GabbyDugan said:
Conway's the only hockey writer I can think of who has ever been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but he seems to reach a very small percentage of the hockey audience. Maybe he should be a little more flamboyant.
Conway proved he was actually a journalist a long time ago. I, too, wonder why he never made it big as a hockey writer. Maybe he likes small town life. Or maybe crossing ownership is not the way to get ahead for a hockey writer.
He does an excellent job of putting the Levitt Report into it's proper context, and he is one of the few "neutral" hockey writers who dares to challenge the way Gary Bettman exploits the Levitt Report. When Levitt's findings are connected with Conway's examples of intertwined business of NHL owners, I end up wishing that a few more reporters would take the time to delve into some of the myths that are floating around.
The thing that drives me nuts about this part of the story is that about 50 hockey reporters should have taken the Levitt report to accounting firms when it was originally published. Does it matter now that the professionals Conway used thinks the report is a joke?
Conway takes a very strong stand against arbitration, which certainly isn't going to endear him to the NHLPA.
I thought this was easily the weakest story of the bunch. He is right on about the Fedorov contract causing a burst of inflation, but it was that burst of inflation led to Leclair getting $7 million. It wasn't the arbitrator's fault. Leclair got market value, a value that was set by Karamanos. He actually asked for $9 million. I don't want this thread to devolve into another argument about arbitration, but I don't see the case is made in this article. In fact, I think the evidence that he does produce tends to imply the system is fair.
His complete proposal? It is quite different from what both the owners and players are looking for, so it would be incredibly easy to pick it apart no matter which side of the fence you are on.
I agree that there is no chance it will be accepted. The owners won't open up their books to be independently audited. If they would actually do that, there might be a deal to be made around some system. Quite a while ago, I suggested that the players turn the PR back on the owners by agreeing to tie revenues to salaries as long as they were talking real revenues derived by the type of audits Conway or his experts described - team by team.
(It really isn't practical, though. Levitt's team supposedly did 2,000 hours of work and he didn't do any audits. These are 30 complicated businesses. How long would it take an independent firm to audit all 30 teams when they have separate companies that do nothing but sell board revenue? How many separate businesses have to be audited each year? Conway does not address this point.)
Without that, how can Conway's plan go anywhere. What about the Jeremy Jacobs anecdotes? He under-reported revenue to the tax man with these kinds of ridiculous arguments:
The Bruins argued that they shouldn't pay Massachusetts taxes on all of their home-game revenue because they are obligated to play half their games out of state, incurring expenses but making no money.
The tax board rejected that argument. It also rejected the Bruins' claim that they shouldn't be taxed on all the team's broadcast revenue. The Bruins had a 31 percent ownership stake in New England Sports Network (NESN) at the time.
The Bruins claimed that a third of the revenue came from out-of-state viewers receiving the broadcast from rented property that was far from Massachusetts -- a satellite floating "22,300 miles above Earth's surface and 1,200 miles west of Mexico's Baja California coast."
Would anyone accept what Jeremy Jacobs says his revenues are without a thorough audit when he is willing to make these kinds of claims to an authority that could put him in jail?
Tom
