2008 Woodie Awards
NHL lockout may doom league
Jacob Richard
Issue date: 10/13/04 Section: Sports
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Was there supposed to be something special about today? Oct. 13 was supposed to be opening day for the National Hockey League. However, the expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which has loomed over the NHL for over a year, and the lack of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement have resulted in the NHL team owners' locking out the players.
The main reason for the rift between the owners and the players boils down to the issue of a salary cap. The team owners claim to need a salary cap because they are losing money under the current economic system, which does not have a cap. Under the current system, the owners claim to have gone $1.8 billion into debt. They also claim that 20 of 30 NHL franchises are losing money and that their losses would be less if they shut down for the season than if games were to continue under the current system. Their hope in locking out the players is to convince them to agree to a payment system that would tie the players' salaries to revenues. Such a plan would result in a decrease in players' salaries from $1.8 million to $1.3 million, with which the players naturally are not too thrilled.
The players have countered this by proposing a five-percent rollback on players' salaries, revenue sharing and a luxury tax, all of which they claim would save the team owners $100 million. Of course, the natural response from the owners is that these proposals are not enough nor are they guaranteed.
With both sides' claiming that the other is trying to cheat them, there appears to be no solution to the problem until at least January. If a solution has not been reached by then, the entire NHL season will be cancelled instead of just the first half as happened during the 1994-95 baseball season.
In 1994, the players of Major League Baseball cut the season short by walking out on the owners with a month left in the season. The work stoppage cost the MLB the last, most exciting month of regular season play, the playoffs and the World Series. After 7 1/2 months of work stoppage, the atmosphere surrounding professional baseball soured severely. It took three years for fans to really start paying attention to the national pastime again, and even that was due to the near Herculean efforts (at least we thought so at the time) of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire in their homerun race of 1998.
The main reason for the rift between the owners and the players boils down to the issue of a salary cap. The team owners claim to need a salary cap because they are losing money under the current economic system, which does not have a cap. Under the current system, the owners claim to have gone $1.8 billion into debt. They also claim that 20 of 30 NHL franchises are losing money and that their losses would be less if they shut down for the season than if games were to continue under the current system. Their hope in locking out the players is to convince them to agree to a payment system that would tie the players' salaries to revenues. Such a plan would result in a decrease in players' salaries from $1.8 million to $1.3 million, with which the players naturally are not too thrilled.
The players have countered this by proposing a five-percent rollback on players' salaries, revenue sharing and a luxury tax, all of which they claim would save the team owners $100 million. Of course, the natural response from the owners is that these proposals are not enough nor are they guaranteed.
With both sides' claiming that the other is trying to cheat them, there appears to be no solution to the problem until at least January. If a solution has not been reached by then, the entire NHL season will be cancelled instead of just the first half as happened during the 1994-95 baseball season.
In 1994, the players of Major League Baseball cut the season short by walking out on the owners with a month left in the season. The work stoppage cost the MLB the last, most exciting month of regular season play, the playoffs and the World Series. After 7 1/2 months of work stoppage, the atmosphere surrounding professional baseball soured severely. It took three years for fans to really start paying attention to the national pastime again, and even that was due to the near Herculean efforts (at least we thought so at the time) of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire in their homerun race of 1998.