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Lockout IV: One likes to believe in the freedom of hockey (Moderated: see post #2)
So not believing your viewpoint means I've been brainwashed?
I have absolutely no problem with some of my money I pay to see the Jets going to help struggling franchises. I pay 70+ dollars a game on ST for upper deck tickets, which is still below average for the rink.
In this case we are not talking 30 individual businesses, per se. Every one of these businesses need the other 29 to viable to maximize the revenue sources for the league as a whole. Right now their is a disparity in the league in terms of revenue, that if left unchecked makes the league not viable with checks and balances such as the cap and revenue sharing. Each team generates as much revenue as they can, and it benefits both themselves and the league as a whole.
If the Leafs and Rangers hated the situation so much they could go make their own 6 team league, see how much they can maximize their revenue there. But they won't, since they realize that the league itself is important and it is important to ensure that all the teams are doing as best as they possibly can.
EDIT: Also completely agreed with No Fun Shogun. Good post!
It's 30 individual businesses when it comes to issues like ticket prices.
It's a league of 30 interconnected businesses when it comes to labor costs.
The owners want it both ways.
So when owners overcharge fans, it's just a function of the market. But when they control costs, "screw the market." The market is bad.
Does he "deserve" a better product? No. If you don't feel that $100 is worth what you're paying, you're free to stop buying it. If you want to go to hockey games for $33, then move somewhere where that's an option, or watch games in a different league (AHL/CHL?). That's not an option? Then you're back at the option of buying or not buying the $100 tickets.
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Don't feel like Suter is worth 12 years or $100 million?
I give them credit. First they said if you go to 50-50 we have a deal. When the PA finally did, they said they will 'die' on the hill of contract lengths. Very smart. Fehr didn't see this coming.
But the players have not gone 50-50. Every proposal has some sort of back door mechanism which negates 50-50.
Their last proposal apparently had this "mid level exception" which would have driven costs up by about 5% of revenue per team (based on some previous NBA examples).
No offense, but if the fan that's paying three times as much for his tickets isn't happy with the quality of what he's seeing, then he should stop paying for it. Or be mad at the organization that's charging so much and yet putting a similar, or inferior, product on the ice compared to a team that's charging a third.
Getting upset at the system when everyone else abides by said system is fairly nonsensical.
And can we get over what anybody deserves, please? Fans, players, owners, teams, markets, etc. deserve nothing. They get what they get, put up with what they put up with, and get away with what they can get away with. Nothing more, nothing less.
Apply that same logic about a fan buying tickets to the NHL owner buying players' services.
Got it and thanks for the thoughtful response. So signing big deals that circumvent the cap may hurt players by allowing some of it to be taken away, but only to the extent that everyone does it. If half the league underspends by the same margin as the other half overspends by, it's irrelevant.
Query then whether the players really should be fighting for cap-circumventing deals, though. It was suggested above that it shouldn't matter. But in reality, we assume that a bunch of teams will spend less than the cap. This actually allows wealthier teams to make up for what the poorer teams refuse to spend.
Exactly the point I made earlier in the week/weekend. Cap circumvention basically causes two money flows.
A) From the owner signing the deal to all other owners and
B) From every player to the guy who got the cap circumvention deal.
Based on B I do not see any rational reason why the players would possibly want to keep these type of deals around. Ultimately who will pay for Suter, Weber and Parise deals this summer? Not the owners, but the players.
The owners know that implementing a 5 year max contract for leaving a team and 7 years for staying with your team will do two things:
1. The optics of negotiations. "I can't give player X the MAX contract length. Sidney Crosby gets the max length. I can go as far as 3 years but your player will have to leave some money on the table". This gives GM's additional negotiating tools to whittle away dollars.
How is this different for ~90% of the players today that don't get even get close to the "MAX" contract? In my view it doesn't change anything for the majority of the league, but now the star players may have the ability to have *more* movement because their contracts are up for renegotiation more often. It seems to me, that this is exciting for fans to see good players shift teams every so often. I'm not a big fan of this idea because my team (Oilers) finally has some stars, but I would have been a big fan of this system 5-6 years ago.
Quote:
Originally Posted by c4fn8d
2. By allowing teams to sign their own players to 7 years. If a player values stability, he will leave money on the table to stay with his team for a longer term. FA frenzy will be a thing of the past. And contracts by default will be for lower dollars.
I wouldn't say that contracts will be for "lower dollars". By implementing what the owners are looking for will produce contracts are are essentially "real" dollars; which over the course of this CBA many fans have been asking for. By limiting the term to 5 years as well will make it easier for the GM's to know what their cap will look like as they try to plan their teams over a multiple year time scale because the actual dollars will be similar to the actual spent dollars.
And, in the end, this should be better for the players as well (IMHO) because a simpler accounting system will give them a better judge of their actual value and what they can fight for when negotiating contracts. An issue players are facing is when the value of a contract (the caphit) is grossly disproportionate to the actual value, this is a bad thing! By limiting contracts to 5/7 years players are protected if they got a raw deal and are under-paid, and owners are protected because an end is in sight if you over-paid.
I give them credit. First they said if you go to 50-50 we have a deal. When the PA finally did, they said they will 'die' on the hill of contract lengths. Very smart. Fehr didn't see this coming.
Did they say they'd sign an existing deal that had 50/50, or did they say they had to have 50/50 before signing any deal?
I don't remember them saying that there was a deal on the table that would be accepted if the only change was to 50/50.
Stephen Whyno @SWhyno
Asked Bill Daly why NHL accepted mediation after not wanting it last week: "We are in a different place now than we were a week ago today."
It's 30 individual businesses when it comes to issues like ticket prices.
It's a league of 30 interconnected businesses when it comes to labor costs.
Every business should be attempting to maximize revenue while minimizing costs.
__________________ "It’s not as if Donald Fehr was lying to us, several players said. Rather, it’s as if he has been economical with information, these players believe, not sharing facts these players consider to be vital."
Is that your top players will sometimes take asmaller salary but with longer term......willing to get security at the expense of full value.
thereby you may get less hometown discounts on prime players due to a 5 ye limit or even a 7 ye limit
and I'm impressed with the pros and their ability to say these incredibly vague and useless statements. I need to acquire this trait.
Cover of Pink Floyds Meddle album. Side B one of those endless Space Cadet ProgRock pieces, 23+ minutes in length, no doubt conceived of & written in the Timothy E. Leary Laboraties at Stanford while floating in an Isolation Tank; Side A with such lyrical delights as "one of these days Im going to cut you into little pieces" in full on balsetto run through echo chambers & phase shifters. Beware of entry type dealeo, pre Dark Side of the Moon, and if I had to hazard a guess, William L. "Bill" Daly the III'rd (no less; and who knew Amurica had Royalty?) likely a fan. Takes a special kind of sardonic warp of the central cortex to come up with the kinds of lines he & Gary Bettman employ on a pretty much regular basis. Yes, most amusing.
Don't feel like Suter is worth 12 years or $100 million?
Don't pay it.
The problem with that logic is that if you extend it to every player, pretty soon you're left with "don't feel Nashville is worth having a hockey team? Don't have one."
Stephen Whyno @SWhyno
Asked Bill Daly why NHL accepted mediation after not wanting it last week: "We are in a different place now than we were a week ago today."
Didn't the PA put another proposal on the table (Thursday night) since they requested mediation?
Cover of Pink Floyds Meddle album. Side B one of those endless Space Cadet ProgRock pieces, 23+ minutes in length, no doubt conceived of & written in the Timothy E. Leary Laboraties at Stanford while floating in an Isolation Tank; Side A with delights like "one of these days Im going to cut you into little pieces" in full on base blasetto run through echo chambers & phase shifters. Beware of entry type dealeo, pre Dark Side of the Moon, and if I had to hazard a guess, William L. "Bill" Daly the III'rd (no less; and who knew Amurica had Royalty?) likely a fan. Takes a special kind of sardonic warp of the central cortex to come up with the kinds of lines he & Gary Bettman employ on a pretty much regular basis. Yes, most amusing.
It's 30 individual businesses when it comes to issues like ticket prices.
It's a league of 30 interconnected businesses when it comes to labor costs.
The owners want it both ways.
So when owners overcharge fans, it's just a function of the market. But when they control costs, "screw the market." The market is bad.
They are, in fact, ONE business with 30 franchises. They are only competitors ON the ice; they are business partners OFF the ice. That's how sports leagues work, and have worked since the 1940s.
Both of you leave yourselfs open. This can't happen with 21 or 24 teams?
The number of teams is immaterial. The only people who carp on the number of teams are the ones who gleefully want to liquidate US teams to further their fantasy of an all-Canadian league.
Cover of Pink Floyds Meddle album. Side B one of those endless Space Cadet ProgRock pieces, 23+ minutes in length, no doubt conceived of & written in the Timothy E. Leary Laboraties at Stanford while floating in an Isolation Tank; Side A with such lyrical delights as "one of these days Im going to cut you into little pieces" in full on balsetto run through echo chambers & phase shifters. Beware of entry type dealeo, pre Dark Side of the Moon, and if I had to hazard a guess, William L. "Bill" Daly the III'rd (no less; and who knew Amurica had Royalty?) likely a fan. Takes a special kind of sardonic warp of the central cortex to come up with the kinds of lines he & Gary Bettman employ on a pretty much regular basis. Yes, most amusing.
And to think my guess was a deformed black-eyed pea. The veggie, not the band.
Originally Posted by Captain Bob
It's 30 individual businesses when it comes to issues like ticket prices.
Unless it's changed, the league does set the prices for each team for playoff tickets. We had a long-standing policy of offering 200 (two hundred, not 2,000 or 20,000 as some claim) tickets at $8 each. Started at the Thunderdome which had 27,000+ capacity & the owners wanted to make games accessible for students, seniors, etc. That tradition carried on for many, many years. When we were in the playoffs in 2003 & 2004 the league told us we couldn't do that for the playoffs.
To our credit, we fought them and won. Fans camped out in the plaza at the arena for days to be in line for those 200 tickets, which were only available for purchase on game days. (I don't think we do this any longer, something probably done away with by the Koules/Barrie regime.)
They are, in fact, ONE business with 30 franchises. They are only competitors ON the ice; they are business partners OFF the ice. That's how sports leagues work, and have worked since the 1940s.
So, since we set labor costs to the lowest common denominator, let's set ticket prices to the lowest common denominator.
yepp. Thats pretty rich alrighty. I wonder who writes his material?
