NHL Lockout Fan Apathy Should Scare Bettman, Daly Back to the Table

He might not be laughing at the end of this negotiation

Hopefully, he will be out of a job....

If we were dealing with a negotiation between two parties who actually cared about their sport, maybe this NHL Lockout would never have happened in the first place. Heading into week 6 of the current stalemate, we are no closer to a resolution in their protracted labour dispute then we were almost 2 months ago when the league (in their infinite wisdom) table a proposal that was essentially a slap in the face to every single player currently in the NHL.

After the loss of the entire 2004-05 season, one would think that both the league and the players would be able to come to some sort of compromise rather quickly instead of going through this kind of head-butting over ideology once again. This should have been especially true given the way that the previous agreement was heralded by Gary Bettman as the “Blueprint” to future labour peace. If you recall, at the time, one of Bettman’s talking points was how they were locking out the players in an effort to give the fans a break on ever increasing ticket prices. 8 years later and I’m still waiting to see where those savings promised to the fans are yet to appear, especially given just how much the League won in their 2004 battle with the players.

 After 2004, the League broke the union and caused a ripple effect which led to 

Donald Fehr becoming the current leader

They basically broke the union with the lockout as the players fired Bob Goodenow and replaced him with Ted Saskin (who himself was fired shortly thereafter, leaving the Players Union in complete disarray). Then they got the players to accept  a hard salary cap at a very low starting point (around $39 Million per team as I recall) giving what the League had been screaming for since the start of their labour dispute, their “cost certainty” in player salaries. They were able to get the players to agree to this in exchange for the one small caveat at the time; that if league revenues grew, so too would the salary cap ceiling. Given how the league lost a season, they didn’t see that one small point as something to worry about and it cost them dearly.

 At the time of the 2004 deal, clearly the league was losing money and needed to do something to stop hemorrhaging as much money as they were. Most of those losses were of course due in large part to Bettman himself and his incredibly short-sighted insistence on continuing with the NHL’s Southern Blueprint (which has failed , miserably) but of course at no point was this ever a concern in 2004. Looking back now over the course of the last 7 years, the League has seen revenues skyrocket to the point where the NHL is now a $3.3 Billion a year revenue generating, fiscally solvent corporate entity. But, as seems to happen with all businesses that grow too much, too fast, the league has forgotten about its fans, how to remain loyal to them, even the parts of North America where they have the most of them.

There are several teams that draw flies in the Southern US that could follow the model of the Atlanta Thrashers and move to a Northern city like Winnipeg. Phoenix and Florida (based in Miami) are 2 prime examples of teams that could move to cities like Quebec City and Hamilton and instantly turn from money losers to money makers. But no. We have Bettman and the League basically bending over backwards to ensure that their stupid Southern Expansion blueprint (a colossal failure at the gate) stays in tact as much as possible. It's stunning to me that they actually bent with regards to the Thrashers moving to Winnipeg. Maybe there are chinks starting to form in that protective armor Bettman seems to have on 24/7.

 Could Bettman be planning his exit strategy with long time friend Brian Burke?

Now comes word out of New York that the league has made a “substantial” offer to the players with a number of positive idea included many concepts that fans have been saying would end this standoff. An even split of revenues, no  salary rollbacks included and a full 82 game schedule if things can be agreed upon in a timely manner. If this had just been their very first proposal or possibly if it had been an offer made like say maybe back in September, we would have avoided all of this month long nonsensical lockout that the league says has already cost them $100 million.

Instead we had to endure 31 days (and counting) of a league mandated lockout of its players which has not only hurt the fans, the staff members of the arenas, the surrounding businesses that rely upon the NHL to fill their bars, restaurants and clubs on game days, not to mention the pocket books of both owners and players alike, but has also cast a pall over the integrity of the league as a whole. This is the 4^th labour related issue that we have seen in the league in the last 20 years and the 3^rd initiated by Bettman himself. He is now such a villain to NHL fans (and has been for a long time now mind you) that his presence alone is enough to make the average hockey fan cringe. He is booed in every NHL arena he is seen in whether it is in person or on the screen.

For the betterment of the league, he should step down after this deal is done as he has lost the respect of everyone who cares for the game. He is seen as a man who cares only about the bottom line of the game and is seemingly controlled by a small group of penny pinching owners who would like nothing better than to constitute rules into the league that would, essentially, protect owners from themselves.

Maybe all the news reports out of major Canadian cities lately about fan apathy towards the lockout spurred the league to come up with their new offer. Maybe they had this as their fallback option as their best deal and hoped the players would cave towards this position first. Whatever the reason, it seems that the league and its players may have finally started down a road of mutual understanding. Maybe the best news besides some significant movement is that Bettman and the league finally blinked this time. Maybe, just maybe, Bettman’s time is up too.