The Puck Stops Here: The political season comes to the NHL

The Puck Stops Here:
The political season comes to the NHL
by Mike Madias, Clinical Sociologist and Columnist

"Slice-o-Life"

September 22, 2003

Columnist Mike Madias This is the political season for CNN and the Washington Post. There are, at this count, eleven candidates for the Democratic nomination for President. All this will climax in early November 2004.

But it is also politics time for ESPN Sports and the Globe and Mail. The conflict will be resolved by the end of October 2004. And the NHL contest, unlike the California recall election, will not involve any hanging chads. The National Hockey League's collective bargaining agreement with the players association expires on Sept. 15, 2004 (the "CBA", according to the sports press) . Like most political contests, this one is about money. Already, both sides to this negotiation are jockeying for position. Last week, the Globe and Mail (the "G&M" Canada's national newspaper, published in Toronto) quotes Bill Daly, the NHL's executive vice-president and chief legal counsel, saying that the NHL management would like to begin the formal negotiating process for a new CBA sometime in the fall. Daly puts his cards on the table. According to Daly, if nothing's changed between now and mid-November, it will be incumbent on management to put together a written,
formal proposal, requesting the players association to come to the bargaining table to begin negotiations about a successor to the CBA. The NHL and the players association, the NHLPA are talking with each other informally now. Nothing formal is likely to happen for a while. But the NHLPA .is not buying into this idea of a threatened formal proposal-a sort of ultimatum, it seems.

The G&M quotes Bob Goodenow of the NHLPA as saying, "The agreement (the CBA) expires in a year [and] there's a provision for parties to give notice 120 days prior to that [in order to terminate the CBA]. So there's really no specific event that will or won't occur in the near future that will change things." This date he refers to is May 15, of 2004.

Goodenow told a G&M reporter, "In terms of what we talked about [in our informal conversations] , we didn't talk about anything different than in prior years . . . It's part of an ongoing process."

So someone is going to have to back down by early November of this year. Will it be the NHL or the player's organization?

The G&M points out that, "The current agreement was supposed to last just six years, but the two sides extended it twice - first, to accommodate the NHL's ambitious late-1990s expansion plan, then a second time to guarantee NHL player participation in the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics."

Now we already have a good indication that the "NHL's ambitious late-1990s expansion plan" was a financial bust. We know that television viewers would rather watch "Fear Factor" and see greedy folks eat raw mountain oysters than watch the NHL on television.

We know that while popularity for the NHL is down, salaries are way up. The G&M gives these statistics: in 1994-95, the average NHL salary was $733,000. Salaries broke the $1-million barrier in 1997-98 (averaging $1.167-million) and by 2002-03, they were closing in on $2-million level ($1.79-million per season). That is a 150 percent jump in player payroll in the last eight years.

Readers of this column know that when you buy four hot dogs at the Joe, the revenue from three of them goes to pay players based on the last CBA. So if they are going to stay in business, the management of the NHL need a to find a way of capping salaries in order to end a potentially destructive bidding war for talent.

The players organization disagrees. If this is typical of the usual politics between labor and management, the NHL (in it's heart of avaricious hearts) would love to break the union.

So, Daly is playing the role of tough cookie."There is one fundamental issue that may be very tough for us to come to grips with and that is: Do we talk about a fair and reasonable allocation of the revenues? Or not? If we can come to resolution on that issue, then I think the other stuff that has to be done, can be done fairly quickly. . . . The question really is, can you get past the threshold issue?"

Goodenow of the player's association is playing hardball as well. Newsday quotes him as saying, "It boils down to one basic philosophy. The players want to be paid in [an open] marketplace. They feel strongly that a marketplace where all players can go in and negotiate is the healthiest environment for them and for the teams, and therefore the entire sport."The lines are drawn the puck is about to drop. The game is beginning.Fasten your seat-belts, fans. It's going to be a bumpy ride. ***

Photo of Mike Madias courtesy of the author

A clinical sociologist living in the Metropolitan Detroit area, Mike's work has appeared in The Detroit News. He may be reached by e-mail at DetroitHardball@hotmail.com.