been left behind by the PA's stampede to make three insta-rejected counter-offers) was this golden idea:

All years of existing SPCs with terms in excess of five (5) years will be accounted for and charged against a team's Cap (at full AAV) regardless of whether or where the Player is playing. In the event any such contract is traded during its term, the related Cap charge will travel with the Player, but only for the year(s) in which the Player remains active and is being paid under his NHL SPC. If, at some subsequent point in time the Player retires or ceases to play and/or receive pay under his NHL SPC, the Cap charge will automatically revert (at full AAV) to the Club that initially entered into the contract for the balance of its term.

If the AHL salary provision wasn't enough, the League wants to burden teams which sign obscenely-lengthed contracts with the cap hit should the player retire.

Now I've been on the record as saying that if owners want to do stupid things they should have to live with the outcome -- good or bad. Having a team trade away a long contract and then later getting whacked with a cap hit when that player retires strikes me as being excessive.

Especially if you consider that many of these contract will probably be coming home to roost after the current ownership has been replaced. Definitely after the management has been replaced.

So what is the point of this cluase? Who, really, are we punishing with this?

While amusing from a karma point of view, I don't think this really does anything to build the league in the long term.

Chirping The CBA: Owners Lob A Fastball

So it sounds like we're down to serious activity with the CBA negotiations.  Whether or not this is a serious offer or a serious PR stunt remains to be seen.

So let's peruse the low highlights of the offer:

50/50 split of Hockey Related Revenues

This marks a serious movement on the league after we started at a ridiculous 42-58 split.  So this is movement to what is commonly thought of as a "fair" split.  But in the longer run it doesn't mean much.  It certainly won't solve the problem of Phoenix, let alone those other southern American franchises which are not profitable -- something which was the express goal of the NHL in these negotiations.

Free agency would start at 28 or eight years of service

...which is an increase on both counts in the current deal.  Locking up players rights longer means that the owners have assets longer that they can leverage either in the arena or against each other for trade.

Entry level contacts last four years

...same reason, excepts this keeps players cheap for an additional year.  I'm not sure I like this.  The players are the lifeblood on the league, and many of them don't last long enough to see the large payouts.  Keeping them cheap longer seems a lousy way to short-change money.  If anything, the owners are offering the existing players a way to hedge their future earnings by restricting the earnings of the future union members -- if young players are cheaper longer, then they won't be providing pressure on caps -- meaning the existing players can get paid more in the short run.  But my feeling is that those young guys who are not going to make it should get paid more.  Seems... fairer some how.

Put those three things together and you have the total pool being cut, but younger players are going to cost less over the long run.  This will only inflate free agent salaries as if you make the bulk of your players cheap, you have to make up the difference somewhere else.

Maximum contract length of five years

This is such a good idea it stuns me.  I'm shocked to see such a common sense proposal -- from either side, frankly.  Now I'm sure that once the CBA is signed, the clever wonks will be all over it looking for other ways to pay players ridiculous amounts of money.  But this proposal would limit the amount of damage that owners and managers could do to their franchises, damage that all to often outlives said owners and managers.

Revenue sharing pool of $200 million

I'm not sure this is enough to make those other franchises viable.  It is a start, though.  No word on how this pool would be generated.  If it is an off-the-top skim from all franchises, including the ones in trouble, well then it is laughably insufficient.

Arbitration would still exist

Only notable because the NHL's previous offers explicitly killed arbitrarion.

NHL Players in AHL would have their contracts count against the signing NHL club's cap

...aka the Wade Redden clause.  I don't like this one, I think it penalizes a NHL club more than it should for signing a bad contract.  By all means make them pay out the contract value, but I'm not against burying that contract in the AHL as long as the hockey player gets paid.  Yes, such a clause would act as a disincentive to making bad offers.  But it would also reduce the supply of bad contracts that every year are sent up and down through waivers, which reduces the chance that someone might be picked up off of waivers.  Sure, Redden is a bad deal at $6 million.  But $3 million?  Maybe someone* would take a chance on him.

Must... not... smirk.

My Conclusion

I think this straddles the middle ground between serious offer and PR-pandering.  50-50 is widely seen as a "fair" split, echoing the levels seen in other professional sports.  Since much has been made of the revenue splits in the mainstream media, this would make Joe Q. Public think yeah, we're there, get the deal done.  The revenue sharing is an improvement -- "yeah, we're there, get the deal done." However the devil is going to be in the details.  I don't think the PA will want to give on the free agency or the entry level contracts.  The "Wade Redden" clause is a blatant throw-away clause, something the owners are willing to "walk away" from in order to gain another concession -- I doubt it will make it into the final agreement.

In total, I think that this could be the basis for a serious counter offer from the PA, and if the PA ignores or craps all over it, the league can use it as a platform to blast the media with the message "well we tried, but the union is the reason why you don't have any hockey".

Either way, the union has to respond.  I'd look for a counter offer of some form from the union, probably before the end of the week.  The media spin, of course, starts now.

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*= OK yeah not me either, but hypothetically speaking.

Chirping The CBA: The Amnesty Clause

One of the more interesting parts of the CBA process is that it gives us a chance to discuss some more intriguing ideas as far as regulations go. These new regulations can change the way the teams do business in interesting ways, adding wrinkles to the way teams go about building their rosters.

The "Amnesty Clause" is not one of those interesting ideas.

After the NBA lockout of 2011, a majestic clause was put into place. The clause allows each team to exterminate the burden of one albatross contract, thereby freeing the team from the immense weight of an ill-advised decision. An amnesty clause is essentially Pepto Bismol for regret.

From management's standpoint, this is the ultimate mulligan -- you can make a mistake and then avoid having to pay for it.

And this is why there shouldn't be one.

Mistakes -- and especially mistakes made by management and owners -- should hurt. Frankly, that's the only way these people learn. If you are going to do something stupid, you should deal with the consequences.

If you are going to sign Wade Redden to a six-year, thirty-six million dollar contract, then by god you should have to pay the man his money.

Look at it the other way. If Sidney Crosby and his agent get roaring drunk and sign a twelve-year, fifteen million dollar contract with the Florida Panthers, nobody is going to let them have a mulligan, are they?

Now there is an argument for a partial mulligan. If a new owner comes in, maybe he should get one or two. Maybe if a new GM is installed the argument could be made for granting one. As long as the player in question still gets paid some how. The only problem with this is that we already have a mechanism for doing this -- the buy-out. Teams can buy their way out of contracts that they don't like. It costs them both in money and cap space, but they can get out of it.

Put it all together and I think this is a dumb idea, and that it isn't really necessary.

Chirping The CBA: Selling Cap Space

So one fine idea which will never see the light of day in the actual CBA was an idea in one of the offers by the players that rich teams which found themselves in need of hockey talent but with a shortage of cap space could undertake to buy unused cap space from another team for actual cash money.   This I thought was an interesting idea.  It would be a ready-made mechanism to transfer an unused asset from a poor team in exchange for the cash money that a rich team is making hand over fist.

Of course I'd want to limit it.  Say that at opening night, your cap hit had to be in line with the regulations for the season.  Say that said cap space had to be purchased at the full year rate, even if it was only used for a third of the season.  So if you needed to hire a guy who got $3 million a year, you'd pay at least $3 million to some other team to use their cap space for the rest of the year.  And oh yes you still have to pay the trade and pay the guy.  And then find some way to be legal before the next opening night.

Of course people won't go for it.  It would let rich teams like Toronto buy their way out of their terrible management, and while I agree that's bad, something like this would be a market to permit teams with unused cap to get money from the richer teams.  And the rich teams would be getting something for their money, unlike revenue sharing.

McKenzie on the CBA

TSN's Bob McKenzie considers the CBA negotiations.  Although I disagree with his conclusions, it is a pretty good detailed survey of the situation today as we head into the lockout.  I agree with his assessments of both the league's and the PA's relative offers: they both totally miss the point.

Unrelated: The last time we had a strike, poker made its big splash into our collective attentions.  While poker has definitely had its last gasp as a "mainstream" "sport", I wonder if something else interesting will make its appearance in the gap that hockey will leave.

Chirping The CBA: Wake Me Up When It Starts To Matter

So it's been a month since anything happened in the CBA negotiations. I mean really, the player's "counter offer" was so out there that I wondered if the NHLPA was even taking the process seriously.

When you consider that the "counter offer" basically boiled down to A) suggesting that maybe the owners should share revenues between themselves more, and B) reducing the revenue split down to 54% for three years before jamming it back up to 57% of revenues, there's no wonder that the owners thought this was a non-starter.

Now there's been a counter-counter offer from the league, which would A) redefine "hockey related revenue" (down, of course) and B) set the revenue split between owners and players at 50% for five of the six years proposed.

There's been no mention of the other details that I've been hoping for.

But since there is still two weeks before 15 September, we are still not at the point that any of this should be taken seriously.

I Love The Smell Of Hypocricy In The Morning

The title of this article says it all: Minnesota Wild owner on crying poverty then spending $196 million on Zach Parise, Ryan Suter

Let's review:

In April, [Wild owner Leipold] told the Star Tribune that his team wasn't turning a profit, and put the onus on player salaries:

"We're not making money, and that's one reason we need to fix our system. We need to fix how much we're spending right now. [The Wild's] revenues are fine. We're down a little bit in attendance, but we're up in sponsorships, we're up in TV revenue. And so the revenue that we're generating is not the issue as much as our expenses. And [the Wild's] biggest expense by far is player salaries."

Three months later, Leipold authorized his general manager to sign Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to contracts totaling $196 million — including $50 million in signing bonuses in the first three years of the contracts.

Everyone keeping up now?

This is why there has to be brakes on the insanity that is player contracts.  The players themselves, while not totally blameless, are certainly not the prime reason for the hole that the Wild are carefully digging themselves.  And while I'm not opposed to Leipold being creative with his future as an owner, he's taking an awfully dangerous risk with the franchise, one that could hamstring it for the next ten years or more.  And that's likely into the reign of the next owner, after Leipold goes bust or decides hemoraging money isn't such a good idea after all.

Chirping The CBA: No Movement Clauses

SensTown asks if the League should do away with No Trade Clauses in contracts:

It's another offseason filled with players wanting to be shipped somewhere new, but only if they approve the destination and I can't help but feel that rightly or wrongly, the end conclusion is hurting the game and frustrating the fans.

My reply in a comment on that post:

No. Frankly the only answer is the one you hand wave away at the top of your post: if management doesn't want to deal with NMC/NTC contracts, they shouldn't offer or sign them. If they sign them, they should live with them.

The NTC is about player compensation, the recognition that at a certain level of skill, the player wants some kind of control over their destiny and career so that if a contract does go sour, they don't get shipped off to some career graveyard like Edmonton (see also Dany Heatley) in exchange for a bag of pucks (see also Dustin Penner).

Banning NTC contracts would put the power disproportionately in the hands of management, and like him or loath him, Heatley's history with the Senators had afforded him the respect that gained him some measure of control over his destiny should a move be required.

You claim these contracts "hurt hockey". I don't buy that. They hurt individual franchises, yes, and I can see how individual fans could confuse the two. If a franchise becomes stuck with a player who doesn't want to be there, then that's a problem. However, shipping him off somewhere else he doesn't want to be like Edmonton doesn't fix the problem. It merely transfers it. And while shipping Heatley off to Edmonton would have solved Ottawa's immediate problem, it wouldn't have done anything for the Edmonton fan since Heatley clearly didn't want to be there either.

Chirping The CBA: Alleged Opening Offer Terms

There are media reports that the owners have tabled a summary of an opening offer to the NHLPA.  Keeping in mind that an opening offer is as much about gauging the opposition's attitude as it is towards setting the table for constructive talks (ie: the details mean nothing in the grand scheme of things), let's quickly look at those same alleged details in the framework of my CBA wishlist:

• Reduce players share of revenues from 57% to 46%: this is a meaningless position.  We know the owners want more of the pie.  46% is never going to happen.  It is a good starting point from which to compromise.
• UFA status now only happens at 10 years, not 7:  This I think is a ridiculous idea.  How many players' careers make it even to the seven year mark?  Increasing the length of time a player's rights are "owned" does nothing for the game, really.
• Contracts limited to five years: yeah, that's pretty much verbatim one of my wishlist items.  I like this.  I don't understand why the owners are talking sense in this matter.  It is not in the interest of the individual teams to have shorter contracts even if it is in the interest of the League's overall health.  Maybe the grownups really are in charge for once.
• End salary arbitration: honestly I don't know enough about arbitration to make an intelligent comment about this.
• Entry level deals five years instead of three:  I don't like this, I think that there needs to be some more give on the matter of entry level deals.  Forcing new guys into a standard cookie-cutter deal for three years is bad enough -- there's a difference between Erik Karlsson and Zack Smith right from the get-go.  Locking them both up for five years at the same peanuts rate is stupid.  My suspicion is that this is a throw-away position to be compromised away through negotiation.
• No more signing bonuses: I don't like this.  How management and players structure the transfer of money to the players shouldn't be an issue, as long as the cap hit issue is addressed (see the next item).
• Future deals all have the same financial value for each year of the contract:  This is why they want the signing bonuses eliminated, because it makes the math simple for analysts like Dave Hodge to follow without a capologist calculator.  I'd let owners and players structure deals differently through different years as long as the cap hit reflected the money paid.  If they want to pay some guy (say) an extra $1 million as a signing bonus in year 1, I have no problem with that, as long as the cap hit for that year reflected that $1 million.

Overall: this sounds like a pretty standard opening offer.  There's no way it will be accepted (not that the owners would be heartbroken if it was).  It is a starting point for discussion.  There's stuff to like in here and stuff to hate.  But I don't agree that this amounts to the owners "declaring war" on the NHLPA.  What matters more is how the NHLPA reacts to the offer, how reasonable they are with a counter-offer, and how willing to move the owners really are.  Only once we see that, probably over the next two or three weeks, will we really understand if we're dealing with a contract negotiation or a "war".

CBA Wishlist

OK, so the open secret here is that there's going to be a lockout of the NHLPA by the NHL owners in September.  The reason for this is because the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is apparently so heavilly tilted in favor of the players that they players would be quite happy to see another year run under it.

The owners, on the other hand, are in the position where around a third of them (I have read 10 of the 30 teams) would lose less money by not playing hockey in October than they would if hockey was played.

So, well, lockout, with the theory that they will be forcing the players to consider the potential damage to their careers (which for many players will be breathtakingly short anyways) and loss of a year's earnings.

Yeah.  We'll see how well that works, shall we?

Having watched hockey in one form or another for a few years, I have some thoughts about what I'd like to see change in the CBA.  Note that I'm not coming down on this from the side of either the owners or the players, although my bias is towards the players personally.  I'm trying to propose things that will make the NHL a better league, something which benefits the owners and the players both.

Player Contracts

The problem the last time around we did this was that some of the owners who had money had gone on a spending binge that tied up insane amounts of money to players that A) the owners couldn't afford and B) had the side-effect of raising the expectations proportionally for everyone else.  Having spent themselves into a hole, the owners were demanding that the players dig the league out of this predicament.  Which they did, through the introduction of the salary cap et al.

There are two problems here that can't really be addressed by any CBA (these proposals included): A) owners and management are smart people and will find clever ways around any rules that actually get written in order to spend money they don't have; and B) owners and management are dumb in that they'll use said clever ways to spend money they don't have and dig themselves another hole, and the next time the CBA comes up for renegotiation we'll play the same game again.

This time around the clever way/dumb result is the insane contract lengths that marquee players are getting these days.  Eight years for Quick.  Ten for Kovalchuck.  Twelve for Crosby.  I don't know how many years Luongo got initially, but he's still got ten to go.

The purpose of these contract lengths is to pay marquee players large amounts of money by planning to pay them much less at the end.  Since the cap hit is the total contract payout divided by the length, you can pay someone a large amount of money now, and still have a cap hit such that you don't have to pack the rest of the team with league-minimum entry-level type deals.  In Crosby's case, this allows Pittsburgh to pay Crosby $12.some million over the first three years, and then by reducing that number to $3 million over the last three years they get a manageable cap hit of around $8.7 million.

The thing is, it has always been a dumb idea.  The player probably won't turn out to expectations, and you end up with mediocre players eating both cash and cap space.  Or getting dumped into the AHL where the salary on their contract doesn't against the NHL team's cap (see also our favorite 6-year, $36 million man, Wade Reddin, who ended up playing in the AHL and getting paid more than most of the rest of the AHL -- combined).

So there are two things we need to do to create a disincentive against being excessively clever: make contracts more dangerous by forcing teams to live with their contracts, and limiting the maximum damage that these contracts can do to franchises.

So, my proposals:

1. Change the cap hit calculation to be the money paid, July 1 to June 30, for that playing year.  Management can still play with the individual amounts paid each year through a contract, but the cap hit is what is paid.
2. No more burying bad contracts in the minors.  1-way contracts stick with the big league team.  If a player doesn't make the cut, then have something like 75% of the cap hit still be charged to the team's cap.  If a player holds out or violates his contract (like running off to play in the KHL) then this doesn't apply.
3. I like the idea of buyouts but I want them still to hurt when applied.  Limiting them to a certain time of year is good; limiting the number that a team can do per year (and maybe, additionally a lower aggregate number over every four years) is also good.
4. Maximum contract length is four or five years.  That way, future franchise owners and management are not hamstrung too long by bad contracts.

None of this will happen easily because A) owners and management want the flexibility to be smart and believe there won't be any negative consequences for them; and B) the players think, if someone wants the flexibility to pay me $12 million while only costing them $8 million in cap hit, who am I to say no to that?

But for the health of the NHL franchises, which will all hopefully live on after the current owners are bankrupt and the management has all been fired, some kind of damage limitation has to happen.  The League really has to be the grown-up here and take a long term view of the entire organization's long term health instead of the 2 to 5 year view that management and owners typically take.

Cap Inflation

One of the interesting effects of the CBA was to tie the cap to league revenues.  Revenues go up, the cap (and minimum) go up with it.  The theory is, a rising tide lifts all boats.

It does make comparing apples to apples difficult though.  Since the last CBA went into effect, the cap has risen around 80%.  This means that contract values (statistics cash values of players) are hard to compare year over year, let alone across multiple years.

What would be more interesting -- and make things easier to compare -- would be to write contracts in terms of percentages of the cap.  So you wouldn't pay Jason Spezza $7 million, you'd pay him 8% of the cap.   Which, if the rules above applied, would help keep the damage being done to a franchise right out in public where the League can get a good sniff of it.

This won't happen because it would mean the owners would have to pay their stars more.

In the same vein something has to be done about the cap floor.  If the league really wants the smaller market teams to survive (forget succeed, just survive) without a revolving door of ownership, they have to make the smaller teams more able to spend to their budgets.

Revenue Sharing

Frankly, I think revenue sharing has no place in the CBA.  Once the gross revenue split(s) between the players and teams are decided, what the owners decide to do between themselves with whats left in terms of revenue splitting is their business.

The whole point of the cap was to ensure that the smaller teams have better access to big name/big skill players and have a better chance at overall success.  I think the wild-wild-west nature of the playoffs runs, where entry-into or failure-to-make the playoffs happens by hairs of points, plus the fact that there has not been much in terms of a dynastic hockey power, since the CBA marks this as overall a success.

On the other hand, franchises are always going to be unequal.  Not every franchise is going to be blessed with a history-steeped, hockey-mad, population dense area surrounding not only its arena but its city and region.  Frankly if the last thirty years can't blow MLSE's profitability out of the water, nothing ever will.  At the same time, Phoenix is putting a winning team on the ice but can't make it at the box office.  New Jersey made it to the finals, but I read that their owner is having finding the proverbial nickels to rub together -- which is a problem with the ownership, not the franchise, but still a problem for those in the front office.  In general, I read that there are potentially ten clubs that will lose less money if hockey is not played than they will if it is.  That's a third of the league, and there's no way you can consider that healthy long-term.

With all due respect to the fans of these franchises in trouble -- at some point the league is going to have to decide if the costs of carrying weaker owners/markets/franchises is really worth it in the long run.  There are options -- new owners, moving franchises to new markets, or outright revoking the franchises -- but bleeding the rich to keep tilting at arenas in the f---ing desert is not a long term recipe for success.

In general, revenue sharing only makes sense if you think the league really needs the number of teams that it has, in the locations it currently has.  And I don't.

But the bottom line is where I started: franchise revenue sharing has no place in the CBA.  What the owners/league decides to do with their share of the revenues should be entirely up to them.

Player Discipline

Overall the spinning-wheel-o-justice is not really any worse than it has been.  For all the guff I give Brendan Shanahan for his unwillingness to swing the Shahana-ban hammer more, he's been willing to stand up on YouTube and explain most of his non-actions.  This is the first step of improvement, and I hope that he (or whomever follows along after him) continues this reaching out to the fans and players to explain the league's actions.

I would prefer that "intent" wasn't ever an excuse for application of discipline, or lack there of.  There's no intent cop-out for off-side or delay-of-game.  There shouldn't be intent cop-out for head-shots.

I would like to see more serious fines for player violations.  $2500 is pocket change for too many of these guys.  Fines should be proportional to both the offense and the salary earned.

Related, I would also like to see fines levelled more at bench and front-office staff for repeat on-ice offenders.  At some point the teams have to take responsibility for the fact that they are employing some of these guys because -- not in spite of, but because -- of their willingness to indulge in hackery and goonery.  Which may be fine, but if we are fining and suspending the player, I'd like to see management held responsible too.

Realignment

The move of Atlanta to Winnipeg proves the point about revenue sharing, and that the League gets it, at least after a fashion.  The league was better off with strong support in a small market than with tepid or no support in a large market.

That said, the League needs more flexibility on realignment if and when franchises moved.  With the exception of leaving the East and West unbalanced in terms of playoffs and franchise numbers, the last realignment plan had several good points I would have liked to see:

• a better playoffs format, with more variety in the potential opponent seeding
• every team visiting every other team at least once per year
• Winnipeg in the West where they belong

I totally get why the NHLPA blocked the realignment over the winter.  But specifically some kind of  realignment has to happen as part of this CBA to deal with Winnipeg.  But in general the league needs more flexibility to deal with franchise movement.


In Conclusion


Most of these issues are probably orthoganal to everyone at the CBA's bargaining table except possibly the League.  The players want to look after themselves, and the owners want to look after themselves.

If anything, the NHLPA has a better long-term perspective since the majority of the players understand that their stay in the league is necessarily brief, and the PA especially has to protect the interests of the future members before they are actually members.  By contrast, the owners probably delude themselves that they'll either stay in this forever minting money or sell-up to some bigger sucker, at which point the mess becomes someone else's problem.

The only potential grown-ups at the table are the League -- and only potentially, since they dance to the tunes played by the owners.  But the squabbling over these issues isn't doing the long term viability of the League any good.

NHL Hockey is enjoying some of its best success ever.  The League just needs to be careful that in an attempt to slice up the current pie they don't make it difficult to keep growing the pie larger.

Overall though I'll say we'll see some movement on these issues, some movement against these issues, and some movement on issues I know nothing about.

And I predict that which this CBA has expired, some of the owners will have dug themselves a different hole they expect the players of the day to dig them out of.

Update(s):

The section on Revenue Sharing was lifted pretty much verbatim from a comment I left on this Sens Shot article on the subject.  Jared Crozier has posted a comprehensive dissection of my arguments listed in that comment.  He and I are approaching the discussion from different viewpoints; it is natural we have different ideas on the way forward.