sibiriak

The scoring in the KHL is lower than in NHL. It is harder to score there. Look at Malkin, OV and Datsyuk's stats over there..

You know, the sooner you let go of an idea that owners and (to a somewhat lesser degree) players are anything but two rational economic actors that behave strategically in order to maximize their respective incomes, the less nerves you will burn up thinking about this. They do not and are not really expected to care about the fans feelings, as long as the fans keep buying tix, and otherwise spending money on NHL product.. And as the 3 previous work stoppages have amply demonstrated, we fans are really that dumb and will grumble a bit, but come back and support the NHL, whenever they decide to play hockey again. So your idea, that with different negotiating teams and/or more time, the compromise would have been found, is not plausible. Personalities and negotiating tactics are determined by the strategic goals, not the other way around. In other words, the players hired Fehr to do exactly what he is doing, and the owners pay Bettman to do exactly what he does. If either side wanted a compromise, they would have behaved differently. From what we've seen so far, the owners are trying to crush the PA yet again, and the players are determined to not be crushed like it happened the last time. At the very least, the players want to make the owners victory so costly, that the owners may hesitate to do this again in the future. Both sides are following thought out strategies, and I don't see a quick resolution, unless something fundamental changes.

The players were the big losers last time. The just expired CBA was dictated by the owners and was designed to benefit them. Prior to the current CBA the players share of the revenue reached 74%. There was no salary cap. If the players won and kept the old system, the top salaries now would have been nearing $20 mil./year and the average salary would have been higher by at least a quarter, and given the existing then trend, probably even higher. Let me clarify it for you. The owners want to cut the players salaries and limit their growth in the future. Since the league revenues went up 50% over the life of the existing CBA, there was no rational way to explain to the players why they would have to give up another 20% of their salary every year, when the players have signed contracts on hand. Since the owners didn't have any rational arguments, they had to somehow force the players to give up money they were contractually promised. The lockout is the most obvious option. This is not only about greed. This is also about players' pride and self-respect. If the lockout lasts till January, and the players then win (that is their CBA offer,as it stands now, is adopted) the players would still lose more money then if they accepted the league offer right now. And the players know this. The players motivation is to make sure that in the future they will not be forced to give up part of their salary any time the owners feel like taking it, without a fight. So the next time the owners want to redistribute income in their favor, they will know that they would have a fight on their hands.

I think that is the key point. The league and the players are at an impasse on money. You appear to believe that there exist a solution that is a win-win for both parties, and if only they had some more time to hash it out, then we'd be seeing hockey right now. I believe that this is a zero-sum game and there is no solution that does not require at least one party to give up a significant amount of cash going forward. The league believes that the way to achieve that solution is to put so much financial pressure on the players, that they would cave in to owners' demands. And therefore the league had to lock the players out. They could have started to negotiate in 2005, and still we would have this lockout.

For $200 mil. you can have my couch and crap in my yard every week. I'll even put out some old newspapers for you to wipe your behind.

Players may demand whatever they want, but it's the owners competing against each other for top talent that make the humongous contracts possible in all the pro sports. If the owners didn't try to outbid each other, the players would have no leverage. The salaries are NOT the players doing. It is the OWNERS. So instead of making the players take a pay cut to bail out the reckless owners, who gave out outrageous contracts, the NHL should be working on a system that prevents owners from overspending, such as luxury tax, revenue sharing, max contract amount and length, tying salary cap to revenue for each team. Otherwise we'll be at this again at the end of the next CBA, whatever the cuts the players will be forced to take now.

Given Pavel's character, I doubt that. I'd rather think he will try to set up his teammates.

It would have been nice, but it is tough for me to watch teams I have no emotional investment in. I tried watching KHL online and I got bored. The low pic quality may have had something to do with it, but also I don't know most of the players.

How exactly can the players' share go from 57% to 43%, of basically the same revenue amount, without rollback? Call it escrow or whatever, it is mathematically impossible to achieve what the league insists on, without reducing existing salaries.

With all due respect Mr.D, I think the players only need to be 76% fit, because you are going to pay them only 76% of what you agreed and promised to.

Your company does it to motivate the employees, since their increased work effort potentially increases company profit and therefore offering employee bonuses benefits the company's bottom line. NHL players are paid to win games. That would tend to increase the profits of their own team, but not the league combined profit, since for every (Wings ) win and a happy (Wings) fan buying tix and merchandise, there must necessarily be a loss and an angry fan of some other team who does not buy NHL stuff. So it would make no sense for the NHL as a whole to give the players a share of the combined profits, because increased players' effort does not increase the combined profit of the league. And every NHL team already pays bonuses for winning - that's what playoff bonuses are for.

Envious? At least there's hockey being played over there, whatever the ice or the unis look like.

In all your examples, the people breaking contracts don't get to keep the things they bought. The NHL owners want to break the contracts, but still have the use of players' services. That is what makes the players mad.

You are correct, there is not enough info to know. However, since the player personnel cost was a fixed 57% share of the revenue, then for profits to fall while revenues increase by 50%, the other expenses would have to have risen almost twice as fast as revenue (at the very least significantly faster than 50%). So what costs of hockey operations could have increased by about 70-100% in 7 years? Non-player personnel? In this economy? Are you kidding me? Electricity? No. Arena rentals? No, they are usually set in a looong term lease. Taxes? No. And often the teams get tax breaks anyway. Adsvertizing? There were no radical increases there either. So where would the alleged cost increases come from? I don't see it. There are indeed teams that lose money, but their problems are not in high non-player costs, they usually have weak fan bases and have committed to unsustainable (fort their markets) player contracts. So you think that in a free market players would get less than in a market with a salary cap? Seriously? Owners didn't install the cap to "restrict PA growing power". (They crushed the union the last time, remember?) The owners put the cap in to save themselves from themselves. Each owner has an incentive to pay more to attract better players, so their team wins and more fans come to see their team play. But collectively as a group, such actions will inevitably lead to bidding up player salaries. Hence, the cap. Without the cap, player salaries reached 70% of revenue mark before the last lockout. And if there were no CBA and no union to negotiate with, the owners couldn't renege on their contract obligations like they are trying to do now, they would have been sued for breach of contract. That is why the owner current behavior would have been illegal in any non-unionized, non anti-trust exempted industry.

Who would you sympathize with In any other business, if when revenues grow by 50% in 7 years, the management would try to cut employees pay by 25%? I would definitely side with workers in such a case.

I love watching Pavel play and I admire him as a person, but if I were a GM putting a team together, I would take Sergei first. He got the Hart over Lemieux, Jagr and Gretzky for crissakes!

Using the same logic, owners being willing to forgo the revenues proves that they don't really have to charge as much for the tickets? Let's face it, the players would play this game for 100k/year since they are not likely to make even that much in any other job. But every dollar that the players don't get goes into the owners pockets. Personally, I don't really care how much money players make or how much profit the owners get. It's just that when the 2 sides squabble over the division of the money, I tend to sympathize with players because they are the ones I like to watch playing. The owners give out the contracts of their own free will, so I have no sympathy for them.

Where do you guys get this idea that the Soviet team trained together year round? That's not true. The guys on the team all played for different higher division teams, and they were with their club teams for most of the season. The national team usually got together for 3-4 weeks before World Championships and maybe for a few days before an "Izvestia" tournament and maybe a couple of other times during the year. Which still would have given them more team cohesion than Canada, but it was a far cry from playing together year round. Also, what prevented Canadian coaches from using lines from the same NHL team, that played together regularly, if they thought that was such an advantage?

If other NHLers weren't there, that wasn't the Russians fault. Canada brought the team it did, so that must have been the best they had at the moment. As to the refs, the Russians think the same thing . North American refs worked 4 games and tEuropean refs worked 4 games. Any bias, difference in style, varying understanding of what constitutes a foul, should cancel out over the series. Also I thought Orr was hurt and couldn't play? So that wasn't gonna happen anyway. Kharlamov, on the other hand did play... until Clarke's slash that is.

No, I meant the best player, besides (possibly) Tretiak. Yakushev was the best scorer, but Kharlamov played fewer games and some of them on fractured ankle. Nevertheless he was the best player on that team, without him the top line seriously lost effectiveness.

It does seem sadly comical, when nhl.com and tsn.ca publish season broadcast schedules etc. like nothing everything is normal.

IMO, Clarke's actions devalue him as a human being, and his coach too. Also, that slash knocked out the best Soviet player (Kharlamov) effectively for the rest of the series. Who knows what might have been?

They were called a Soviet National Team. The Red Army team was one of the teams in the Soviet top league. The two are not the same. I doubt there were more then 9 (at most 10) Red Army players in that series. Also, if your comment was meant to justify Clarke's act, I always thought that deliberately imjuring an opponent crosses the line from playing the game to no rules war. If that were the Soviets attitude, they had only to arrange for a couple of car accidents, a food poisoning in the Team Canada hotel, a traffic jam or a team bus breakdown, and the series would have been theirs. Would you consider that type of behavior justified? To me , this doing this sort of things in order to win only devalues your victory..

If you want to get technical, it is only an option for the union. Even if they exercise it, their average share for the life of the new CBA will certainly be lower than 57%. Also, the definition of the hockey related revenue is being changed, so the players would get 57% of the lesser total, which would be a defacto decrease in salary. Not to mention the fact, that the current system was put in place by the NHL, who used the last lockout to roll over the players union and force them to accept this CBA. If you listened to Bettman speeches then, the expiring CBA was going to set he economic house of hockey in order. And now the system they devised is suddenly favoring the players? FYI, average share of wages, salaries etc. in all the other industries of American economy is near 70%. So the owners are already getting a good deal. What it amounts to is that the league appears to try to shake down the players at the end of each CBA period for as much as they can get away with. And lock them out if they resist. Rinse, lather, repeat every 4-5 years. Personally, I resent their bully tactics that result in my loss of enjoyment of my favorite sport.

Read the NHLPA proposal again. Your statement is factually incorrect.