Pskov Wings Fan

As a general rule (at least in civilian life) a person cannot be forced to work. If Visnovsky does not want to play he is within his right not to. He is not asking Islanders to pay him the remaining $3M as far as I know.

Right. From everything I heard he has no desire to play in NHL. If forced to choose between Islanders and not playing anywhere he might out for the latter. Another option mentioned was for him to retire from hockey, then unretire and sign with Slovan (his KHL team).

According to Russian news KHL and NHL could not agree about NHL players staying for the KHL All Stars game. Pavel is not in the lineup for today's CSKA game so I guess he should be in Detroit pretty soon.

KHL All Stars game is this coming weekend. Pavel was voted into All Stars team for the Western Conference and he expressed interest in playing in the game. In an interview Pavel said that he will see if he can make it.

$56.9 is the actual payroll. Cap number (according to previous CBA rules) is $51.1M.

Are the negotiators paid by the hour or something?

According to capgeek, Minnesota has 16 payers signed for 13-14 season at $51.1M cap hit. So they just need to find 6-7 guys at around $1M each to fill the roster.

Does anybody know how the following affects already signed contracts? Is it only applicable to newly signed contracts? Anyway, the offer looks reasonable. And players get some stuff in "Working Conditions" and "Health and Safety" areas. NHLPA should take it.

Looks like they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_KHL_Junior_Draft For example, Radek Faksa was drafted 13th overall in NHL draft and 7th overall in KHL draft. Not many Canadiens in KHL draft. Mostly Russians and Europeans.

I think Bobby Clarke breaking Kharlamov's leg is still well remembered in Russia. In my experience "It does not matter how you win as long as you win" way of thinking is more North American than European. Hence "soft" Europeans and "dirty" Canadians stereotypes (or lazy talented stars vs hard-working gritty average guys). In such arguments one can hardly expect objectivity.

I do not disagree on revenue sharing. Rich teams do need opponents to generate their large revenues so they might as well share the proceeds. And fans probably do want to see their team beat up on poor southern cousins once in a while.

After 120 pages of discussion there really should be no confusion between profit and revenue. 3.3 billion is NHL's revenue (according to whatever was the definition of hockey-related revenue in old CBA). Profit is more or less what is left from these 3.3 billion after all expenses including players salary are paid. I think the league if profitable as a whole, but few teams (like Toronto) generate most of that profit (and revenues for that matter). Having said that I do agree with the premise of the article. Before complaining about hardship owners only need collectively to look in the mirror for the cause. Players did not exactly went on strike fighting for more money. They just took what GMs offered.

I think this is the correct way to see who is conceeding what. Compare terms of the proposals to the previous CBA not to other proposals. Previous CBA is the (only) valid starting point.

They did allow league expansion into unfavorable markets. I believe owners get some say in such manners so they can't claim complete innocence. Also even successful teams need opponents to play against. If they are so opposed to revenue sharing then allow poor teams to fold and go forward with a smaller league but stop complaining about something, which is of their own making and within their power to address.

I generally support the players but at this point it makes me wonder how many players are affected by 5% vs 25% variance as well as 5 vs 8 years contract length limit. I suspect majority never get to sign a 5 year deal during their whole career. If the only issues truly were the CBA, contract length and year-to-year variance then in my opinion players should have taken the deal. I assume existing long contracts would have been grandfathered in so Crosby's and Ovechkin's do not have a reason to complain either.

Fans just need to stop paying and the pedestal would disappear. But they do so it appears that players do provide something of value and fans are willing to pay for it.

The money NHL takes in has to go somewhere. The choices appear to be either the players or the owners. I would love fans to be on the list in form of lower ticket prices but recent history shows that this is not likely to happen. Between the players and the owners I would choose the players because I watch them on the ice playing the game. It does not really matter how much the players are paid in absolute terms. The argument is about which portion of the money NHL gets because of fans watching the hockey players on the ice should go to the owners. Here is a exaggerated example to demonstrate my point. Lets assume that a person engages in some activity which earns $1B. She gets paid $10M, which is a lot of money and would provide a comfortable living for quite a while. But is it fair that the person who generated the income got only 1% of it?

Here is a Wikipedia article about financial regulations in European soccer. Actually it is a lot more regulated than I would have expected. In France, for example,

We might be going off-topic here, but quite a few of the 'top' European soccer clubs have been in existence for more than a century. So I am not certain that "once an owner leaves...no more team" is a valid comment. I am not sure why FIFA or UEFA have much influence about finance of soccer clubs. Unlike NHL these are governing bodies, which are not generally concerned with the business side of the game of association football. IIHF would be the hockey counterpart. It would be interesting to compare European soccer leagues with the North American sports leagues. I do not think such things as CBA, salary cap, draft and the rests exist in soccer (excluding MLS here, I think I follows North American model).

Lack of CBA does not necessarily eliminate the perks listed above. But it would mean that each player would need to negotiate contract with the club very carefully and make sure that everything CBA used to cover is spelled out explicitly.

If union is decertified then, as I understand it, the whole CBA issue goes away because without union there is no CBA. No need to discuss salary cap, revenue split or free agency. There are just individual hockey teams and individual hockey players which are free to negotiate contracts under existing laws (US or Canadian depending on location I would guess). I am not certain what becomes of the existing contracts in that scenario.

I appears that players are starting to seriously consider the idea of union decertification ( http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=410081 ). If they manage to get it done it would be interesting to see league with its anti-trust exemptions gone. No cap, no draft, every player for himself.

It goes both ways. So people follow teams, others follow players. For example, somebody might buy Red Wings jersey for the logo on the front, but somebody else for the number 13 and Datsyuk's name on the back.

If NHLPA is unable to do so at this point then I wonder what they have been doing all this time. I would hope they got one ready to go and not claim needing time to prepare it.

For giving out contracts they can afford? You bet they are. Or when a player is offered a contract he should say "No, this is a bit too much. This would be a burden on your team's finances dear GM"? What exactly is the player's fault when he is accepting a contract, which a team really should not have offered? I am not talking about CBA, lockout or anything else. This is about teams paying money they do not have.