Dark Metamorphosis said:
Gary Bettman has said, I believe in a NY radio interview, that the NHL's books have been open to the nhlpa since 1999, yet they refuse to look at them.
Bettman is talking about the "Unified Report of Operations" when he talks about the league books. Those are not the books of Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment or the Comcast books. They are the books according to how the NHL splits up the revenue between the rinks teams and broadcasters.
The NHLPA was allowed to look at the actual books of four teams, but that's it, and they didn't like what they found. It just set off a dispute about revenue definition. It convinced the NHLPA that every team was different and it wasn't practical to try to define revenues for 30 such diverse operations.
The NHL itself doesn't have books except for the league operations. Teams have books and those books are not open to the NHLPA.
How can anyone support the players when they refuse to even prove their own point? Are they scared they'll find that the owners are actually losing money? God I hate this damn union. At this point i'd almost rather have scabs than these greedy SOBs.
No, they aren't afraid to learn the owners are actually losing money. They recognize it is an impossible task. Consider the Toronto Maple Leafs. The majority owner of MLSE is the Ontario Teacher's Pension Fund.
This is how they responded to a question from a retired teacher who wanted to know how his fund expected to make money investing in a hockey team:
The Teachers’ plan has a 58 per cent stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE), which owns the Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors and the Air Canada Centre. We do not receive cash dividends from our investment; all money stays with MLSE...
Despite the Leafs’ early exit from this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) is the most successful sports franchise in North America. It has also proven to be a good investment for the fund, growing substantially since we first invested in it back in 1994. We make money on such investments by helping the company grow over time and become more successful. Eventually we sell these investments and realize the value.
Note that earnings are retained and the entire return will be taken when the investment is sold. The Teacher's pension fund says MLSE has a value of $740 million with assets of $1.4 billion and liabilities of $650 million. Presumably the value increases every year.
How much of the increase in value should be attributed to the Toronto Maple Leafs each year? How on earth do we expect the NHLPA to sort it out? Can it be anything but arbitrary? The players think that the ownership of MLSE - including the people who run the billions in the Teacher's Pension Plan - can sort it out and set a reasonable player budget. Nobody else can as a practical matter.
Tom