Things Really Heating Up (NHL)

[calgARI '07]

They are meeting right now in Niagara Falls.  Players have finally gotten over their no cap stance and offered a cap yesterday.  Either way, this thing is gonna be done soon.  

http://www.tsn.ca/Nhl/news_story.asp?ID=115014&hubName=nhl

[jtwcornell91]

Dude, can we flag the NHL threads [OT] or [NHL]?  That's a pretty generic subject line.

[mjh89]

:`(

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]calgARI '07 Wrote:

 They are meeting right now in Niagara Falls.  Players have finally gotten over their no cap stance and offered a cap yesterday.  Either way, this thing is gonna be done soon.  

Edited 1 times. Last edit at 02/15/05 03:11PM by calgARI '07.[/q]
And the owners have finally gotten over their insistance that player link their salaries to how well the owners do their job. Its also pretty major to see if the owners will actually commit to a serious revenue sharing plan.

So far the owners have put all the responsibility to save teams on the players. Yet if the owners were willing to revenue share a good amount, they could easily do half the job themselves (well, half is a random amount I made up, but a significant portion). The last owners revenue sharing proposal shared only an $80 million slice out of a $2 billion pie.

But the good news is that they finally have a shared structure where they can negotiate numbers rather than philsophies: salary cap with a lower luxury tax, no linkage, and revenue sharing.

We'll see.

On the flip side, I'll be sorry to loose the College Hockey TV time  B-]

[calgARI '07]

Sportsnet has learned that the National Hockey League is considering making a counter proposal off the NHLPA's initial salary cap offer of $52 million, perhaps as early as today.

One source close to the negotiations believes a deal can be reached now that the philosophical differences have been bridged, though there is still considerable work to be done.

"It's just a matter of crunching numbers now," a source said. "Now that linkage is out of the equation, the players don't have to worry about the league's books and trusting their numbers."

http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/article.jsp...215_102404_5036

[Trotsky]

Would somebody explain linkage, briefly, for those of us who have been out of the loop on this?

[ugarte]

"Linkage" refers to a variation of what the NBA cap looks like: the cap for a given year is x% of revenues from the prior year.

Since the NHL (unlike the NBA) has refused to open its books (and non-NBA leagues are NEVER honest about their books), the NHLPA has told them to link that plan to their own asses.

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]Trotsky Wrote:

 Would somebody explain linkage, briefly, for those of us who have been out of the loop on this?[/q]
Team A earns $70 million in revenue one year. Team A's salary cap is $38.5 million.

Team B earns $60 million in revenue one year. Team B's salary cap is $33 million.

I have to assume that a team's salary cap is connected to their previous years revenues. This presents numerous issues that the players had.
1) Owners do a crappy job generating revenue and the owners pay.
2) Not sure how individual contacts work, but I would have to imagine that individual contracts are tied to revenue too, so not only do players pay in general but they pay individually.
3) An audit of NHL books recently found about $10 million per team in undisclosed revenue, so the players don't trust the owners numbers.
4) Each team has a different cap so teams can't really be competitive for each other, and they can't compete for certain players.

And I'm sure there's more.

It was a big concession by the NHL, which finally opened this thing up.

[KeithK]

They were seriously talking about every team having a different cap?  I always assumed this meant xx% of the league revenues as a whole, divided by the number of teams (in other words xx% of average revenue).  That makes sense from a financial and competitive balance standpoint.  Linking to individual team revenues (if that's what they were talking about is ridiculous).  To again bring up the baseball analogy (since I know the numbers well) it would be like saying the Yankees have a salary cap of $140 million based on revenues of $250M while the Expos have a cap of $25M.

A (league average) linkage makes sense to me, but because of the books issue it is difficult to trust the owners on this.  So the logical answer is to negotiate fixed numbers, which the owners will presumably base on a percentage of revenue projections.  it doesn't give the absolute certainty that owners want but business isn't a certain thing anyway.

BTW - not having a fixed percentage could actually benefit the owners if the sport grows faster than expected.  

[DeltaOne81]

Yup, they were seriously talking about every team having a different cap - with mins of $32 million and max of $42 million. I've complained about it on here before. For 6 months, up until yesterday, that's the only offer they ever put on the table.

[KeithK]

[q] Yup, they were seriously talking about every team having a different cap - with mins of $32 million and max of $42 million. I've complained about it on here before.[/q]Well, you either didn't make it clear (or just as likely) I had such a clear conception of what I thought we were talking about that I didn't read closely.  Different caps for each team is idiotic.

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:

 [Q2] Yup, they were seriously talking about every team having a different cap - with mins of $32 million and max of $42 million. I've complained about it on here before.[/Q]
Well, you either didn't make it clear (or just as likely) I had such a clear conception of what I thought we were talking about that I didn't read closely.  Different caps for each team is idiotic.[/q]
Didn't mean to blame you, Keith . Its a topic that the media glanced over and that the owners were more than happy to have them do so. Actually I don't remember if you responded on my threads, and have even less of an idea if you even read them . Not everyone on here cares about the NHL and I barely do, except I lover the Stanley Cup playoffs and it'd be a shame not to have a draft.

But yes, it is idiotic. And they're absolutely insistance on it for 6 months is why I mainly blame the owners for this shit. You see that as soon as they dropped the stupidity, things are moving along quite nicely. Its a shame that Bettman didn't drop the idiocy months ago.

[cbuckser]

Fred, it has always been my impression (perhaps erroneous), that each team under the NHL's proposals would have the same salary floor and salary cap, both of which would be based on a fixed percentage of league revenues.  For example, under the NHL's December counteroffer to the NHLPA's 24% rollback proposal, it appears to me that each team would have to spend between 51% and 57% of a 1/30th share of league revenues.

http://nhlcbanews.com/news/nhlresponse121404.html

Where have you seen that a different salary cap would apply to different teams?

[KeithK]

Fortunately or unfortunately I read just about every thread on this board.  Work is no fun, after all. :-D

After a little bit of thought, it's not quite as idiotic as I originally thought to propose team specific salary caps.  What they're basically saying is that they want every team to stick to a budget and not spend themselves into oblivion.  Individually, owners certainly have a right to do this - it fits with the argument of "who put a gun to the owners heads and make them spend all that money?"  If the league just unilaterally decided to do this as a whole the NHLPA would turn around and sue them for collusion and I assume would have a case under current law. So the owners are trying to negotiate this instead.

I still don't think it's a good idea.  First off, it's bad for competitive balance in the way I outlined earlier.  Second, it prevents a team from making investments - if an owner believes that spending a little more on salaries this year might result in a championship and lay the groundwork for future revenue growth this is a legitimate business decision.  Then again, I'm assuming that it's reasonable to treat a professional sport as a traditional business.  

[calgARI '07]

FINAL OFFER IS IN.  GOODENOW HAS UNTIL 11 TOMORROW MORNING TO ACCEPT OR SEASON IS TOAST.

http://www.tsn.ca/Nhl/news_story.asp?ID=115048&hubName=nhl