September 23, 2004
A Question Of Shared Responsibility
Jes Golbez asks this question:
“Mr. Bettman, why should the NHLPA and the players have to pay the ultimate price for the stupidity and free-spending habits of the owners and the weak leadership displayed by you? "
I'm no apologist for Commissioner Bettman, but terming the imposition of a salary cap in a league that is bleeding fans and cash, and can't move the meter in television ratings South of the border doesn't seem all that extreme.
Riddle me this: Walking side-by-side in an American shopping mall are Mario Lemieux and Chris Moneymaker. Who is more likely to be recognized?
Further, how and why is the fate Jes described different than the reality that every other employee faces any day of the week? After all, during the high tech bust of the late 1990s, literally millions of workers around the world lost their jobs because of the "free-spending habits" and "weak leadership" of their bosses.
Did they deserve their fate? Maybe they did, maybe they didn't -- but they had to endure it anyway, simply because the businesses they were in weren't generating enough profits to justify their salaries.
Here's Tom Benjamin who wrote the following while discussing Gary Bettman's performance on the CBC Saturday night:
He defended expansion to non-traditional markets with the claim that 40 million fans had attended games in the nine new markets.
That sounds really good until you get out a calculator and you figure it works out to 12,700 fans per game. That's disingenuous because it is hardly a ringing endorsement. Challenged, Bettman insisted that all markets could be healthy. The problem, he said, was the CBA and cited Nashville as an example. The reason their attendance fell off after a good start was because players make too much money for the market and the team could not afford to expand payroll.
Right. I wondered how the Carolina attendance can be blamed on the players.
The answer to Tom's question is simple: They can be held accountable the same way every other employee can be held accountable -- by performance. And in all but a limited number of cases, if you win, the fans come out in droves. And if you lose, like Carolina did in the wake of their Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 2002, the fans stay home, and perhaps never come back.
As for Nashville, despite making the playoffs for the first time, their 8th place finish in the regular season was hardly a season of legend.
But what's up with this notion that the players aren't at least partially responsible for the success or failure of the game as a business? If anything, the argument is a throwback to the 19th century, back when Karl Marx held a little more sway in the world.
These players aren't mindless automatons, forced to slave for the greedy manipulators of capital and totally out of control of their fates.
Tom's right about one thing: Bettman is being disingenuous when he says that all markets can be healthy. The nature of competition demands that somebody has to fail sometime. But what is true about a salary cap is that it can level the playing field to a certain extent, and give each franchise a fighting chance to win, and perhaps make a profit, every season.
That's the way things work in the National Football League, easily the most successful professional sport in North America. In every way, the owners in the league cooperate with one another to make sure that the league as a whole is profitable. And with cooperation has come incredible financial success, and millions of happy fans who attend games in person, watch on television, and purchase hundreds of millions of dollars in merchandise and memorabilia.
And why is that? Because the owners know that while they might compete on the field of play, it's together as one league that they compete against every other entertainment option that might draw the attention of what can be an extremely fickle public.
It's a model the NHL ought to emulate.
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Eric,
Is a 'season of legend' necessary to gain respect? These are 21-to-24-year-olds for the most part, playing their hearts out *while* they learn the NHL game. For them to make the playoffs was a pretty remarkable achievement.
Every team in the league has a 'fighting chance' to win every season if it decides to fight. That means properly managing a team. Throwing out all the musty players in favor of younger ones is most often the only way to do that; this sheds bloated salaries and diminishing talent in favor of small salaries and burgeoning talent. The team might pull a Nashville and make the playoffs; they might fall short. But sooner or later they'll be good enough to win consistently, as long as no one monkeys with the plan.
I usually agree with you, but when you push for adoption of the NFL salary cap model I have to disagree. There's no better way to make sure that teams fall apart, and that team management skills are negated entirely, than to 'level the playing field' NFL style. Teams *can* make money under an agreement like the old CBA. It needs to be fine-tuned, not scrapped altogether in favor of a system that insures the lowest common denominator will be the only denominator.
Posted by:
at September 23, 2004 03:00 PM
Wait a minute.
NFL owners share revenues (hello, Karl Marx!), therefore NHL players should have a salary cap?
In addition to the hard bargaining, shouldn't the NHL owners be looking at their own house too?
Posted by:
at September 23, 2004 03:17 PM
Chris -- when McDonald's franchises cooperate in terms of marketing, branding, advertising and business standards, is that socialism?
How about your local Chevy dealers?
If you consider every separate franchise an independent business at war with one another in every way, I guess your comment has some merit. But if you look at the NFL in the way it truly operates, as one incredibly large and dynamic entertainment business, I think you can see how cooperation in pursuit of shared goals makes a lot of sense.
What the NFL knows instinctively is that if it lets teams like Green Bay to fall by the wayside, every other team will take a huge hit. The competition inside the NFL is on the field, in the recrutiment of free agents, and in the war between coaches on each sideline.
But the NFL as a whole competes with every other entertainment option available in the universe, from the latest NY Times bestseller to a re-run of Trading Spaces.
The bottom line is that the NFL model works (thank you Pete Rozell), while the NHL has failed (thank you John Ziegler and Alan Eagleson), and failed miserably.
On the one hand, one league gets richer and richer still. On the other hand, the NHL teeters on the brink of destruction in the midst of labor chaos.
You say that the model you propose can work -- but where's the proof?
Posted by:
at September 23, 2004 04:10 PM
Eric --
We actually agree. I just wanted to see your knee twitch at the mention of Uncle Charlie. The real revenue-sharing shout-out probably should be to Lord Keynes; a little socialism is not a dangerous thing. But what do I know; I majored in Religious Studies, where socialism abounds (see Acts).
Still, it's the fact that the NFL shares revenue that makes it big. The NFL has been the biggest thing going for 30-40 years, well before the idea of the salary cap.
So it seems to me that the NHL would do better if it didn't just blame the players for everything, but tried to fix its own house at the same time. If the players live with "cost certainty" -- and, things being what they are, they ought to -- why can't the owners live with "revenue certainty?"
Posted by:
at September 24, 2004 01:45 PM
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