Not three months after hockey fans got to see one of the most riveting Cinderella story victories in Stanley Cup history, the league entered into its fourth work stoppage in the last twenty years. Let the absurdity of that fact settle in for a moment. In my lifetime, I have seen four work stoppages, three lockouts and at least one season completely cancelled due to labor disputes.
The NHL Players Association (NHLPA) was founded in 1967 as a player’s union and was led by Alan Eagleson until 1991. Three months later, there was a player’s strike, starting April 1, 1992 and lasting ten days. The league had been operating all season on the expired Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), when, just before playoffs, the players walked out.
One of the major sticking points in the negotiations was how revenue from trading cards would be split between players and owners. Overall, the strike didn’t cause any games to be cancelled, and had a lasting effect on the league, essentially acting as the prologue to the 1994-95 lockout.
The main concern going into the lockout of ’94-’95 was small market teams. The league wanted to implement a salary cap in order to keep small market teams competitive with larger market teams like Toronto, Detroit, New York and Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the NHLPA wanted revenue sharing to help the smaller teams, similar to what the NFL does. The ’94-’95 season was shortened to forty-eight games. However, unlike the CBA from the previous labor negotiation, the agreement that year had a term of ten years, ending with the ’03-’04 season.
This brings us to September 16, 2004, the day after the old CBA expired, the start of the ’04-’05 lockout and the only time a major North American professional sports league has cancelled an entire season. The major issue was once again a salary cap.
In the previous season, an NHL commissioned report showed that seventy-six percent of team revenue was being spent on player salaries. As a solution to this problem, the owners wanted a salary cap, which the NHLPA had vowed never to accept.
After a year without hockey, a new CBA was signed. When the dust settled, the players had accepted a moving salary cap, which was set at $39 million the first year and would change annually to guarantee the players fifty-four percent of NHL revenues.
There would also be a minimum salary floor, as well as revenue sharing in which the top ten most profitable teams would pool a portion of their earnings to be divided up among the fifteen lowest grossing teams.
There were also a number of rule changes implemented, such as the elimination of the two line pass rule, the implementation of a shoot-out to decide regular season games, as well as stricter enforcement of penalties such as hooking, holding and other obstruction plays.
Despite missing an entire season, the NHL came back bigger and better than ever. Since the last lockout, annual league revenues have increased from $2.2 billion to $3.3 billion. The NHL recently signed a monumental ten-year TV contract with NBC and has seen a huge growth in popularity.
Even so, the owners remain unhappy. As the previous CBA expired September 16, the NHL is now currently in its fourth work stoppage. On one side is the commissioner of the league, Gary Bettman, who essentially acts as a puppet for the owners, consulting with all thirty owners and acting as a proxy, carrying out their will. This is Bettman’s fourth lockout as commissioner, three times with players and once in 1993 with the referees.
The major issue at hand is once again, revenues.
As in 1992 when the owners and players couldn’t agree upon a revenue split from trading cards, the owners are again determined to increase their share. Currently, players salaries are fifty-seven percent of league hockey related revenue. The initial offer from the owners would knock that number down to forty-three percent. The owners also want to put a cap on individual contracts, as a counter measure to the popularity of long-term front loaded contracts that we have seen over the last three years.
Since the initial offer, the NHLPA has come down to about fifty-three percent while the owners have come up to forty-six percent, which is a still a big gap. The NHLPA has also said that they would not be opposed to implementing a hard salary cap, which would be stable and be supplemented by more revenue sharing amongst the teams.
Over the last month, as the deadline came closer and closer, it became clear that a lockout was inevitable. The players have overwhelmingly expressed a desire to play, even issuing a statement that they would be willing to begin the season playing under the old CBA. The owners, however, were unwilling to do that, and the lockout began with the cancelation of all the entire preseason.
So far, no regular season games have been cancelled, but looking at the current gap between two sides, I find it unlikely that an agreement will be reached quickly enough to start the season on time. Many players have already left to play overseas in European leagues.
Detroit Red Wings forward Dan Cleary told the media last week that he expects labor talks to be long and drawn out, potentially consuming yet another NHL season. Right now it is too early to tell how long this lockout will last.
The last time around, the NHL took a lot of criticism for nixing the season, and it is tough to imagine that after surviving that criticism and rising to the popularity the league enjoys today, that it would be willing to cancel an entire season. With that being said, both Bettman and Fehr are known to be fierce negotiators and with the history the NHL has, I think that we could miss at least a month or two of the ’12-’13 NHL season. •
