Pretty soon, we will find out if the sport of hockey has gone completely dysfunctional, and will toss a season because they cannot agree on relatively small matters. It’s a lot like a couple divorcing because they can’t stop arguing about who should do the dishes.
And that’s kind of where we’re at now. The therapist has fired the couple: The NHL and the players turned negotiations over to a mediator last week, and the mediators walked away saying these two were nuts. Then, on Tuesday, the kids met to work it out without Mom and Dad in the room. Players like Sidney Crosby met at a hotel in midtown New York with owners, with commissioner Gary Bettman and player representative Donald Fehr elsewhere. It actually seemed to help.
On paper, it looks like a match that should work. The players union and the owners have both tentatively agreed to a proposal which shares revenue roughly equally among the players and the owners, which is how the NBA and the NFL manage to get along, and they seem to be doing alright. 50/50 isn’t what the hockey players got in the last round–they were up to 57 percent at the close of the 2011-2012 season–but it doesn’t sound like such a bad deal to most onlookers, and they might get to it gradually. Time to play hockey, right?
Not quite. During the last agreement, owners ran up some large bills signing players to geologically long contracts. The Devils, to take just one example, signed forward Ilya Kovalchuk to a 17-year-deal in 2010. That means he’s under contract until he’s 44. You can count the number of forwards playing at 44 on one hand, and you don’t even have to open your fist. It was a clever way of avoiding salary restrictions.
The players would like the owners to honor these contracts no matter what, and any others–making sure that the new sharing doesn’t sink old deals– and are asking for $393 million put aside to do so. They’ve offered a kind of settlement of $211 million. That’s a difference of $183 million, not a lot in a business that generated over $3 billion in revenue last year alone, a record, and not a lot when it’s actually buying the services of a premier player.
Players and owners are also arguing about how long a young player must stay with a team before letting the market set his salary, or, in the legal term, entering “unrestricted free agency.” This seems easy enough to solve, maybe a little longer than it was, but not much.
So why haven’t they just met in the middle, got it done, and moved on? It may be that’s just gotten way too personal, and the money isn’t the issue any more: This couple just can’t get along.
In 1994′s The Ref, Dennis Leary–a huge hockey fan, by the way–played a burglar who kidnapped a feuding couple. He saved their marriage. Fehr and Bettman may need a visit from Leary.
