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September 15, 2004
Stan Fischler
FOX Sports Net
The 2004-2005 National Hockey League season is about to begin - but it already has ended.
Sounds crazy, doesn't it; a season ending before it ever started.
But that's the way it is in the crazy world of overpaid, pampered performers who can't be happy with a league-wide average salary of $1.2 million.
That figure - a million plus two hundred grand - is what would result from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's offer to the NHL Players' Association.
Now that the current collective bargaining agreement between the union (otherwise known as Brotherhood of Millionaires) and NHL has ended, what next?
Anyone with half a brain realizes that a new pact should be signed, but the NHLPA has this bizarre notion that hockey is the most successful of North America's four major spectator sports while everyone else knows that it's a poor fourth.
Very poor.
So, poor, in fact, that subterranean U.S. television ratings forced Bettman - in the most recent pact - to virtually give away NHL telecasts while the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball make zillions from their TV contracts.
Legitimately, you may wonder just how big-league hockey got into this dreadful position and why Armageddon will arrive right on schedule this coming Wednesday.
"It doesn't serve any purpose to go back and dissect why we're where we are," says Calgary Flames owner Harley Hotchkiss, "we have a responsibility to look ahead."
Actually, the reason for the NHL dilemma can be summed up in two words, "greed" and "spoilage."
In the view of some observers, NHL players have been spoiled rotten ever since Bob Goodenow replaced Alan Eagleson as NHLPA boss a dozen years ago.
Since 1992, salaries have climbed through the stratosphere.
In each of the CBA pacts hammered out since then, the union has beaten the NHL.
"Goodenow made a gamble in 1994 that as long as one owner could be stupid, it would pull the rest of the owners up," says Brian Burke, former Vancouver Canucks president. "And he was right."
When you go 3-for-3, you think you can bat a thousand forever.
At least that's the way hockey's unionists think.
And because they have been conditioned - or spoiled - to think they never can lose to ownership, NHLPA cardholders refuse to acknowledge reality.
"It's all about television money," an upstate New York minor league club owner tells me. "Football, baseball and basketball gets it - big-time - but hockey does not.
"If the NHL got NFL dollars, there'd be a settlement in a minute."
You would think that players would understand hockey is hurting and perhaps some of them do. But what remains uppermost in their minds is the idea of making more and more money whether the league can afford it or not.
Edmonton Oilers' general manager Kevin Lowe sums up the problem succinctly when he says, "The players simply don't know when enough is enough."
That point, my friends, has been reached.
And if you're wondering how the spectators feel, check out the 21,000-member NHL Fans' Association.
"A recent poll of the NHLFA members found that 81 percent of fans believe that there should be some form of team salary cap or luxury tax to keep player costs under control," says the NHLFA's Jim Boone. "More than half (55 percent) of fans think a team's salary cap should be between $30 and $40 million each season."
I believe that ownership has had it with the greedy, insensitive NHLPA.
This time management will not capitulate as it mistakenly did in 1995 when a hard salary cap was within reach.
"We can't give in this time," an NHL club vice-president tells me, "because we have to get the RIGHT system. At the moment, only the players benefit from the system. We need one that benefits not only the players but the owners and the fans as well."
Impartial analysts such as Street & Smiths SportsBusiness Journal's Andy Bernstein wonder who will crack first.
"With 700 players in the union," writes Bernstein, "most of whom have a burning desire to play, Goodenow may have a far more difficult time than Bettman in keeping his troops unified."
Management acknowledges that it made many mistakes en route to Armageddon and that explains why it's determined to make major changes.
"We made the players rich and powerful," the V.P. goes on, "and now they're running the league."
A major obstacle is the wide philosophical differences between "No Cap" Goodenow and "Yes Cap" Bettman.
Yet another problem is Goodenow's take-no-prisoners style.
"I've dealt with Bob Goodenow in the past and I don't think he's the kind of guy who is going to try to work out anything in the whole interest of the game," says Flyers owner Ed Snider. "He's going to hold out. He thinks he can bring people down to their knees, but that's not going to happen."
Although I hope I'm wrong, my prediction is that 2004-2005 will be a season without big-league hockey.
"It will take a lost season for us to straighten out our game," the exec concludes. "The only thing that'll change things will be the players beginning to hurt, financially, but that'll take quite a while."
My forecast is that in July 2005, the NHL will begin signing players - replacement skaters and those who will decide to bolt the NHLPA - and at that point the union will be broken.
It happened in pro football; it could happen in hockey.
In the end, we'll have a brave, new NHL world and Bob Goodenow will be history.
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