Omallley said:
Bob McKenzie weighs in with a very thorough look at the current situation. Worth the read: http://www.tsn.ca/blogs/bob_mckenzie/?id=404989
I think he does a pretty good job laying out the basic facts but I think he stretches a little to come to the same sort of mushy "C'mon, just meet in the middle" conclusion that seems pretty popular. As far as I read it, his arguments that the players should agree to a lower % of the overall pie boils down to four things.
1. The owners want it to
2. Just because the players eventually reached 57% of the last revenues doesn't mean they should feel "entitled" to 57% in the next deal.
3. The players should be more willing to compromise because this is a dispute over money, not ideology.
4. The NFL and NBA deals reflect an economic landscape that would suggest that the player's proposal isn't realistic.
None of those strike me as particularly compelling. Except 1, I guess. At least that, in it's simplicity, is a compelling argument for why the player's share is almost certainly going to end up at below 57% and that the players should be inclined to get a deal done. What I don't get on McKenzie's part though is the sort of expressed incredulity at the idea that because such a concession is almost certainly inevitable that the players should be making it now. The players, as indicated by the deal struck in the NBA, are almost certainly better served by waiting until a league shutdown threatens things the League will desperately want to go on like the winter classic.
As to the others:
That said, though, just because the NHL has proposed such a dramatic reduction in the players' share of revenue doesn't necessarily mean the players should have an inalienable right or entitlement to 57 per cent. I mean, it went from 54 per cent in the first year to 55.6 to 56.7, to 56.73 to 57 over the life of this CBA. Is it insane to conceive that it could or should slide the other way?
Man, I'd love to be in the room when Bob McKenzie negotiates his next contract. "Sure, as you've put in your hard work and built a following your salary has consistently gone up but just because it's gone up recently, why not let it go down now?". I wonder how "entitled" Bob feels to his salary not getting cut. And, sure, TSN may not be in financial trouble but the Print Media sure is. Doesn't Bob feel an obligation to take a pay cut so that the Toronto Star can shore up it's numbers? And he sure better not start talking about getting it in writing that his pay cut will go to helping the Toronto Star. How TSN shares its revenues is their business.
No, I'm sure Bob feels that he has an "inalienable right" to negotiate his own deal with TSN and let other journalists do the same with their respective employers.
The last lockout was fought on ideology -- the free market system vs. the cap system. It was foolish to lose a whole season on that basis, but it's not the first or last time a war was fought defending a principle or ideal.
That, to me, strikes me as the biggest sort of oversight in his whole piece. He makes frequent reference to the 57% figure and the last lockout without linking them. That figure, the 57%, is what the player's got in return for their MASSIVE capitulation in the last lockout.
The idea that holding onto that 57% figure reads as an entitlement or inalienable right only really holds if you think that what the owners won in the last lockout is forever etched in stone tablets as if handed down by a divine being and what the players got as table scraps is the only thing fit to be negotiated. I'm sure if the PA started talking about doing away with the hard cap then we'd find out pretty quickly that the owners feel they're "entitled" to a lot of things from the old deal too.
It's quite obvious that within the NHL, there's been a growing disparity between the wealthy clubs that are largely driving the upward spiral of revenues and the more financially-challenged clubs who for a variety of reasons are not faring well economically. The players don't even dispute that.
This is because the central question, the central difference in ideology, really hasn't gone away despite the cap being in place. The central question still is that, in a league where the various teams have vastly different financial circumstances, what responsibility do the players have to ensure the continued success of the teams in financial difficulty. That's the ideology the last lockout was about. That's the one that Bob understood enough to see why the last lockout lasted as long as it did, even if it was "dumb".
That the League is coming back to the players and asking them to again address this issue is vindication to a lot of the people who didn't agree with what the league was after last time. Caps don't really change things. Revenue sharing does. If revenues were shared as equally as they were in the NFL then the NHLPA could be legitimately expected to sit down with the league and deal with the league's financial system as an amorphous whole.
But as we've seen, in a capped league where the majority of revenues aren't shared, all it does is heighten the absurdity in asking the PA to negotiate a deal on the basis that the Leafs and the Panthers should exist with the same artificial constraints and, indeed, escalators in what they pay their employees. Sitting down to negotiate a deal with 30 different employers each with their own sets of financial realities and trying to come up with one that treats them as if they're all one and the same just doesn't make sense.
What we've seen under the new deal is, yes, teams like Florida and Phoenix and Columbus get burned when they don't see an equal share of the revenue pie but are expected to foot a near equal chunk of the expenses. But that is the world wrought by the last CBA. I think, to use Bob's word, it is absurd for the NHL to use that reality, that they bargained, as the justification for reducing the player's share.
To the surprise of many who thought a salary cap was the end of the players' world as they knew it, the players have done quite well in the current system.
This is just flat-out straw manning to a pretty ridiculous extent. Bob Goodenow could do math. So could agents. They could work out that under the proposals the owners gave during the last lockout that their players would still be earning enough to be driving BMW's, buying out the bar and making it rain. Moreover they could look at the NBA and NFL, two leagues that beat them to the cap punch, and see that not only could pro athletes make a lot of money under a cap they could also see that money grow so long as the league's revenues did.
But as Bob himself said earlier in the piece, the last lockout was
never about whether or not the players would "do quite well" under a cap system. It was largely about ideology and, again, even if Bob feels that a cap is now dogmatic law that fight hasn't died. I'm sure there are a lot of people at the PA, not to mention players and their agents, who still don't really like a cap. Who still, if they had their way, would rather see a return to a system that saw Bobby Holik sign a deal for a richer annual amount than what Sidney Crosby is going to be getting now.
But the players lost all that and, for good reason, they're not trying to address that in current negotiations. What Bob doesn't really seem to understand here is that 57% figure is tied to that ideology. That number is what they got for sacrificing all shreds of that ideology. Negotiating it downwards is not just dry mathematics. It's asking for further capitulation after a CBA that saw the players lose on just about every count that mattered to them and the NHL's revenues explode afterwards.
The NBA and its players, after going through their own lockout, recently agreed to a deal that is approximately 50-50. The NFL and its players did a deal that gave the owners' a favorable 53-47 split... In either case, I'm not sure one can simply ignore that the other two North American pro sports leagues with caps have ratios where the players get 50 per cent or less. It is at the very least indicative of some sort of a trend, is it not?
Well, it's been a long time since freshman economics but I think calling two vaguely similar things happening(with a third that contradicts it) a "trend" is a little bit on the side of overstatement but, hey, why not.
So, assuming this is a trend, what does this trend tell us? That rough economic times are tough for sports leagues? Well, no. The NFL is making a ton of money. Baseball too. As Bob has admitted, NHL revenues went shooting up while banks crumbled.
Alright. So does it tell us that there's some sort of hierarchy that the NHL should fit into in terms of what % they give their players and that it's determined by league revenues/expenses? Well, again, no. The NFL is the league with the greatest revenues but they're solidly on the bottom of the % their players make. MLB is, I'm assuming, the league with the most expenses like travel simply because of the number of games they play and trips they take but they don't even have a cap. The deal they signed was one that didn't do a whole lot to change player compensation. I suspect they probably pay the highest % of revenues on players.
So then, what trend are we looking at? The continuing amount of evidence that the NFLPA is clown shoes? Yeah, but I don't think that's what Bob had in mind. I think the only "trend" here is that leagues are getting a little wiser to the staggering amount of leverage they have. I think we're seeing the that the further and further the labour movement in sports gets from the days where players were winning real, important ideological battles the less and less cohesion their unions have as players become more and more self-interested and the owners are, smartly, taking advantage of that to sign more favourable deals.
Kudos to them. If the world has taught us anything of late it's that Billionaires are good people who just want the best for everyone. Just don't try and sell me that a sports economics landscape that sees the Dallas Cowboys paying their players a smaller percentage of their revenues than the Charlotte Bobcats is in anyway based on "fairness" or logic.
Or to put it another way, the NHL spent $1.873 billion on player salaries last season and the NHLPA proposed that number be INCREASED by 2 per cent in the coming season, 4 per cent in year two and 6 per cent in year three. So, basically, the NHLPA is proposing the actual dollars spent on player salaries to go UP at a time when the NHL fully expects they should go DOWN.
I see. So, in other words, one might even be INCLINED to say that on the issue of player compensation the owners and the players DISAGREE.
Because the NHLPA is offering to reduce its share of future "growth," the league feels there's an intangible quality to it. It could be "this" much ($465 million), it could be "that" much (more or less). It's a temporary, short-term (three-year) fix on a propsed four-year CBA, which isn't long enough. The NHL is not looking to increase the $1.873 billion it spent on salaries last season, it's looking to decrease it. And yet the NHLPA proposal calls for a real-dollar increases in each of the next three years and full return to status quo percentage of 57 in Year Four, a move which the NHL interprets as the players thinking they have an absolute "entitlement" to that magic number of 57.
So, the NHL interprets a proposal where under the first three years the players would be paid less than 57 percent of the leaguewide revenues as indicative that the players feel they're entitled to 57 percent of leaguewide revenues? Well, as reasonable as that is...
But at the end of the day, does it really matter what I think or who wins in the court of public opinion, who sides with whom? We're all pretty much just spectators here.
If ever there were a better epitaph for the grand old tradition of the fourth estate, I haven't read it.
But since it's an occasion when self-interest is paramount, I have but one request: Make the next CBA eight years long. I'll be in retirement by the time it expires and won't have to endure another...
As the great Bart Simpson once said, the ironing is delicious.
