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Hold the Celebration Please

June 16, 2020, 9:00 AM ET [0 Comments]
Jay Greenberg
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • RSSArchiveCONTACT
While baseball is going to the brink, hockey owners and players are in embrace, seemingly making it simple to declare which sport sees a bigger picture during hard times. But let’s hold those hugs and not just because they could spread disease.

Both the NHL players and owners have the right to terminate the CBA a year early–fall of 2021. Under this commissioner, the NHL has locked out the players twice, once for an entire season, so let’s suppress the kumbayas until the next 6-8 years are signed, sealed and delivered uninterrupted.
Yes, give the hockey players and owners high fives—wear gloves, though–for the common sense understanding that a crisis demands cooperation. Be grateful for good will when you see it because you don’t very often in pro sports. Reason argues that it’s important to salvage some revenue coming out of a nationwide lockdown. Just don’t kid yourself that this peace is anything more than temporary. Given the long and painful history of sports labor negotiations, including the last two collective bargaining agreements in the NHL, the hockey players may come to regret playing nice.

The baseball players obviously are worried that whatever concessions they make to save half a season will be used against them when their CBA expires, also in 2021. They are fixing for a fight much bigger than over just one truncated season, perhaps a bench-clearer to rival the one in 1994 that wiped out the playoffs and World Series.

Revenues have increased while an onerous luxury tax has depressed salaries, serving as a cap in the only sport that doesn’t have one, at least technically. Whatever baseball settles upon–and despite that doomsday sabre-rattling by Commissioner Rob Manfred on Monday we still believe it reluctantly will – would be a band-aid during an ongoing national health emergency. But no vaccine that eventually safely enables large public gatherings again is going to cure decades of distrust.

“Not being a baseball player, I can't speak to how strong those guys feel,” Cory Schneider, the Devils goalie, was saying last week. “As a fan, you sort of say, ‘Well why can't they just figure it out? It's just money and they all are making plenty of it.

“But there's always a long game in mind. You’ve got to negotiate today for tomorrow. You never know what kind of stuff will happen in the future.

“In these times you have to look a little bit more at the present, figure out what's best for everyone's health and safety, and what can [the sport] do to contribute. How can we come back and play and maybe make things better on us while we're all struggling? We're all going to take a hit, so let's not destroy the game just for the sake of an argument. Let’s figure out the best way to come back.

“But sometimes feelings and mistrust are so deep-seated that it's really hard to overcome. So if you haven't been through lockouts, it's something that you understand but wish it wouldn't happen.”

Mature thoughts from a bright guy who understands that the $6 million he will make during the 2020-21 season–provided there is a full one–has been paid forward. Time flies when the seasons go by uninterrupted: Most of the players who sacrificed a year’s pay in 2004-05 in the unsuccessful attempt to ward off a cap–but still ended up with good salary escalation–are out of the game today.

Unions functions mostly for the benefit of following generations. Whether they represent electrical workers trying to get $50-an-hour or players making millions, the opponent-heartless managements answering first to their stockholders, not to their employees–hasn’t changed for more than 200 years.

Owners won’t open their books. Never have, never will, and so of course, the players, victimized by the Big Lie for so many years, always wonder what else they can’t get their fair share of. Hockey, which has an agreement guaranteeing the players a variable percentage of the revenue, is more transparent than baseball, but not fully. The “partnership” that supposedly saved the NHL in 2005, didn’t rescue it from another half-season lockout in 2012-13 when owners insisted that the players’ share had to come down and contract lengths had to be given limits.

Same old, same old: Owners wanting to make the players take the hit for their own dumb decisions, all the while the value of their franchises rises exponentially. The hired hands, of course, do not get a cut of the profits when the owner finally sells.

Franchises have relocated. But since the big expansions in the four majors began in the sixties, only one–the NHL’s Cleveland Barons, has folded, When the Blues were abandoned by Ralston-Purina in 1983. Harry Ornest saved them from death with a thin dime. Now, the Seattle owners are paying $650 million to get in.

The people in Ottawa, Edmonton, Pittsburgh drank the Kool Aid that the cap saved their teams, when there was no prior real evidence of competitive imbalance and plenty of other compromises available to save the 2004-05 season from full cancellation. In the three playoffs before that lockout there was not one repeat semifinalist and the highest spending team, the Rangers, were a competitive disaster.

Every franchise knows best its operating costs in a specific market, and therefore should have its own cap. It’s called a budget. If the owner is not smart enough to operate successfully within one, he must sell to another owner who can. That’s called capitalism.

The fan endures the inevitable cycles of good and bad seasons but is grievously wounded only when the owner-of a private enterprise that has taken on the city’s name–leaves for a better deal elsewhere. St. Louis was willing to build a new football stadium only 20 years since it constructed the last one. Stan Kroenke would make millions more building one for two teams in Southern California and the league let him go.

The mom and pop-owned franchises with visible, likeable, owners have dwindled to a precious few. The loyalty of the customer is only to the brand, or should be, not to the owners or players who have the right to free agency after accruing enough service time. Nevertheless, during lockouts and strikes, the fan will choose one villain over another because choosing a side, afterall, is what fans do. When a season get interrupted, the diehard has the choice of holding his breath until he turns blue, or coming back when the games begin again. He always has and, by now, we have to believe, always will. The players and owners both know this by now, why they dare risk shutdowns.

We will say this for the growing sophistication of the patrons: During the first labor dispute I ever covered, in 1973, when the NFL players were on strike, the bully owners won the PR battle by successfully playing to the fans’ sense of betrayal. “I thought these guys played for the love of me, not for money! I would do what they do it for free and they want $100,000 and a more comfortable old age? When Dave Parker, the best player in baseball, broke the $1 million a year threshold, the fans in Pittsburgh pelted him in right field. Now all the anger of Pirate fans is thrown at the cheapskate owner refusing to spend to win.

We would congratulate them on their maturation except that the beloved Penguins owner who delivered two Stanley Cups on the ice once (and much more seriously than he'd subsequently admit) entertained an offer to move the team to Kansas City with nary a loss of popularity; the people choosing to blame the economic system rather than bad management for the team’s financial crisis. Mario Lemieux used leverage, got the new (taxpayer-funded) arena he wanted. And if he hadn’t?

Be glad they are going to play. Don’t put any wreaths on their heads.
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