More than ever, pro-owner

[AM]

why bother

do you know if they were one of the teams that made a profit or lost money????

Edmonton, like alot of small market teams last year and the last few years cut payroll because they knew the CBA was going to expire and cost certainty will be put into effect.

they also cannot compete with teams with a 70 million dollar payroll so why give huge raises out just to miss the playoffs

Edmonton cannot afford a 40-50 million dollar team but they can afford a 34-38 million dollar team as long as everyone else has a 34-38 million dollar team

see, that allows them to have a fair chance for a playoff spot and a run to the cup instead of the slim chances they normally have

To explain it to these guys? Same old arguements, and then when you refute them they just ignore it.

 

[vanlady]

do you know if they were one of the teams that made a profit or lost money????

Edmonton, like alot of small market teams last year and the last few years cut payroll because they knew the CBA was going to expire and cost certainty will be put into effect.

they also cannot compete with teams with a 70 million dollar payroll so why give huge raises out just to miss the playoffs

Edmonton cannot afford a 40-50 million dollar team but they can afford a 34-38 million dollar team as long as everyone else has a 34-38 million dollar team

see, that allows them to have a fair chance for a playoff spot and a run to the cup instead of the slim chances they normally have

If you examine the NHLPA offer of Dec 9 and really look at the charts you discover that the Oilers made money.

You seem to be confused that high payrolls equal success. They don't. Where Detroit, Colorado and NJ high payroll teams 10 years ago, no. They built there teams and in there success have been able to pay more.

With the rise in the Canadian dollar the Oiler would have made an even bigger profit they could invest in payroll

For anyone who thinks that caps equal a balanced league, look at the NFL where 2 teams have taken 8 of the 16 conference final spots in the last 4 years. And by the way when was the last time the Lakers didn't make the playoffs?

 

[PecaFan]

The NHLPA said fine, we do not believe your figures but we will structure an offer with a 24% rollback which will mimic the claimed losses.

Riiiight. We dont "actually" believe the numbers, we'll just negotiate as if we do. Nope, this doesn't wash, the NHLPA proved they believed the numbers with that offer.

Bettman looked like he had been punched in the stomach if you caught the news conference.

Pfft. Wishful thinking on your behalf.

Forbes Magazine slashed Levitt's numbers by half and they are not known to be union friendly by any stretch of the imagination. They were only able to use publicly available documents and sources. Who knows how far they would have cut back the losses if they could have got in and dug around. Forbes was very conservative in attacking Levitt's numbers. Forbes credited the Canucks with a $1.7 profit when the team by its own admission made over $25 million that season.

Brian Burke, a man who's actually seen the numbers says those Forbes numbers are *way* overstated. It was more like $12 million, he wouldn't say specifically, but agreed when given a range.

And what has been lost here, the Forbes numbers, despite being pie in the sky, most optimistic case, totally ad-hoc guesses and estimations, supports the NHL's position. They still show the league is bleeding money, probably $150+ million per year, if you take a number between the two extremes of best case and worst case.

Interestingly since divulging the two sets of books to the newspaper, Ron Ryan has not made another public statement. Big surprise.

He said there were two reports, not sets of books. Surely an educated man such as yourself knows the difference.

Award winning investigative sports journalist (and Pulitzer prize nominee for his expose of Eagleson), Russ Conway skewered the Levitt Report as well recently having several outside accounting experts look at the report and methodology.

No, Conway skewered the "super audit" statement by the league. He has specifically stated he doesn't disagree with the basic findings.

If you want a line by line criticism of the Levitt Report, check this out by New York economist Dubi Silverstein who publishes the Blue Shirt Bulletin:

Ah yes, the good old useless ramblings of Dubi. Pure crap that is, just massive quibbling over words like "net revenue" (remember, it's not an audit Dubi, they can use any words they want) and character assassinations.

Stuff like this proves just how out to lunch good ol' Dubi is:
"Levitt even includes minor league salaries, which would be fine if minor league revenues were included, but they were not."

NHL teams don't *own* the minor league teams, they're separate businesses. They don't receive the revenue from minor league teams. They just have agreements, where they pay the salaries of their players that are in the minor leagues. Thus, expenses are included, and revenues are not.

The freakin' idiot uses the TMR costs, based on average prices of soda pop and souvenir hats and multiplies them by average attendance numbers to "prove" the URO's are wrong. Gee, what a surprise, a half assed guess based on multiplying a couple of numbers together differs from the reported numbers. Gosh, that must mean the actual numbers are wrong, since the half assed guess *must* be correct.

 

[arnie]

I am firmly on the side of the players. Negotiations consist of give and take, not take it or leave it. Bettman has refused to offer any meaningful concessions to the players. He has taken their concessions and offered nothing in return. His vision for the league includes breaking up the teams that are over the cap and distributing their players, wonderful idea. He wants the playoff teams to share revenue with the non-playoff teams. We'll have the Flames and Lightning sharing revenues with the Rangers, does this make any sense at all. He has fans that believe that the cap will lower ticket prices, think again, the ticket prices are set by supply and demand. So instead of the fans dollars going to support the team, they will go to line the owners pockets. He wants teams that can not turn a profit at payrolls in the 20 million dollar range spend over 30 million. He wants the NFL without the revenue sharing. He wants parity in a league that already has parity. He wants to turn the league into some kind of fantasy league with yearly dispersal drafts. Great vision.

First, he has offerred concession. The NHL upped their offer by 10%

The criticism of 30 teams is also misqguided. If there were 20 teams, 250 NHL players would be out of work. Do you really think that the NHPLA wants this any more thjan a cap? The 30 teams suit everyone just fine.

 

[arnie]

Partly, but I have also been a management labour negotiator in the past.

My position comes from looking at a whole host of things to come to my opinion in support of the NHLPA in this dispute.

Exactly how does you position justify acting like a pack of spolied brats. Business is about money and there is no right or wrong - just two sides trying make themselves the best deal. The behavior of the many of the players has been abomonable. This is a matter of character, not labor negotiations. Either you throw childish tantrums or you don't

 

[arnie]

I have yet to see the pro-cap people post a single independent expert that supports the owners.

Phil Esposito.

 

[CarlRacki]

Look at it this way.

NHL concessions = 0%
NHLPA concessions = 100%

That is the scenario you are looking at right now. It isn't the players want more money and the owners are saying no to giving them more money. It the NHL wanting a hard cap coming from a no cap system and the players saying we will take a luxury tax (soft cap) but not a hard cap.

You can skew the information however you want to convince yourself that the NHL and Bettman are the good guys during this whole lockout, but you show me direct quotes, aside from the media releases where the NHL says they are trying to negotiate, where legitmacy was offered from the NHL aside from their one-track mind hard cap offer.

The reason they call it a CBA is because it is a COLLECTIVE BARGAINING agreement. Not a we want a cap and this is the OBA (Owners + Bettman Agreement), the collective bargaining agreement. As in both sides factor in on the negotiations. The NHL is trying to take the bargaining out of the equation, which is why we see such a significant gap today.

You cannot just boil this down to a binary equation lockout of either CAP or NO CAP. There are many other solutions that the NHL has decided that they are not willing to even consider. If you put strict rules on younger contracts, you can drive down the price of players by bringing about a new generation of lower salaries players. You can put in place a luxury tax, something that the NHLPA has already offered, but with more severe numbers to curb excessive spending. It isn't a one option for solution decision. The NHL has just chosen to make it so.

1. The owners have risen the cap and floor levels, lowered the age of UFA, and increased the minimum contract. Like it or not, these are concessions.
2. A luxury tax is not a soft cap.

 

[CarlRacki]

Fantastic retort.
Even Forbes' skewed report - which claimed non-hockey related revenues as hockey-related revenues - had the NHL losing significant money.

 

[likea]

If you examine the NHLPA offer of Dec 9 and really look at the charts you discover that the Oilers made money.

You seem to be confused that high payrolls equal success. They don't. Where Detroit, Colorado and NJ high payroll teams 10 years ago, no. They built there teams and in there success have been able to pay more.

With the rise in the Canadian dollar the Oiler would have made an even bigger profit they could invest in payroll

For anyone who thinks that caps equal a balanced league, look at the NFL where 2 teams have taken 8 of the 16 conference final spots in the last 4 years. And by the way when was the last time the Lakers didn't make the playoffs?

in 2002-2003, and 2003-2004

if you look at the top 15 teams in payroll

11 out of 15 made the playoffs

bottom 15- 5 out of 15




2001-2002

again 11 out of the top 15 in payroll made the playoffs
that means 5 of the top 15 did also and the percentages stay the same

2000-2001

13 out of the top 15 made the playoffs


therefore 3 of the bottom 15





in the four years

if you were in the top 15 in payroll 46 teams in the last 4 years made the playoffs out of 60



if you were in the bottom 15 in payroll 18 teams in the last 4 years made the playoffs out of 60


payroll makes a huge difference and is a huge advantage

 

[CarlRacki]

No, I have loads more.

The NHLPA has never agreed with Levitt's figures and for good reason and nor has anyone else who has looked at them closely and evaluated his methodology. Here was the NHLPA reaction to the Levitt Report:



The NHLPA said fine , we do not believe your figures but we will structure an offer with a 24% rollback which will mimic the claimed losses. Bettman looked like he had been punched in the stomach if you caught the news conference. Shock and awe would be a good description when the NHLPA dropped this bombshell. What employer in its right mind would not have grabbed those concessions and ran. Not to mention the other concessions offered up. But for the NHL it was salary cap or bust.

Levitt is not independent under any reasonable definition of the term. Nor is he an auditor or even an accountant - he is a Wall Street broker. He was head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged with watching out for the consumer investor. On his watch there were the Enron and World.com scandals as well as numerous other scandals and accounting irregularities. Looks like just the guy the NHL needed.

His work of fiction is no longer even mentioned by the NHL in its recent PR spins. Bettman quit referring to it after he was roasted over his description of the report as a "super audit" - it was not a regular audit or even a baby audit. Not under any accounting defintion except perhaps that known to Gary Bettman.

Even Levitt allowed this was not an audit but simply a report. A report for which one side hired him and paid him. Actually let's be clear Levitt was not hired by the NHL, he was hired by the NHL's outside legal firm, Proskauer Rose (Bettman's old New York law firm) who supplied the abrasive Bob Batterman to attend the latest meetings with Linden. Why do that you ask??? Well if it comes to determining what precise instructions Mr. Levitt may have been given the NHL can always claim solicitor-client confidentiality and say talk to our lawyers - they retained him. And the lawyers if asked - well solicitor-client confidentiality is pretty much absolute. we do know how to insulate our clients from those uncomfortable questions and future examinations for discovery.

Levitt never provided a team by team breakdown and was not prepared to so it is rather difficult for the lay person to get any real sense of whether it is true.

He offered the NHLPA to review the numbers upon which he based his report - since he did not go beyond the URO's that would not have been useful. Since it was the URO's and the players already knew they were not accurate, why waste the time? The NHL knew the URO's were bogus from their 1999 and 2000 review of the Montreal, Boston, LA and Buffalo. See my quote above when the NHLPA responded to Levitt.

"We've always said it's not an accounting issue of making sure the numbers add up," Ted Saskin said, "but a much more complex task of how one defines the revenues in a business with many related parts and complicated corporate structures. There's no way to tell because they continue to refuse to give you individual team financial information."

That's why the union has little faith in the URO process. The NHLPA doesn't believe it accurately reflects the financial state of the teams.

"Absolutely not" said Saskin. "The financial reporting you get from the National Hockey League is only as good as the information they get from each team in what is an unaudited and voluntary submission. And the old adage 'Garbage in, garbage out' is unfortunately an apt description of the current system they have in place. We have numerous examples of teams simply putting down 'zero' for luxury suites, concessions and other items. You can't take that kind of reporting seriously."

Forbes Magazine slashed Levitt's numbers by half and they are not known to be union friendly by any stretch of the imagination. They were only able to use publicly available documents and sources. Who knows how far they would have cut back the losses if they could have got in and dug around. Forbes was very conservative in attacking Levitt's numbers. Forbes credited the Canucks with a $1.7 profit when the team by its own admission made over $25 million that season.

The President of the Flyers told a Philadelphia newspaper that contrary to the claim of Ed Snider the Chairman of the Board the Flyers did not lose money as determined by Levitt. After the Levitt Report came out, Philadelphia Flyers chairman Ed Snider revealed his team was one of the 19 NHL teams the report said lost money in 2002-03. Team president Ron Ryan said the Flyers weren't among the teams whose lost money HUH???????? Must be two Philadelphia Flyer teams, right?



Interestingly since divulging the two sets of books to the newspaper, Ron Ryan has not made another public statement. Big surprise.

Award winning investigative sports journalist (and Pulitzer prize nominee for his expose of Eagleson), Russ Conway skewered the Levitt Report as well recently having several outside accounting experts look at the report and methodology.


If you want a line by line criticism of the Levitt Report, check this out by New York economist Dubi Silverstein who publishes the Blue Shirt Bulletin:


And here is Silverstein on the issue of Levitt's so-called independence:

And his conclusion:

http://ordinaryleastsquare.typepad.com/dubi/2004/03/reading_compreh.html

Now do you understand why when the claim of Levitt's independence was made my response was " "?

Stick a fork in Arthur Levitt and his report, they are done like dinner. (to borrow a phrase from the immortal Dave "Tiger: Williams)

Sound and fury signifying nothing. Wetcoaster, you're an absolute master at cutting and pasting long strings comments and analysis from various sources then trying to package them as a single, coherent argument on the issue. Anyone who reads these carefully (which is difficult) can see the numerous holes.

1. You dismiss the Leavitt report and trump Forbes, but fail to recognize that a) Forbes still portrays significant losses by the NHL b) that less than half the NHL's teams turned a profit last year and c) this despote the fact it counts things as "team-related" revenue that no one else would, including players' associations in any other professional sports league. We're talking about hotels near arenas, suite rental for concerts and movie theaters. These have never been, and never will be, regarded as team-related revenues in any professional sports leagues. Remove these figures from Forbes' report, and the NHL's losses grow significantly from the $96 million it claims.
2. The issue of Leavitt's independence is a red herring thrown out there by lazy people who'd rather not discuss the substance of his report. First, it's laughable that you would take the NHL to task for the fact the report is not an audit when every NHL press release on the subject states "The Leavitt Report." Go look at the NHL web site. It's called "The Leavitt Report." Secondly, Leavitt is someone with impeccable credentials. You mention Enron? Fact: Leavitt tried to enact measures that would have prevented that kind of situation while he headed the SEC only to have them blocked by the Clinton administration. Why not bother familiarizing yourself with a few facts before you impugn someone's integrity?
3. All of this is meaningless once the NHLPA agrees to a cap with independent audits that will determine what the revenues really are. If the owners are misstating revenues, then the cap will rise and the players will get richer. It's that simple.

 

[RangerBoy]

Big market teams keep the league afloat in the US. There's the biggest surprise!

You must be content spending $500 million in the last seven years to miss the playoffs

Regarding your earlier point about the cap leading to mediocre play,tell that to the Eagles and Patriots.Smart management and quality coaching can win under any system.Even under a hard cap.Try telling those millions of people who tune into the NFL Championship games that a cap leads to medocrity

The big market teams in the US have been dreadful so they are not keeping the NHL afloat in the US.Four of the biggest TV markets in the US do not have hockey teams:New York,LA,Chicago and Boston.In the US,hockey is dead