[Lafleurs Guy]

Originally Posted by Habtchum

You need to be two to dance tango... Fehr is using his passive "NO" tactics to its best.

Both guys deserve severe blames. They are killing NHL hockey.

Bettman started from a very stupid position. It was a shot across the bow and a clear signal that he wanted to play hardball. Well, he found somebody who was willing to play hardball right back.

I don't think Fehr is blameless but I blame Bettman more than anyone.

Originally Posted by Kriss E

Here's the thing, not every owner is making money, matter of fact, wasn't there 13 teams in the negative last year? And I believe only 13 actually made more than 5M.
Really, the revenue sharing among owners is pretty much the only thing that is saving this league. If rich owners wouldn't be flipping the bill for the poor ones, league would have to downside big time.

And who's fault is that? Why do we have teams in Phoenix to begin with?

And secondly, it's great that we have revenue sharing but it's not enough. The Leafs are making money hand over fist. The league owners should look at each other as partners, if half the league isn't making money then it's not going to make for a very good league.

Like I said, we overexpanded and went to places that didn't make a whole lot of sense and pulled hockey out of places it should've stayed.

Originally Posted by Kriss E

As for the stupid contracts, I agree on some level. All it takes is one moron to get the ball rolling, I'm sure you know this. And it's not only the owner's fault. The agents are just as guilty. If one agent convinces his client he deserves 80M, and makes him agree that if he doesn't get that much from his current team, he'll get it from some other, then his current owner/gm is faced with a choice, let him walk or give in. Now, if they agree that the asset is too good to let go, they find a solution as to how to give him that much, and so the front loaded-long term deals were born.
Everybody plays a part in it, not just the owners, not just the agents, but the players as well. In the end, the owners are the ones making the decisions and dishing out the cash, but like I said, it only takes one to get it started, after that you either have to adapt or the players will go elsewhere.

Sure. But there are already controls in place for this. And it sounds like the players were cool going to 50/50 so that limits the contracts they can have.

Despite this though the owners are dumb enough to come up with 30 year contracts. I mean seriously man... Why is this the fault of the players. It certainly isn't collusionary not to sign a 15 year deal with a player and have every other owner not do this.

I'm okay with controls being in place to protect owners from themselves but there's got to be a limit. And this CERTAINLY is not an issue that was worth locking players out over. Yet it's a hill they will die on?

Why?

And hell, the players (amazingly) even agreed to this control. I think they said it was okay for 10 year limits. The league should say okay to this or met in the middle and next time around try to make it shorter. That's how you negotiate.

You don't say "we'll die on the hill unless we get our way" and run home with your bag of marbles. It's assinine.

Originally Posted by Kriss E

As for the expansion, going to the south was a mistake, and I think he should be fired for it. However, the idea of expanding the league was good. More teams also means more players. But I agree, location, location, location. However, franchises were struggling in Canada at the time as well. The idea was to get the States in every part of it involved in this sport. A good idea, and it might have worked if they did better studies and didn't expand as fast, who knows.
According to Forbes, the NHL should have 20 teams in order to truly be profitable, not 30. That's ten times a 23 men roster, 230 players affected.

http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl-l...0_team_league/

As much as I think the owners have handled it poorly, and are ridiculous at times, I really don't think the players understand how good they have it.

"Good" is a relative term. A player making 2 mil a year has it good over the average worker but it sucks compared to other pro atheletes. Again, it comes down to a question of who gets what percentage of the pie and I don't think the issues here were worth having this kind of a dispute over.

Originally Posted by Carey Price

I keep hearing this and it's crap. Yes it's the owners that sign ridiculous contracts but the teams signing huge contracs taht are frontloaded and have big bonus money up front are not the ones suffering...they can't get together and not offer big contracts as this would be collusion.

The sticking point isn't the dollars... it's the years.

Originally Posted by Carey Price

Somebody with a baseball avatar should know that MLB was sued and lost big in the 1990's collusion cases.

Apples and oranges. There is a cap in place for a reason. To limit player salary... basically legalized collousion. It's not collusionary for all the owners to realize that 15 year contracts are dumb and not offer them.

It's not like Nik Lidstrom went to a team to try to get a contract only to have the door closed in his face until he gave them a blank check (like what happened with Andre Dawson) this is a completely different story.

Originally Posted by Carey Price

In terms of Southern US Expansion, in order to expand the footprint you have to expand geographically. It's easy to say move the southern teams up North but where are they going to play? Hamilton and Quebec are not excatly great markets, Quebec has no rink and a small population(relatively speaking) and Hamilton has a 15k rink and ****** fan support for AHL. Seattle also would need a rink.

If you want big US dollars and a major TV deal you have to be further south than Washington St Louis and Detroit.

By all means expand. But don't expand by 30% into untested markets. That's a recipe for disaster. Bettman overexpanded at a very rapid pace. I mean TWO teams in Florida? Really?

That's just flat out dumb.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

Did you miss the part where it was pointed out that revenue sharing IS being increased

Big deal. It's not by nearly enough. Like I said, the Leafs are a cash cow, let them foot the bill ahead of the journeyman hockey player. The players are already giving up an additional 7%. They aren't going to be perpertually making millions as the Leafs are. The revenues should come from the richest teams.

This isn't even a question of fairness, it's a question of practicality.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

by a larger margin than the rollback players were asked to take? I take it the answer is "yes", so I hope you read this post.

Nope, didn't miss it. Revenue sharing in the NHL is a joke.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

SOME of the rich owners make money year after year. Some of them LOSE money with their franchises, year after year. That 4th liner is getting very well paid to do his job, he is ot getting slave wages. Since when is getting $550 000 a horrible thing deserving of such sympathy? Let that 4th liner recognize that he needs to be intelligent with his funds in order to be able to set himself up in some other career, or even save enough to cover manageable bills so that he CAN go back to school for some degree that will enable him to live a decent life in the real world. Why is it that there are people on here that think these players do so much that they deserve to make enough money to retire comfortably after a 3-12 year career in their chosen profession?

550k isn't horrible. But again, it's for a limited time for those guys.

The Leafs can print money. They can afford it and not even blink. Hell, I hear Brian Burke lights up tabacco in a 100 dollar bill every time he trades away a first rounder.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

Stopping "dumb" owners from signing stupid contracts it what this negotiation is all about.

Exactly. Thanks for proving my point.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

Just because a couple of GMs are willig to toss their owners' money around like idiots doesn't mean all of them are that stupid. The problem is with the handful who ARE that stupid. If there is nothing in pace in the CBA to prevent such stupidity, the players can sue the league for collusion if suddenly the agent can not find anyone willing to offer a "fair" contract for that player. We saw what collusion charges did to baseball, the NHL owners do not want that problem, so they want to have a contract limitation added to the CBA to prevent stupid GMs from damaging the league with idiotic contracts like we saw Luongo, Yashin, DiPietro, Kovalchuk et al get.

If the owners are that stupid, there should be consequences for their stupidity. There are already controls in place to limit the damage. At some point the owners should police themselves.

Bottom line there's a cap on how much they can spend. That's about as fair as it gets. Add in some revenue sharing and the system should work.

But it has to be REAL revenue sharing (which it isn't) and the owners can't try to defeat a cap they themselves set in place.

And again the players actually agreed to limits on this issue. It's 10 years, the owners want 5 (or something like that I don't even remember) ... just meet in the middle. That's what a normal negotiator would do.

Instead Bettman gives us the "we'll die on the hill for this" rhetoric.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

The poor franchises ARE getting subsidized by the owners, and are going to be getting more under the new CBA. The players are being asked to split the HRR pie in a fair 50/50 split to ALSO help those weaker teams since it benefits the players to not have contraction just as much as it benefits the owners.

The cap that was "rammed" down the players' throat has been so devastating that the players' salaries have increased 63.5% over the duration of the last CBA! Man, it must suck to see salaries raise by such a minimal amount...The owners DID get some of wha what they wanted last time, but it is quite clear that they truly believe they are entitled to make 50% of the HRR in the very business that they pay every single related cost in. They each bring as much value to the game as the players, albeit in a different manner, and should be able to get an equal share of the HRR. That is why they are complaining. Heck, the richer owners actually get less than the share they deserve because they have revenue sharing. I don't see Ovechkin sharing his salary with that poor 4th liner who isn't going to make enough to retire. Should the owners ask the players to engage in some revenue sharing so that the poor 4th liner can have an easier opportunity to retire when he can no longer play?

This is the same salary cap that the league sacrificed a season over last time. And the players with not a whole lot of resistance actually came down to the 50/50 mark. I don't think anyone disagrees a whole lot with this.

If they weren't going for this you might have a point.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

Bettman started nogotiations with the same "insulting" offer that the owners have been living under for 7 years believing the players would make a counter offer. That is what you do in negotiations. The players actually refused to even make a counter offer to the original proposal. THAT is why we are where we are. Heck, even the last offer from the owners to the players seemed to be one that the players were interested in until Fehr came along and said "no" without even bringing the offer to the union to vote on. THAT is why we are where we are.

It was a dumb offer. Everyone knew it was a hard ass offer and that's why we are where we are now. When you start with that kind of a gulf, it's harder to bridge the gap. Moreover, the people across the table from you become more skeptical and they start hardening their positions.

Starting from a crazy position is a great strategy... if you like work stoppages.

Originally Posted by Drydenwasthebest

It IS ridiculous that we are in this situation---AGAIN. It might have been far better for the players to start negotiating with the NHL las year like the owners wanted to do, rather than choosing to wait until this summer to "begin" negotiations.

The fact that there was a shorter period of time to work with (assuming you're right) makes Bettman's initial offer all the more ridiculous.