Lanny MacDonald*
Guest
JohnnyReb said:Ummm.. Isn't that the whole point of the lockout?
So their payrolls are equal. One team is making money hand over fist, because they are only spending 37.5% of their revenues on labour costs, while the other is losing money hand over fist, because they are spending 75% of their revenues on labour costs... this is good because...?
If the percentages of revenues is irrelevant, why the insistence on "linkage?"
You're skewing your numbers in a way. The percentage that is being guaranteed is from the total amount of revenues from a league perspective and not from an individual team perspective. I think the league is working from the idea of leveling the playing field, identifying the point where everyone needs to be at where all can compete fairly, and share that cost across the board, allowing teams a change to push into profitability while being competitive. Anyone that wished to spend over that level would have to sustain those expenditures themselves through generation of their own revenue streams. I like this because it gets the teams to the point where the excuses are gone. Now a team's hardwork is what is going to take it to the next level.
A good example is that challenge that the Canadian teams face. The currency difference is a terrible burden to have to live with. That linkage guarantees that the rest of the league also shares the burden of the currency differentiation and allows the Canadian clubs to go on with business without worrying about that one bugaboo that the US teams do not even think about. The Canadian teams can then move from survival mode into competition mode and leverage the creative ways they have been finding revenue streams over the past five or six years into profits and realistic runs at championships. The combination of the linkage, the league sharing the responsiblity for the linked revenues (that's where the revenue sharing that the players have been demanding come in and why the league has not been able to say how much that will be, as it will be variable from year to year), and the cap levels (minimum and maximum) make a very smart way of controlling costs and not handcuffing any one franchise (or six) and not making it a welfare league. Its the ultimate compromise from all levels in an attempt to find a common ground IMO. I'm surprised more people have not been able to see the elegance of this proposal and the opportuinities it presents to all parties.