Pskov Wings Fan

Here are couple other things players can offer to the league. - Make the cap number to equal actual salary (kill the front-loaded contracts) - Remove players option for the 5% cap inflator

Once lockout starts there is a building financial pressure on both sides. Players not getting paid. Owners losing money due to lack of revenue and possibly declining value of the teams. Eventually immediate need of money will overcome long term desire for more money and deal would be reached. Or not, NHL will die, some other league will get started. But as long as there are people willing to pay money to watch hockey somebody will find a way to charge for it.

Who cares? Maybe somebody with an ability to run a successful hockey franchise would buy it cheap then.

Even more, it hardly matters now. Just another business with conflict between management and workers. Everybody dies in the end regardless of which side gets better deal in the next CBA.

I think that making sure that seasons starts is not the main goal of either side. The goal is to make sure that over the lifetime of the next CBA it would be most beneficial to that particular side. From that point of view each side is just following their agenda. Fans and people whose paychecks depend on NHL games (apart from players) are interested in not losing any games but they are not part of the process.

It is clear that owners want to have more than 50% of revenues while players are not willing accept less than 50%. If positions cannot be reconciled it does not matter when you start negotiating.

Aren't entry level deals already capped? Arbitration is part of the current deal. Keeping it is not really a concession by the league. In any case I think the removal of arbitration is just a side show in the NHL's proposal meant to draw attention away from parts owners really want and something to potentially "give back". I would like to see actual financial concessions from the profitable NHL teams. For example, let say that non-profitable teams are losing $200M in total. Structure a deal where half comes from lowering players share of revenues and half comes from "rich" teams through revenue sharing.

That was not the point of the original post. Owners do not appear to be willing to make any concessions. The league of a whole is profitable but profits go to a small number of teams. So when when owners want to fix non profitable teams strictly at players expense (rather than revenue sharing) I understand why NHLPA would be unwilling to budge. One interesting issue with the lockout. Profitable teams actually stand to lose money when there are no games (unlike Phoenix for example, or the last time around when everybody cried poor). So I wonder if there would be some push from "rich" teams to have season start on schedule. This is an old article from The Globe And Mail, but I think it covers issues quite well. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/globe-on-hockey/why-nhl-teams-cry-poor-despite-the-leagues-record-growth/article4429817/

I do not see how it is possible to players share of revenues to drop from 57% to 46% and not have salary rollbacks. Players are not going to get the full value from the contracts they have signed. They can name this process however they want but it amount to the same thing - less money for players.

Then both sides need to be part of this bailout. Players through lower payroll, owners through revenue sharing. I haven't heard anything about revenue sharing in NHL's proposal.

Players settling for less money would not result in lower prices for consumers but in more profits for owners. There is a difference here.

What do owners giving up here? I only see players getting smaller share. But the cap number is calculated based on contract value. Escrow does not play into it. Teams would still be over the 58M cap even if they only pay players 58M in real money.

I do not have a problem with the money players are making. If large number of people is willing to pay to see you play hockey or dance or sing or anything else then you will make some money. I do not see anything wrong or unfair in this arrangement. This is a market in its rather basic and easily understandable form. There are many other occupations where earnings are much more difficult to justify. Think the whole management chain of any large company, for example.

Teams have to ice NHL level lineup. If a team can't do that maybe it should not exist.

I very much prefer the way Mr. Abramovich approaches ownership of a sports team. I believe Chelsea F.C. have not been profitable since Abramovich has acquired the team but it does not appear to bother him. Owners should pad their egos by owning NHL team not their bottom line. Also I do not see NHL players being at fault in this conflict in the slightest. Owners basically complain that they are losing money because they are spending too much. But how much a team spends is completely under owners control. If you spend money you don't have to buy stuff from a store and go bankrupt it is not stores fault.

Maybe players should just start their own league. Without best hockey players on the planet NHL is nothing. On the other hand if all the owners got replaced with whole new lot I doubt any hockey fan would notice.

You can look at it from a different point of view. Are the league as a whole profitable or not? If that is the case than what would be the justification for players to reduce their share? It would make already profitable teams more profitable while trying to make others at least break even. It kinda looks like using struggling teams to squeeze more money out of players. On the other hand under the current CBA given league revenues at $3.3B the cap should be around $62.7M ($3.3B / 30 * 0.57) not $70M. Cap increases in recent years appear to outrun the revenue growth. This may be the part of CBA which needs fixing. I think players have some sort of "inflator" they can apply to the cap. It may have to go and it might be an easy concession for players to make.

I am not sure that Minnesota Wild is on the receiving side of revenue sharing. It would be interesting to see NHL revenue numbers by team if anybody has such data.

The assumption/hope that stronger markets do exist might not be true. You need people with money who want to watch hockey and are willing to pay for it.

The initial NHL proposal for a new CBA sounds like trouble. http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=400580 Here are the highlights: reduction of players' hockey-related revenues from 57 per cent to 46 per cent players would need to wait 10 seasons before becoming unrestricted free agents and that contracts would be limited to a maximum of five years end to salary arbitration and that entry-level contracts would be five years instead of three as they are under the current CBA eliminate signing bonuses on future contracts and mandate that all future deals have an equal value for every year of the contract

Agree. Team needs an opponent to play hockey. So unless "rich" teams want to be the only teams left they need to share.

Foster missed a whole season few years ago with broken femur. He has (or maybe had) a very strong shot from the point.

Heatley and PMB are overpaid. Koivu on the other hand is worth the money.

Attempt to do this would most certainly lead to standoff between NHL and NHLPA. So they would either start season under old CBA or not start it at all. I do not believe that players would accept another pay cut.

I saw number of people suggest that if CBA lowers the cap then some teams would have to cup players to get under it. Are there any sources that support this even as a possibility? It has been mentioned that owners are looking to lowers the percentage of league revenues, which goes to players. This would cause cap to be lower. But it is much more likely that existing contracts would rolled back by some percentage just like the last time. And getting players to agree to reduce their share would be a hard sell in the first place.