John Flyers Fan said:
There are teams an owners that are being hurt in a big way by this lockout.
The Flyers announced that if the season is a complete wipeout they will lose $15 million, and they are far from the only team in that situation.
Yes there are some teams that will lose less with no hockey, but a whole bunch of teams that will lose more.
That doesn't even take into account the fact of possible future fan apathy, loss in ticket sales/overall slowing or reversing of revenue growth.
I said "overall" bottomline and I meant it. With hockey, owners collectively lost something like $300M per year (excluding interests and amortization). Add to that the franchise value that is lower (overall) when the league isn't making profits to that. If there's no hockey, the teams will lose collectively about the same amount.
To top it off, if they keep a similar structure, the owners think they would lose $300M this year, then the next one, the year after the next one, etc. If they can put a stop gap, then they will likely make profits (and tremendously increase their collective franchise value).
Overall, they don't stand to lose much by sitting out. Surely, some individual franchises will lose more than others. At the same time, if a cap gets implemented, those franchises stand to win even more though, so it's a situation they're probably willing to accept.
Now, let's assume a worst case scenario where every year of a lockout means the owners lose $200M more than they would if they were operating (really high figure). They would lose $400M over two years. That's probably money they'll be able to get back with the next cba if they implement the one they want. In other words, the loss from the owners during the lockout is sustainable. And while on the long term I don't think it's sound business, the owners can have planned to used the lockout losses as tax shelters, so they aren't even "losing" that amount.
On the other hand, you have the players collectively losing revenues over $1B this year, and then next year too. After two years, it's probably about $2.5B that they will have lost. I just can't see that as a sustainable loss, they'll never get gains over the next CBA that will compensate them for the lost revenues. Even more, if they get to finally agree to a cap (in %), then their collective revenues will suffer from the loss of fanbase, since the overall revenues will be lower as every day of this lockout goes by. Which means that for the players, the clock is ticking. Not only are they losing revenues that they have no chance to earn back in the next cba, but when they sign to a form of cost certainty, their revenues will be lower as the fanbase erodes while the league is not operating.
To me, when you look at it this way, I just can't see why the owners would cave in before the players do. The players have everything to lose and the owners everything to gain from the lockout. The bargaining strenght this time is with the owners, while in 1994 it was with the players (because the owners were afraid to lose expansion money, national tv money and expected rise in revenues while the players salaries weren't that high collectively back then).