National Hockey League locks out its players

FOX ^ | 16 September 2012 | AP Story

[smokingfrog]

NEW YORK – The clock struck midnight, and the NHL turned into another sports league closed for business.

Unable to reach agreement on a new labor deal, the National Hockey League locked out its players at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, the third major pro sport to impose a work stoppage in the last 18 months, behind the NFL and NBA.

The action also marks the fourth shutdown for the NHL since 1992, including a year-long dispute that forced the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season when the league successfully held out for a salary cap.

That fight ended with the latest collective bargaining agreement, and when it ended Commissioner Gary Bettman followed through on his longstanding pledge to lock out the players if no deal was in place.

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly confirmed the shutdown was in effect. The union said it would have no comment.

The sides were so far apart in their discussions that they didn't even meet face-to-face for negotiations on Saturday.

[Beaten Valve]

So sick of this crap...

-LA Kings season ticketholder

[pepsionice]

I think if they can struck through the entire season...it’ll finally kill off most interest, and someone will have to restart some Canadian league deal, with most salaries down in the $100k to $400k a season range.

[Bullish]

-LA Kings season ticketholder

As am I bro.

Everything the players AND the owners do is designed to screw the fans out of more money. It sucks!!!!

[NTHockey]

I’m with the players this time. It is the owners who are offering the obscene contracts - think Suter and Parise - and now they want the players to take another 25% cut!

The players should all sign contracts with European leagues and not return until they get an agreement without rollbacks. Malkin and Gonchar have already done so; Brodeur is on the way. If Crosby, Ovechkin and the Staals go, the owners are SOOL. Replacement players won’t cut it.

[hadaclueonce]

killing the golden goose ping!

[oh8eleven]

Everything the players AND the owners do is designed to screw the fans out of more money.
It's not just hockey but every sport - AND - not just the fans getting screwed, but the taxpayers too.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Well, Glad I hold season tickets to the AHL.

Sorry, no athlete is worth 15 million a year, especially when the same fans will come see him if he gets 4 million a year.

My teenage son had the best solution for sports. Get rid of the unions and only give Athletes 5 year contracts with +/- 20% dollar figures each year based on performance.

[SeminoleCounty]

And blame it all on the owners....the players are willing to play. Many of the current stars will be playing in Europe, others in some minor leagues. Unlike other sports, hockey players have other pro options and can handle a long work stoppage

The owners and the league screwed themselves because they could move some of the struggling franchises to Canada, where the economy is much better. Why they worked so hard to keep the Phoenix Coyotes in Phoenix? That has to be one of the stupidest sports business moves ever

Unfortunately, your rank and file Business Socialists will blame the players fully...and be dumb enough to call it a “strike”. It is the owners who shut the league down

[shove_it]

[oh8eleven]

My teenage son had the best solution for sports.
With all due respect, the best solution is to stop allowing taxpayer money to be available for team owners. Let the franchise go out of business if the fans won't support it.
Good example - Buffalo Bills. About 8-10 years ago, owner Ralph Wilson (a multimillionaire) couldn't get anyone to cough up money for "stadium renovations and naming rights."
So he went begging to Albany and they gave him $100 million of taxpayers dollars. WTF do Pols care - it ain't their money. Then Wilson had the gall to name the stadium after himself.
A few months ago, he was back in Albany begging once again. The team sux, the owner sux and if the few fans left in Buffalo won't support it, sell the team and move it to LA.

[PGR88]

Bastards.

I thought it was all posturing, and they would get a deal done on time. Can’t believe they will have ANOTHER lockout.

[Dartman]

Pay the top player in the league 1 million per year and base everyone else's salary relative to that. Bring the ticket prices back to reality. I've always said that the criteria for owning an NHL franchise should be that if you can't have a backyard rink in your city during the winter (due to local climate), you don't get a team. It's a WINTER sport. Flame away.

[SamAdams76]

Growing up in Boston back in the 1970s, I remember going to Red Sox and Bruins games on newspaper route money. On a sunny afternoon, I'd take the subway over to Fenway Park and purchase a bleacher seat for $1.75. For an extra 50 cents (if the game wasn't sold out), I could purchase what they called at the time a "grandstand pass" which allowed me to roam the grandstand looking for empty seats. More often or not, I'd be in the front row by the 7th inning as many adults would leave the game early to beat the traffic home.

The Bruins were a little more expensive but a decent seat could be had for under $5. I'd take the subway to North Station the day of the game and ask the ticket window for the best available seat for whatever money I had to spend at the time.

During the time I was 13-17 years old, I must have seen over 200 Red Sox and Bruins games (didn't like the Celtics and the Patriots were down in Foxboro). This was only 30-35 years ago!

My kids never had the experience of going to games on their own as it was way beyond their reach financially. The few times I took my sons to Fenway, it costed me a couple hundred dollars or more per event when you factor in parking, food, etc.

I don't blame player salaries for the situation. It's just the law of supply and demand. Ticket prices skyrocketed because people (and mostly corporations) were willing to pay the higher prices.

When I went to games in the 1970s, you had mostly real fans there. Mostly working class people who might get a hot dog and a couple beers but would take the subway there and not spend a lot of money on souvenirs and such.

Starting in the 1980s, corporations started buying up season tickets because they could then offer the tickets to clients and potential clients as gratuities and to top performers as perks. Thus the demographics of the spectators changed radically. You had a lot more well-heeled spectators who would pay for overpriced souvenirs to take home to the kids (or they'd have kids with them) and pay the higher concession prices. Suddenly ballparks started offering higher quality food items and microbrew beer to their menus instead of just soggy hot dogs and watered down Budweiser. Most patrons would think nothing of spending $50 a person or more on food and drink alone.

This is all not to mention television revenues which became enormous - especially for the NFL. In fact, the story of the NFL under Pete Rozelle is a fascinating one if you like business stories. I would highly recommend reading books on how Pete Rozelle built the NFL into a cash-cow.

So professional sports teams became multi-billion dollar businesses and player salaries skyrocketed as well. The average fan who used to go to the ballpark multiple times each season was now content to watch the games at home (on a big screen TV) and let the corporate people go to the actual park and limit their own attendance to an occasional one-off appearance - like how you might go to Disneyland or Las Vegas once every five years or so.

Well in recent years, corporations are tightening their belts and are spending much less on corporate seats. My own company pulled out of Fenway Park two years ago (we had a block of 6 seats) as the benefits of having this perk to hand out no longer justified the bottom line expense.

So we are seeing a lot more empty seats on stadiums then we used to. I believe that the business of professional sports has peaked and an adjustment is necessary. Sports teams are now overvalued and as ticket and TV revenues drop, look for salaries for athletes to drop as well.

It will be interesting to see how this hockey lock-out turns out. It appears that the owners are drawing a line in the sand on this and do not want to increase the player's share of revenues.

[Alberta's Child]

This is really a shame. I can see this problem from both sides and understand why both sides are digging in their heels. That tells me that the NHL business model is broken -- maybe irreparably.

There isn't a bigger hockey fan anywhere than me ... and if the regular season is impacted in any way by this labor dispute I can assure anyone in the NHL who might be reading this that this will likely close the books for me as far as my support of the NHL is concerned.

[Alberta's Child]

If you back and study the history of the last few decades in the NHL, I think the story behind the relocation of the Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix in the mid-1990s probably illustrates the NHL's dilemma best. That move was part of the "NBA-ization" of the NHL, which began with the hiring of Gary Bettman (a former NBA executive) a few years earlier. The whole business model can be captured in the Winnipeg-Phoenix distinction, where the NHL decided that a major U.S. metro area with a few thousand hockey fans among several million people represented a better market for hockey than a small Canadian city with 600,000 die-hard hockey fans among 800,000 people. It's all based on television revenue, and Phoenix is only "important" to the NHL to the extent that TV advertisers see those several million people as potential customers.

What these people haven't figured out yet is that hockey is not -- and never will be -- a "popular" sport. At it's root, it is a "cult" sport with the most dedicated, passionate fans you'll find anywhere in North America. In their haste to build a business model to attract mildly disinterested casual fans, they've left the real fans out on the street.

[Alberta's Child]

Very good post, Sam.

There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal describing the dilemma that the NFL now faces. They've gone so overboard to make pro football a television spectacle that fans aren't even bothering to show up for the games. In fact, an NFL game is so heavily oriented towards a TV viewer that when you watch a game in person it is actually boring as hell and a colossal waste of time. As a result, many of these professional teams are seeing huge declines in spectator-related revenue (ticket sales, parking, concessions, etc.) even as their TV revenue climbs dramatically.

[Alberta's Child]

I should just change the date on the thread linked below and re-post it today. It's as relevant today as it was back in 2005. It's amazing that seven years have passed since that last labor dispute.

Recent Events in NHL History

That thread had over 200 replies ... and there are a lot of familiar names there!

[discostu]

I don’t see this one getting past Thanksgiving. The last one was over a fundamental difference, the league wanted a cap the players didn’t. This one is arguing over pennies, if it costs more than a dozen games per team both sides lose more money than they’re arguing over. Of course if the owners are to be believed most of the teams will be OK with that, but the players’ wives won’t. Same thing the NBA went through last year, when the Mrs can’t buy that dress the Mr learns the importance of caving in.

[Alberta's Child]

Maybe so, but I don’t see the NHLPA caving in too easily when Donald Fehr is their leader.