Rumored Proposal to Save Season

[K-Swiss]

Source for this rumor is?

[jy3]

please let them accept this - being away from cornell hockey and seeing one game this year PLUS no nhl is killing me i have to be able to watching something good on tv. of course being in buffalo means nothing but sabres games - although i think we get a good spread of nyc/nj stations so  i can see the devils

downtown buffalo is hurting without the sabres in town

[calgARI '07]

Right now, I've heard from very reliable sources passing on rumors they have heard from almost all relatively large radio stations in Canada.  A couple people have told me they come from people in the NHL office.  The people that passed these rumors on to me do not blow smoke.  They are very reliable.  They themselves all admit that it could be a bogus rumor, but there's no point in ignoring it, especially with people from both sides totally keeping the media in the dark.  Take it for what's worth, hence why the title has the word Rumored in it.  I like to think that where there is smoke, there is fire, but again, take it for what it's worth.

[French Rage]

[Q]jy3 Wrote:

 please let them accept this - being away from cornell hockey and seeing one game this year PLUS no nhl is killing me  i have to be able to watching something good on tv. of course being in buffalo means nothing but sabres games - although i think we get a good spread of nyc/nj stations so  i can see the devils

downtown buffalo is hurting without the sabres in town[/q]

Given how it looked a couple years back, downtown Buffalo is hurting with or without the Sabres. :-D

[calgARI '07]

By the way, the two sides are meeting tonight somewhere in NYC.

[Josh '99]

Ooh, I'm totally gonna go crash that, I bet they have good beer at those meetings.  :-D

[calgARI '07]

Good luck finding the hotel.  All they said was they are meeting at a hotel in NYC.

[DeltaOne81]

I like it. This is pretty much what I've suggested to people I've talked to about it - well, except the artibration/UFA/rookie stuff, which I never bothered to think about :-)

The only thing I'd prefer is an extreme luxury tax at the second tier, instead of a hard cap. I.e. say a 5 to 1, or even 10 to 1 luxury tax penalty for going over it. This makes it pretty much a hard cap, except there's the potential to generate a few million extra for smaller market teams, and also does give the team the flexibilty to exceed it by tens or thousand or hundreds of thousands of dollars, if necessary to keep a group together.

And lets be honest, there are no Yankees in hockey - not even the Rangers (note I am not commenting on the Yankees here, just saying there no one who will blow through luxury taxes and not care). No one is going to sign a guy for $1 million if it means they have to pay $10 million in luxury taxes - or hell, even $1 million in luxury taxes, not very often. Besides, the Rangers are perfect proof, time and time again, that high spending doesn't help anyway.

Heck, if the owners don't really even trust... well, themselves, they could put a clause that if teams exceed the $50 million secondary cap by more than a total of $5 million in any given year (total of al the spending above $50, not including taxes), then its automatically replaced with a hard cap.

That said, who knows is this is for real, but it'd be nice if it was.

I have one question: Bettman initially said the cap should be set at 53% of revenue, and then "generously" raised his offer to 54%. What kind of cap would that have translated to? By his numbers, anyway.

[calgARI '07]

Well it depends, but it would be in the upper 50's at the very least.

[DeltaOne81]

You're saying the 54% cap would have been upper $50 millions? So this is actually a better deal for the league than their original offer?

Or are you saying the $50 million cap correlates to upper 50-percentages?

[calgARI '07]

An economist buddy of mine did all the math and he concluded that with this proposal, including everything, based on similar revenue percentages from the last couple years, it would give the players about 60%.

[mjh89]

Why would you ever want to watch the Devils? They're the most boring team in hockey.

[calgARI '07]

A different proposal rumor from Rogers Sportsnet:

http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/article.jsp;jsessionid=PODNIADMKAKH?content=20050126_122859_2272

[calgARI '07]

More positive news coming from an Austrian website, http://www.hockeyfans.at/c.php?c=6&op=news&nid=15015.  I took the liberty of translating it into English:


Calgary Flames To Order All Players Back

"It does which in things Lockout. If one regards the last hours and the developments of Europe, then the impossible could become nevertheless still possible: a NHL season! Already in the today's afternoon reported Hockeyfans.at over rumors from Sweden, according to which the NHL of associations would have ordered their teams for 3 February to North America. Now there is a second source, which confirms this. Therefore the Calgary Flames zurueckbeordert today all their players to Canada - normal way a clear indication for the fact that one stands before a beginning of season! The information originates from very well informed circles, which have direct contacts to NHL associations and partly even than Scouts in Europe to function. The NHL and the player trade union NHLPA will meet meanwhile tonight again in New York to discussions. Contents are not well-known yet, the fans remain hope that one gets to see nevertheless still another NHL season, even if this will have effects on the European leagues and also the WM in Austria! Meanwhile there are first messages also in US radios, whereafter the NHL season start is to be imminent! The date: Saturday, 5 February!"

[KeithK]

Hopefully that 's Babblefish's translation (or similar0 and not your's Ari.... :-)