saffron leaf said:
I feel that you have presented a false dichotomy.
Pardon me if I'm just stating the obvious and if you had somehow implied it, but you claim that we / the league must choose between parity+contraction or disparity+no contraction.
What about relocation though?
What about relocating to Moose Jaw? We’d have to drop the floor down to about $10 mil to allow them to compete. But we could balance that perhaps by raising the ceiling to $70mil.
That would be silly right, not to mention flying in the face of all the ideals fans publicly argued for in getting the salary cap last time?
Surely they would only allow relocation to a market that can show a business plan that at the very least has them selling out every game at top prices and thus making enough to ice a team at the salary floor. Like Winnipeg! Relocation would only be to places that can maintain the parity, never to a place that would require the salary floor to drop in order to allow them a chance to ice a team.
Revenues have been growing lately. Many fans fear this means that some teams are having a tough time keeping up and are looking to radical lockout action by the owners in hopes to claw back more revenues from the players to give to struggling owners, thinking this last tweak will finally fix the problem.
But a lot of the revenue growth lately has been central revenue growth shared equally, not to mention that as revenues rise so does revenue sharing; it’s also linked to revenues. So why is there an assumption that as revenues have risen lately that more teams are unable to compete without cba changes? Just boot-licking practice?
But IF it’s true, if Gary Bettmans CBA to save all 30 teams in their current markets has failed a market like Atlanta and others to come, what are their options?
Either they are:
- allowed to spend less (Disparity via lowering the salary floor), or
- they receive enough revenue sharing to continue spending to the minimum (Parity via rev sharing), or
- (Parity via relocation/contraction/bankruptcy.)
A trichotomy if you will.
You wouldn’t lower the salary floor to allow an expansion team into the league, nor a relocated team, right? But many fans lately are proposing just that cba change to fix the cba problem which is that even though Gary Bettman got the perfect cba, some teams still cant make a profit. So to fix this they are proposing to throw parity under the bus.
Contraction is a silly concept, if by that you mean 29 nhl owners vote one owner off the island and pay him off as was done to the Expos. It’s hard to picture the circumstances that would lead to that in the NHL. Especially since the owners already created a method for dealing with those problem welfare cases - they decrease their revenue sharing cheques each year for 3 years until they only get half what their due, which is basically ensuring the struggling go bankrupt if they couldn’t even compete when receiving max revenue sharing cheques. Contraction via bankruptcy, then sure
Relocation is just another means of keeping the parity (I thought had already accounted for that saying relocate or fold, move or go bankrupt).
Bankruptcy also keeps the parity.
Lowering the floor sacrifices parity to save a team that probably should fold or relocate.
The reason there is confusion, or that it appears to many as a false dichotomy, is perhaps that many fans assumed a cap meant saving all 30 teams, when in fact it assures that teams that cant keep up are relocated or go bankrupt.
Whenever a team was struggling during the last cba, immediately all would point to a salary cap and the resultant parity as the solution to all the teams problems.
Now that we have a cap, if a team can still no longer compete, what do fans vote to do this time? Last time 80% here regularly voted to lockout players until they accepted a cap thinking that would fix it for sure. Yet here we are again apparently suggesting find a new way of ensuring that a little more of the money we spend on hockey goes to the owners instead of the players.
As to which city should they relocate to, sure those are all possible cities in the right circumstance, but its often talked of as if its Loblaws centrally deciding where to plop their next store.
The three elements you need are Arena, Ownership, and Fan Interest.
You forgot the most important one in this day and age - business dollars for the sponsorships and suite revenues. The NHL model is highly dependent on those business class seat sales. All the fan interest in the world wont save you without it. Unless they drop the floor and sacrifice parity
I think we can assume that any time there is a team that has used up all its options, that the league will either:
allow them to sell and relocate if they can approve a market that has an owner/investor willing to buy the team and its a market that converges with the NHL’s expansion plans, or
wait for them go bankrupt and then have a new team enter the league by expansion fees.
But wondering whether we should ‘allow’ relocation as an option seems a pretty pointless question, of course the owners with millions in equity on the line will. Whenever a team can no longer afford to continue icing a team at the salary floor, or just if an owner feels like moving really (See NFL during salary cap years)
knorthern knight said:
Actually, contraction/expansion is probably on topic here, in the sense that the NHLPA might consider the trafeoff of a lower percentage of gross revenue in return for more players being employed.
This is perhaps the thinking of traditional labour unions, but the NHLPA is an association of the worlds elite in a particularly lucrative occupation. They arent looking for jobs, jobs, jobs for Joe the plumber. It’s show me the money.
The players taking less money as a trade-off for the owners bringing in more teams and jobs? Now there’s an example of a false dichotomy.