The Business of Professional Hockey

So the National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players Association have failed to come to a reasonable compromise that is favourable to both parties. The players have been locked out of their jobs, and it’s likely that there will be no hockey this season. But what brought this on? Who is to blame? This is not an isolated incident, but yet another monkey wrench in the cogs of a dishonest relationship that has been playing out for the better part of the past 80 years. In all of those years except very recently, the spoils of success have been overwhelmingly enjoyed by the owners and governors of the NHL. And it’s precisely because the pendulum is swinging the other way that the League finds itself in the current crisis. Anyone in power for this long would be adamantly resistant to change. And the National Hockey League, if compared with other professional sports, has enjoyed more profit and power than it has ever been given credit for.

The National Hockey League

For over half a century, professional hockey in North America was carefully and tightly controlled by a group of men numbering small enough to sit around a poker table. No other sport has had this kind of centralization of authority and power. One of the biggest myths about hockey was that the owners were all small-time, family run businesses. In actual fact, they were successful entertainment merchants, dealing in everything from boxing to horseracing, and during the era of prohibition walked hand-in-hand with organized crime syndicates. The Norris dynasty was one of the richest families in the United States at its height. At one point James E. Norris owned the New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks, Detroit Red Wings, and controlling interests in the Boston Bruins—four out of the six existing teams—simultaneously. Even as far back as the early days professional sports had tight restrictions on monopolies and cartels running things. Baseball, for instance, prohibited anyone from owning more than one team. But hockey permitted it so long as the ownership was a corporation. Conveniently, the rules didn`t require disclosing who was behind those corporations.

There are legal loopholes and tricks like this all over the place, some of them existing solely for the purpose of amassing the owners` power over the league. For instance, the farm system—a sophisticated network of sponsored amateur clubs and leagues—was introduced not to improve grassroots play, but to curtail mercenary behavior among players and thus keep salaries down. By maintaining exclusive rights over them and limiting their ability to market their services independently, owners essentially held the players in a sort of bondage. There was no such thing as free agency in the old days; the vast majority of hockey players were shackled to the same team their entire careers. In fact, demotions were more common than trades. It was also cheaper: if you were sent down to the minors, your salary went with you, dropping to half or even a third of what it would be with the NHL squad. And there was little to no compensation. The player dealt with his own moving expenses and broken leases. NHL clubs paid for very little beyond playing hockey. It even says so in the contract.

The Standard Player`s Contract: an oppressive little piece of paper that dictated hockey players lives for over half a century. It forbade them from earning money in any other athletic-based entertainment setting (including playing other professional sports and activities). It required them to take part in any and all promotional activities of the club and the league, without pay. The team was free to use players` likeness, pictures, signatures, name recognition and endorsements on any merchandise or product it wanted to sell. The players saw no money from any of this. The Contract prohibited players from individually making any public appearances, having their pictures taken, writing articles or sponsoring products "without the written consent of the Club." Such consent was rarely granted. The Contract prohibited any player from disclosing his salary to any other player, the public, or the media. For all intents and purposes, the players were deliberately and systematically kept in the dark for much of the NHL’s existence.

Gordie Howe, the best player in the 50s, had the simplest contract ever. Striking a deal with Red Wings owner Bruce Norris to always be the highest paid player in the league, his salary served as a cap for nearly 20 years. During that time span, the Detroit Red Wings always netted at least $2 million net profit on hockey operations and running the rink, making them one of the most lucrative sports franchises of all time. Gordie`s salary in 1957: $15,000. And up until the mid-90s, Mr. Hockey received a pension from the sport he played for 26 years of just under $13,000 a year.

The average salary in 1957 was $8,000. Many things that are standard issue today were not included in that, such as medical attention for injuries. Some teams supplied a doctor at times, but ultimately the player paid his own hospital bills. Players with career-ending injuries received no compensation at all. Players with grievous injuries often ignored or played through them. Players who refused to play because of injuries were contractually guilty of withholding services, and fined.

When owners bargained with the players for new contracts, it was usually during the tail end of the summer months, right before training camp. There, the players were more desperate, vulnerable and anxious to get their first checks after a long hiatus. There was little to no negotiating. Most players weren`t even aware of what their legal or contractual rights were, mostly because they weren`t allowed to have a copy of their contracts (they could request to have a look at it, but such behavior was frowned upon).

Few players had more than a high school education. Odd jobs—like janitors and parking lot attendants—were common in the off-season, so long as they were not in violation of the contract. Some players attempted to improve themselves with correspondence courses and Summer School, but they were strongly discouraged by their clubs. When Toronto Maple Leafs defencemen Robert Baun, a venerable Renaissance man, used his off-seasons to pursue interests like becoming a certified chef, taking a management course at General Motors and enrolling in the Wharton School of Business, he was branded a "deviant personality" with "perverted" interests by the owners.

Athletes have always felt apprehensive when it comes to money. They are afraid of looking greedy. They are afraid of the League`s vengeance. They are afraid of looking bad in front of the fans. And most of all, they are afraid of losing themselves. After all, they should be happy that they`re getting paid anything at all, right? Because they`re really doing it for the love of the game? And they wouldn`t want to do anything that would harm the purity and sanctity of the sport. The owners, of course, are not handcuffed by any such moral burden. Sports have always been about money to them from the beginning, and it will always be about money to them first and foremost. They think of the game with a clear conscience, and they have repeatedly used this leverage to milk the players for everything possible.

No player has ever put himself ahead of the sport that made him. But every owner has absolutely no qualms with doing just that very thing. The NHL is the only league in which the owners have exonerated and immortalized themselves to the point of being demigods. It is quite reasonable for them to feel that they are more important than the players who make the game what it is. In the old 21 team league of the 80s, the 4 divisions were the Smythe, Norris, Adams and Patrick--named after, respectively, Conn, James, Jack and Lester, the Mount Rushmore of hockey`s builders pantheon (and the two conferences, Campbell and Wales, after long-standing NHL President Clarence Campbell and His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales). The league trophies given out every year, rather than using easily understandable names like MVP, Rookie of the Year, Coach of the Year, et. al. are instead graced with the namesake of NHL governors and executives: Frank Calder Memorial Trophy (Rookie of the Year), Conn Smythe Trophy (MVP in the Playoffs) Jack Adams Trophy (Coach of the Year), James Norris Memorial Trophy (Top Defenseman), and so on. Only two of the game`s 18 trophies honour players: the Vezina trophy, given to the top goaltender, named after goalie Georges Vezina, who collapsed during a game in 1925, succumbing to tuberculosis. And the most recent one added to the NHL hardware list (1999), the Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy, given to the top goal scorer in the NHL, named after the eponymous Montreal superstar of the 1940s. An exception can be made for a third, Art Ross, though he was a player first and an NHL governor later on in life, the trophy recognizes his outstanding contribution to the game in the latter role.

It is precisely this frame of mind that allows the owners to exploit the players the way they do. The result has been, for much of its existence, a skewed system of domination and control. The players, naturally, have had to defend themselves from the League they swore to serve.

The National Hockey League Player’s Association

The history of the NHL is actually rife with player insurrections and the League ruthlessly cracking down on them every time.

The first came in 1910. Then, the National Hockey Association (precursor to the NHL) snuffed an attempt to unionize by the league`s leading scorer, Art Ross. The League had imposed a salary cap of $5,000 for each team, and vowed to blackball any player who didn`t agree to the terms. The media and the public vilified Ross, who comprised half of his team`s entire payroll, for being a greedy rabble-rouser (and probably a communist), and the union idea died.

The second one was in 1925. Players had signed contracts for a 24-game season, and then the league decided to increase it to 30 games, with no increase in pay. The Hamilton Tigers threatened to boycott the season, demanding an extra $200 for the six additional games. Refusing to negotiate, the League suspended the entire team for the rest of the season and the playoffs (they were in first place), and just to get their point across, fined each player $200. The team was not asked back the next season.

That calmed the waters for about 20 years. In 1946 a group of players gathered to discuss the idea of a league-wide pension plan, operated and owned by the players. The League, lauding the idea, stepped in and took over control of the pension plan and its organization and statutes, essentially pulling the rug out from underneath the players’ feet. All players initially paid $900 into the plan (which was huge, considering the average salary was between $3,500 and $5,000), and the owners agreed to pay $600 per player. But none of that came from owner profits. They merely paid the gate receipts for the all-star game and some playoff games (both of which players did not get paid for), effectively donating the players own wages into their pension plan. In some years, there was very little—if any—actual owner contribution. By 1957, the pension had amassed over $1.5 million dollars, which the owners promptly and quietly began distributing among themselves. For the next 25 years the players would live with the belief that they had the best pension plan in pro sports.

And then there was the well-popularized "Terrible" Ted Lindsay and Doug Harvey uprising in 1957. Lindsay, Red Wings Captain and one-third of the awesome "Production Line" (with Gordie Howe and Sid Abel) during the mid-50s, was tenacious, insolent and insightful. Earlier in the decade he, Howe, and teammate Marty Pavelich decided to start a plastics business, and his knowledge accumulated there about business costs and book-keeping opened his eyes to the way the NHL operated. Suddenly he looked around and saw that while his fellow players struggled to make ends meet playing hockey, people in other occupations were building their futures. There was an awful lot of money being made in hockey, and the players were getting next to none of it. The numbers were just not adding up.

Lindsay`s suspicions were given the litmus test when he, by chance, ran into Cleveland Indians pitcher and founding President of the baseball players association, Bob Feller. On advice from Feller, Lindsay travelled to New York to meet with law firm Mound & Lewis, who had just successfully negotiated a $9.75 million pension settlement in World Series broadcast revenues. Lindsay compared business practices. The results were staggering; hockey players were, in essence, indentured servants, with conditions far worse than in any other sport. Comparisons to medieval feudalism were not far off. Team Presidents—like Jack Adams in Detroit—ran their clubs like fiefdoms. Inspired by Lindsay’s plight, the lawyers vowed to do for hockey what they did for baseball. They urged Lindsay and the players to unionize.

Lindsay—and all athletes, for that matter—did not want a union. It destroys the image of the sport to make them look like petty trade hagglers, arguing over percentages and rights. They just wanted to play hockey. Even today, union is still a taboo word in professional sports. They much prefer the softer and fraternal word "association". But unions were the way things got done in the business world, and if the hockey players were going to get their fair share, a union was what they would have to be. So on February 12, 1957 they formed the National Hockey League Players` Association, with Lindsay as President.

The owner backlash was typical of the men who had been playing this sort of game—the one not on the ice—for years. Club Presidents isolated and belittled individual team members. Owners greased the palms of sports writers and newspapers, molding press and public opinion in their favour. Jack Adams, smelling the runt behind all this, began a public smear campaign of Ted Lindsay, releasing false salary figures exposing him as a greedy, selfish malcontent manipulating the players for his own end. Conn Smythe treated his Toronto Maple Leafs even less cordially: "Traitors!" "Quislings!" "Communists!" Endless tirades about all the owners did for the players, all their sacrifices for the good of the game. Talk of gratitude, loyalty, and looking after each other in this, the humblest of businesses.

Publicly, the League simply refused to acknowledge the Association`s existence. It didn`t negotiate, answer phone calls or respond to letters. One by one, the founding members of the Association were vilified, ostracized, blacklisted, and ultimately ejected from hockey within a year. A staggering 32% of the league were replacement players by the 57-58 season. Lindsay, Detroit`s leading scorer and first team all-star, was traded to the Chicago Blackhawks—the redheaded stepchild and torrential cellar dweller of the NHL, and its poorest club—for next to nothing. With him out of the way, the blacklisting went unimpeded, as he was branded a spoiled muckraker who was betraying the interests of the players.

Facing intense public loathing and a losing battle against the League, the Association finally capitulated and met the owners for one final settlement. Out of this deal, they got next to nothing. The only thing the owners gave up was the players’ right to have the Association, as powerless and ineffective as it was. By early 1958, the National Hockey League Players Association quietly dissolved. Everything important that it outlined at the outset was instead left to the honesty and goodwill of the owners. No questions about the pension fund were ever answered. Lindsay was quietly fazed out of the League two years later. Several others—including Hall of Famers—were simply forgotten and dismissed by the League once they retired. One ended up homeless, freezing to death in 1972. Doug Harvey himself ended up penniless and living in an abandoned railway car.

Today`s NHLPA that we know and understand was formed in 1967. Learning from their past mistakes and emboldened with a new sense of right and wrong, player representatives from the original six clubs met to adopt a constitution and elect a President. At a meeting with team owners, newly elected NHLPA President Bob Pulford let it be known that if the owners refused to accept the new Association, the players would seek recognition through the Canadian Labour Relations Board. The players also sought a guarantee that no player would suffer unfair treatment for being a member of the NHLPA. The owners yielded, if only because they figured that unionizing was an inevitability, and after witnessing Jimmy Hoffa’s Mafia-backed Teamsters Union threaten to take over the NFL players association in 1965, feared the same thing might happen to hockey.

Things did not get better, however. Still retaining a sort of innocence and naiveté about the business of sports, the NHLPA nominated lawyer (and non-hockey guy) Alan Eagleson as its first Executive Director. Essentially handing over power of attorney to him, Eagleson was named for his legendary bouts in winning the minor-pro Springfield Indians team reprieve from their tyrannical owner Eddie Shore (yes, that Eddie Shore), and in negotiating Bobby Orr’s sensational rookie contract with the Boston Bruins. And, subsequently, taking advantage of Orr and milking his status as the first marketable icon of the NHL, in a relationship that was very much like pimp and prostitute. Ruthless and conniving, Eagleson was a despicable mix of sleazy fight promoter Don King, slimy record manager Colonel Tom Parker, and sneaky player agent Bob Sugar from the movie Jerry Maguire, and was every bit as bad for the players as the owners were. Corrupt to the core and putting personal interests ahead of the players and the league, Eagleson stayed as Director for over two decades, treating the treasury as his personal piggy bank and surrounding himself with an entourage that did nothing but consume money and resources. In addition, he withheld millions of dollars of pension money from NHL veterans until 1991, when word of his corruption broke and he was forcibly removed from power. He went on to face criminal charges and in 1998 pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud, agreeing to pay a fine of $1,000,000 and 18 months in jail.

The players, meanwhile, were so grateful that they had an Association at all that they didn’t think to question its effectiveness. In truth, the NHLPA was toothless and complacent for most of its existence. Any concessions they won from the owners were really only what the owners were willing to give them, and in light of the leverage they didn’t know they had, such concessions were pathetic. For instance, one clause was to raise the league minimum wage to $10,000. The League agreed; there was only one player earning less than that anyway. Other things the League implemented, like increasing the schedule to 74 games (and then later to 80, and then 84), adding more playoff rounds, expansion teams (read as: expansion fees), went straight into the owners pockets. If anything, the formation of the NHLPA brought about a new level of docility for the players. With a new NBC contract added on top of that, the owners had never been more profitable. The players still didn’t even have the basic right to have copies of their own contracts. There was lots of talk and meetings, but very little ever got done. The pie was bigger, sure, but the players’ piece actually shrank.

The first collective bargaining agreement occurred in 1975. Just beforehand, the owners whipped out their most effective weapon (and one they’ve used many, many times): that the players would kill the game if they pressed their demands, or any demands for that matter. In addition, sportswriters began reporting secret financial information about weak franchises, declining profitability, and the League hemorrhaging money. Player salaries were blamed. Claims that salaries consuming 50% of total League revenue were smothering the owners’ capacity to run hockey clubs. Sound familiar?

Owners love trotting that stat out. Today they claim that player salaries consume 73% of revenue. But they only include gate receipts—which they routinely underestimate—and conveniently ignore revenue from broadcasting, promotions, concessions, licensing and expansion.

1995 was the first actual, realistic, fair, just and honest bargaining agreement the players have received by the NHL. It was finally wrought from the owners’ hands kicking and screaming, after going through a 10-day strike in 1992, a half-season lockout in 1994, and a lawsuit that awarded a group of retired hockey legends (which included Gordie Howe) a $41 million settlement—a pension they should have received 30 years ago. Finally, for the first time, the Association was using the two most powerful weapons in any union’s arsenal: strike and legal action.

The owners continued to insist that the sky was falling, however. In fact, you ask any owner anytime, he will never flat-out admit how well he’s doing. It’s a staple of professional sports business to never show how much your hand is worth, and always insist that your risk is greater than the other side’s, and that you stand to lose no matter what happens.

The Risks of Being an Owner

It’s the bottom line of any business: the owner puts up the money, therefore the owner takes the risk. But in the sneaky world of corporate management, this risk can be minimized, marginalized, or in some cases, completely obliterated altogether.

While it’s true that hockey teams can be enormously profitable if run well, the real secret to making money in pro sports is owning the arena itself. There are many ways to do this without spending a single cent, too. Simply take controlling interest of a team and threaten to move it to another city unless they build you a new arena or stadium. The city always complies, because professional sports are an economic and cultural boon they don’t want to lose (Major League baseball, for instance, hasn’t built a completely private-funded ballpark since 1962). In exchange, a percentage of gate receipts and concession sales go towards paying off the cost. With the stadium bundled with the team, everything can then be resold for up to five times its previous value before the stadium existed. Which is the point of corporate business: buy for cheap, mortgage its future, and sell for expensive.

This works in just about every sport. In fact, it is working. Since 1990, the four major sports have built or are building 72 new stadiums and arenas at a combined cost of $19.4 billion. $12.2 billion of that comes from taxes. None of those entertainment complexes are owned by their respective cities or their cities’ citizens. To safeguard the risk on top of that, cities can be made to pay a fee to the stadium—for staffing and maintenance—if attendance falls short of expectations. Essentially, the owner is getting paid the difference for not having a sell-out. San Diego and Indianapolis’ football clubs do this.

Once you own the arena, making it appear that the team is losing money is Hong Kong economics. What most owners do is set up two companies—one to run the team, the other to run the arena. The books can be cooked in any manner of ways, such as charging the team a non-existent rent for use of its own facilities, or have concession sales, beer sales, parking, souvenirs and other such things be placed on the arena`s books (not the team`s). Or maybe as a separate branch of the parent corporation altogether. Or simply under-report attendance figures (for 30 years, the old Maple Leaf Gardens listed its capacity as 10,000. There are 16,000 seats). The best thing about these techniques is the revenue culled from them isn`t taxed. With the right creative accounting, even teams that sell out every game can be made to seem like they are bleeding money.

That hasn’t stopped NHL owners from continuously complaining about their relative small status compared to the other sports. As a matter of fact, at any one time they want to keep you in constant fear that the League is perpetually on the brink of disaster. But the players are hardly to blame for this. The structure of the NHL governors is so conservative that most of the time they aren’t fighting the players for money. They’re fighting themselves. And the risk they’re incurring isn’t from running the franchise itself, but from running against each other.

For years the owners have complained about the lack of a television contract. While baseball, basketball and football have happily enjoyed broadcast deals numbering in the billions of dollars, hockey is glad to eke in a deal worth mere millions. But the truth is the owners have no one but themselves to blame for this. Hockey was actually one of the first ever sports broadcasted on American television. CBS regularly ran games in the late 50s, but when the contract came up for renewal in 1959, Jim Norris voted to dissolve the broadcast commission altogether. New short-term contracts have come and gone, but by and large hockey has been trying to get a new stable contract ever since.

Not that they showed any inclination towards wanting one. Throughout the 60s, as the television era loomed, all professional sports gladly bent over backwards to accommodate television viewing audiences: changing dates and times of games, scheduling breaks for commercials, and even tailoring the rules to make games more exciting and palatable for television. They experimented with different colored balls (baseball had different colored stitching at one point, and football had an odd-colored pigskin that would show up on TV more. This is more than 30 years before the fandangled glowing puck). Basketball courts happily removed seating to provide for television cameras. But when Boston Bruins owner Weston Adams was asked to take out five seats to provide a better camera angle, he flat-out refused.

In 1963, CBS proposed a "hockey game of the week" tradition on Sundays, right after football, to build a viewing pattern for sports fans. The NHL rejected the idea outright, citing schedule conflicts. Where the other sports molded their schedules around prime TV viewing hours and used the medium to turn their athletes into superstars, celebrities and role models, the NHL was viciously reluctant to sell its players, denying them even from having their pictures on bubblegum cards. When the NHL finally did allow hockey cards to be made, the enterprise—and its profits—naturally was controlled, operated, and enjoyed by the owners. This trend continues today. Hockey is and has always been largely unapologetic, stubborn, and dismissive of the lucrative market of television coverage. It steadfastly refuses to compromise one bit for TV. The owners shot themselves in the foot, and they have been playing catch-up to the other sports markets ever since.

The owners also resisted expansion. As the 60s roared on and the Smythe and Norris families bled their franchises dry to pay for their other failed business ventures, the league was extremely reclusive and resistant to change. Only when it noticed the upstart American Football League nail a $35 million NBC contract and feared something similar might happen to the WHL—a rival league from the west coast that was gaining steam in terms of competitiveness and quality of play—that the NHL decided it needed to act fast to corner the pro hockey circuit. Six franchises were handed out willy-nilly in 1967, some of them for mysterious reasons. St. Louis got a hockey team, and they never even filed an application (it was later learned that it was awarded because Norris owned the St. Louis arena). Vancouver’s application was rejected, because "there was no clear owner"; they were a group of five investors, and the League did not want to deal with groups with varying interests, even though Pittsburgh’s application was granted, and they had 21 investors. The owners of other expansion teams—Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—had never even seen a hockey game before, and were granted a team based purely on their relation to someone famous or rich. This, of course, would never change, as 30 years later the NHL would still dole out franchises to people with no hockey knowledge but plenty of money, such as the oft-ridiculed Mighty Ducks franchise of Anaheim—owned by Disney Corp.—used purely as a vehicle to market a trilogy of teenage hockey movies.

Baseball has tight restrictions on just who can or can not own a baseball team. When Minoru Arakawa (of Nintendo) purchased the Seattle Marines, it took five months of paperwork, inquiries, and legal checks to complete the transaction. But hockey has always been fairly candid and loose about ownership, willing to hand a team to just about anybody who has a modicum of wealth. This tendency has come back to haunt the League on a number of occasions, like in 2002 when John Rigas, founder of Adelphia Communications Corp. and owner of the Buffalo Sabres, announced that the team was officially bankrupt and looking to fold by season’s end. In truth, the team was in no financial difficulty whatsoever, but was victim of corrupt business practices by Rigas and his sons, who stole money from his fledging cable TV empire’s investors to purchase and run the team. Operating costs, escalating player salaries and dwindling fan interest were never part of the team’s financial troubles.

When the six original owners drew up the expansion draft clause, they biased it so heavily in their favour that it ensured all but one of the new franchises decades of futility and financial ruin. They wanted the money the expansion owners gave them, but could care less about what they did with their teams after that. Improving the competitiveness and quality of play in the League was very likely not much of a factor. Such it was that for several years afterward the NHL had very, very bad hockey. For the good of the game, indeed.

Hockey owners are notoriously cannibalistic in this regard. Due to the game’s bi-national strata, it is the only professional team sport that doesn’t have any kind of major revenue-sharing agreement. It’s a mentality that stems back to the powerful Montreal and Toronto teams of the 50s and 60s, who enjoyed enormous profits from exclusive broadcast coverage. The American teams have consistently blamed the Canadian owners for not being more adamant about securing an American network contract. The blasé attitude that the Canadian hockey powers display towards the fledgling American franchises precisely illustrates why hockey does not sell well in the United States. It is because the League is not entirely sold on the idea that it wants it to. None of this is the players’ fault.

The hoarding of money did not stop at the border, either. The League was even parasitical on the other Canadian owners. One of the stipulations of absorbing the WHA franchises in Quebec, Winnipeg and Edmonton was that they sign over their broadcast rights to Molson, the major sponsor of "Hockey Night in Canada." By the 80s, Toronto was earning more in broadcast revenue than all the American teams combined. Because hockey’s epicentre is in Canada, the Canadian owners have been fiercely protective of their gains, always letting the weaker teams wither on the vine. Self-interest to the point of suicide has always been a theme in hockey. No one has ever had the League’s interest at heart. So this can’t be the players’ fault.

So what is the players’ fault?

The Risks of Being a Player

Understand: there are always far more players than there are jobs. In any other field or profession on the planet, supply reflects demand. This is not true in professional sports, where the positions are a fixed amount, and every year there is a new graduating class of hopefuls looking to fill them. The competition is so fierce and cutthroat, that some men dedicate their entire lives working towards the singular goal of becoming a professional athlete, and still aren’t good enough.

In 1992, I caught site of a touring hockey team from Kharkov, Ukraine. This team of Bantam boys was called Druzhba ’78 (Druzhba being the Ukrainian word for "friendship", and ’78 being their year of birth). They were, as the story goes, handpicked at the age of five under the old Soviet system as potentials with incredible athletic ability, and sent to a special hockey school to train exclusively. For four years they developed their skills at hockey and soccer, and then just at hockey, full time. The product of the centralized athletics program of the 80s, they quickly improved beyond their contemporaries in skill, speed, and talent. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine obtained its independence, these gifted hockey lads suddenly found the program cancelled and their funding ceased. So, like any neo-capitalist country, they went on tour showcasing their hockey skills to earn money for training and equipment to keep the program going.

They came through my town to play a couple friendly exhibition games against the local Midget AAA team (one notch below Junior). Druzhba, at age 14 and many of them not quite yet developed physically, were not daunted by the bigger, more menacing 17-year old Midgets, and proceeded to use their inhuman speed to dance circles around them. The final score: 20-1. It wasn’t even close. The Midget defence just could not keep up with the superior speed and playmaking of the eastern Europeans.

This Druzhba team played some 70 games a year, throughout all North America, participating in high-ranking Bantam and Midget tournaments. Over a period of five years they played some 340 games, winning all but five. They were clearly a super team, much better, faster, and stronger on their skates and with the puck than any group of teenage phenoms I had ever seen, and I watched with anticipation over the years to see what the world would make of them when they became men.

Of this team of super players—each one a Gretzky—only one was actually good enough to make it to the NHL: Dainius Zubrus. The others scattered when they turned pro. Some fell out with Junior clubs. Others played in Euro leagues, or in semi-pro leagues. Maybe others gave it up altogether, and tried to do something else. The point is for a group of boys selected purely for their raw athletic ability and programmed from an early age to eat, sleep, and breathe hockey, they still weren’t good enough to become NHL players at all, let alone NHL superstars.

The level of competitiveness in the world of pro sports is insane. Nothing is a sure thing. Hockey players live with this kind of mounting pressure and overwhelming odds every day of their lives. Professional sports are the only discipline where you can train your whole life and still aren’t guaranteed a job.

The comparison to other professionals is often made. Teachers, doctors, lawyers. Fans love to call the hockey player’s 7-figure salary obscene, and the teachers and doctors’ salaries—people who fill a much more dedicated and useful function to society—a travesty in comparison. But those arguments are dishonest. NHL athletes represent the top 0.01 percentile in the world at what they do. At most: 600 dedicated roster spots. There are millions of teachers in the world, so if you want to compare them to hockey players, compare aptitude with aptitude: take the 600 best teachers (they would probably go by the name "professor"). Or the 600 best lawyers or 600 best doctors. You’ll likely find that they’re all making 7-figure salaries. When you’re the best in the world at what you do, you command the kind of paycheck that reflects it. A better comparison to the local public school teacher is the local public recreational hockey player—and he isn’t making any money at all.

Furthermore, the longevity of an athlete in any professional sport from a peak earning period is four years. Every player is constantly reminded that they are replaceable at a moment’s notice. It is the only profession in the world where the training and skill acquisition take longer than actually employing them for profit. That is the reality that professional athletes face: signing over their livelihood for a brief opportunity at a payoff. On most occasions, this never comes to fruition. The high-profile players get all the press, but when salaries are cut down it is the fringe players, who outnumber the high-profile players 100 to 1, who undoubtedly suffer.

In Hollywood, actors make obscene amounts of money. Arnold Schwarzenegger gets paid $30 million a movie. But that’s because his movies make $300 million dollars. Why, then, do we resent the players for demanding similar compensation when the owners clear similar profits?

And this demand is relatively new. Player’s salaries really only started skyrocketing when Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles in 1988. That trade changed everything insofar as the worth and value of a marquee player was concerned. Gretzky had a Gordie Howe-like mindset when it came to salary, and like Howe his "don’t rock the boat" position inadvertently held back salaries for the better part of a decade. His contract was equally as simple: "pay me what you feel you have to." So LA doubled his salary. Bruce McNall was the first owner who wanted it announced to the whole world just what exactly the fledgling Kings franchise had received: the greatest player of all time. The greatest player deserved the greatest contract. The owners, not understanding the idea behind marketing a star player that had since become standard fare in basketball, football and baseball, complained that rising salaries would ruin hockey. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite happened. The hoopla surrounding big signings catapulted fan interest, gate receipts, and overall league revenues. Gretzky’s salary escalated from $1.25 million to $2.5 million, but the King’s revenues went from $4 million to $13 million. The Gretzky signing prompted other star players to renegotiate their contracts. Mario Lemieux obtained a new $2 million deal. Brett Hull went from $125,000 to $7.3 million after his legendary 73-goal season. Scott Stevens signed for $5.1 million over four years. It was a period of unprecedented prosperity for both the League and the Players. So what was the problem?

The problem was power. The owners suddenly realized that they could no longer keep the players underneath their thumb, as they had for decades. Eric Lindros—branded "The Next One" by hockey writers—was the first player who knew exactly what he was worth, and refused to come into the game on one knee selling his future for the pride and privilege of playing hockey. At age 18 he understood, perhaps better than anyone, exactly how his team and the League would profit from him. Of course, the League painted a different slant, and it made for more sensationalism in the media to call him spoiled, immature, greedy and having no respect nor love for the NHL and hockey. Death threats were made to him and his family. In Juniors, he often slept with a knife underneath his pillow. His brother Brett was forced to flee to the US collegiate system to play hockey. His parents lived in fear of being castrated; his sister lived with the feeling she would be beaten or raped. Public sentiment towards Lindros and his family looked not unlike the public sentiment towards people of Arabic descent after the terrorist attacks. And all because a young boy did not want to do what a bunch of rich men told him to do.

It’s a time-honoured technique for the owners to continuously berate the players and warn them that their "unreasonable" demands will kill the game. Only professional athletes live with the gripping fear that organizing a strike will destroy their sports. No other industry worries about these things. Steelworkers don’t fret that the steel industry will come to a crashing halt if they picket. Teachers don’t contemplate the possibility of no one ever learning anything ever again if they walk out of their classrooms. Engineers aren’t afraid that bridges will collapse and dams will break if they refuse to take on projects. Only athletes straddle that dangerous line between getting their due, and destroying their reason for living. The owners know this, and never hesitate to bring it up time and time again. And the owners never foster any delusions about what the game means to them. It is about money. And no owner fears that he may never get to run a company ever again if the NHL folds. The owner still has other vested interests. If the League collapses, the owner moves on, and runs other companies.

What does the player get to do?

Honesty & Compromise

It’s true that some franchises are losing money, but to blame that on the players is out and out deception. First of all, the teams may be losing money, but the ownerships are not. That is an important distinction. Secondly the players didn’t approve of those franchises. The players didn’t place them in non-hockey markets. The players didn’t collect and enjoy any of the expansion fees. The players didn’t make the business decisions that financially strapped the teams. The players weren’t even in the room when those decisions were made. So how can anyone fault the players for this? The owners and the League mismanaged those teams into oblivion, so the owners and the League must bear the brunt of the repercussions.

Yet the owners, with typical near-sightedness, don’t see things that way. In every single labour dispute, the first thing they do is publicly lambaste the players. Whether they know it or not, that is killing the golden goose. The only thing the owners have of value to sell are the players. That’s it. By swaying the public to hate the players, to get the media and the average fan to loathe the surly, spoiled machismo of the professional athlete, the owners in essence are damning themselves to ruination. They are discrediting the only thing they are really marketing. What business dumps on its own product in such a fashion? What business doesn’t stop and think that in diminishing the value of its cash cow it is guaranteeing no return on investment? If the fans see the players as worthless as the owners do, then the fans will stage their own private boycott. They’ll stop attending arenas, they’ll stop buying jerseys, they’ll stop following statistics, and they’ll stop watching games on TV—which decreases revenue for the sport, and thus the owners. Fans are just as fickle as players are and the backlash is usually not worth it. Just ask Major League Baseball.

So they want to change things, but if they thought long and hard about it, they’d realize that it’s not the players they need to change, but the way they run hockey teams. For the first time ever, it is the players who are united, and the owners who are fragmented. What the owners really need is protection from themselves. That’s what a salary cap does. A salary cap isn’t for the good of the players, or even for the good of the game. It’s for the good of the owners. It keeps them honest. It’s the owners who set prices, it’s the owners who sell tickets, it’s the owners who draw up contracts, and it’s the owners who run hockey franchises. If an owner doesn’t want to pay a player an exorbitant amount of money, he doesn’t have to. But he does. Why? Because other owners will. Gone are the days when a player could be blackballed from the entire League, and all owners would honour it. Today there are no agreements. Every owner is out for his own skin, and if that means at the expense of 29 other teams, then so be it.

But as is the case in business politics, owners would rather deep six the business than admit to any wrongdoing. And part of the reason why they are even in this mess at all is because the players don’t trust them. At every step of this league’s sordid history, the owners repeatedly and continuously lied, cheated, and scammed the players out of every last dime they could, so it’s hard not to blame the players for never believing another thing the owners ever have to say. They’ve been fooled a dozen times, and they’re not falling for it anymore.

So what do the players do? Answer: nothing. And if the owners can’t see that, then perhaps the only recourse is for the players to leave the NHL forever and start their own league. Some of them may be apprehensive about that, but that’s just a form of battered wife syndrome. As soon as they realize that there’s not a hell of a lot that the owners and the League do for them, they’re going to wonder why they even miss it. Since when has the NHL ever given them a fair shake?

Neither side is arguing how much they have or how much they want, but rather how much the other side deserves. But he bottom line is: Nobody pays a single red cent to watch an owner run a team. They pay for the product on the ice, on the field, on the court, or in the diamond. Period.