Lockout

[skee0025]

[if, if ands were butts we'd all have candy nuts.

I LOVE estimates by internet sites... I always believe what I read on the net as fact ... LOL.

Forbes an "internet site" Thats funny!. An uninterested 3rd party of highly respected professional financial analysists, but you go ahead and go with gut feeling and the word of Fehr. Theres also the fact that 2 teams have filed for Bankruptcy in the last couple of years. That tends to lend more credibilty to the NHL position vs. Fehrs contention that everything is peachy and its all about owner greed. You cant hide "the books" during a bankruptcy filing.

[Bear55]

This is sounding more and more like the season is over. I snipped this from TSN. I don't know any details but none of it sounds good.

So it finally happened: the NHL filed a lawsuit in New York asking the Court to declare the lockout legal. The NHL sued because it believed there was a real threat the NHLPA was going to file a disclaimer of interest, and after that, sue the league to get the lockout lifted. TSN Legal Analyst Eric Macramalla has more. Full Story.

Headlines:

NHL lawsuit assigned to former federal prosecutor

NHL players to vote on giving board authority to dissolve union

NHL counters PA disclaimer move with class action complaint

[Scott K]

Kinda sounding like the Twinkie debacle. I heard if the season doesnt start in January there are some of the smaller new owners, that will need to file for bankruptcy. They dont have the stashed revenue to pay their bills, without the season. I guess we will see.

[Bear55]

I think many of the big $$$ owners have no problem watching some teams fold. That would certainly cut down on the revenue sharing needed to support the small market teams. What a mess.

[PierBridge]

No winning in this Lame Blame Game!

ESPN!

First, let's be a man and admit when we're wrong.

My summer outlook for the NHL lockout months ago was puck drop by mid-December.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nope, the most illogical and incomprehensible labor battle in the history of pro sports has found a way to drag its way into the holiday season.

Somehow, a deal that isn't that far away at all -- on paper, at least -- is threatening to get worse with the legal battle now under way between the NHL and NHL Players' Association.

The only hope of having any hockey this season is if the looming threat of the union dissolving itself and the two sides duking it out in court provides one last jolt of urgency to the moderates on both sides to try to get over the final hurdles of this deal.

As of Monday morning, however, no talks were scheduled between the NHL and NHLPA.

So what now?

"We will continue to explore options for moving the process forward, and we hope the players' association is doing the same," deputy commissioner Bill Daly told ESPN.com via email Monday morning.

"Time is obviously getting short."

There is no official drop-dead date, although most people around the hockey world believe mid-January looms large in that regard.

Commissioner Gary Bettman has said anything less than a 48-game season wouldn't cut it, so you can't drop the puck past January and expect to pull that off, even with hockey in late June, which the league is prepared to do.

“

Daly Time is obviously getting short.

” -- NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly

What is needed at this point is for one side to provide one more compromised offer, one that the moderate representatives could bring to their respective constituencies for a vote. Moderates on both sides have indicated to ESPN.com over the past few days that is how this thing finally ends.

Problem is, they disagree on how to come up with that proposal. The folks on the league/ownership side say it's up to the NHLPA to come up with the next proposal. The players we've talked to tell ESPN.com they believe it's up to the league to provide the next offer.

Picture me now banging my head against the wall. Repeatedly.

At holiday party gatherings over the past week, people from different walks of life approached me and asked just what this labor dispute is about and why it's dragged out so long. I now fumble for an answer. I'm not sure I can even provide a legitimate answer anymore.

I know this: I lay plenty of blame for the decision-making on both sides.

Looking back, the NHL made a terrible strategic mistake back in July with an original offer that asked for players to accept 43 percent of hockey-related revenue, down from the 57 percent it had in the previous deal. I cannot tell you how many level-headed NHL players -- not militants but rather moderates -- have told me repeatedly how that first offer from the NHL in July felt like a punch to the head and galvanized the player membership in a way in which NHLPA executive director Don Fehr likely could have never managed on his own.

That offer set the tone for the level of mistrust that has plagued what should have been a simpler negotiation, the players knowing deep down all along that they'd be accepting a 50-50 split of revenues.

On the other side of things, Fehr is also showing his true colors of late. The longtime baseball union leader seems hard to pin down. It just seems like whenever the league moves on what Fehr deemed a critical issue -- such as funding the "make-whole" provision and then upping it to $300 million -- the NHLPA boss finds new demands to throw the league's way, the latest being his desire to cap escrow as part of the transition rules.

All of which just feeds into the long-held criticism from NHL owners that Fehr can't close a deal.

Let's be clear here: The players have done most of the giving in this negotiation. There's no way you can argue otherwise. But as I've long maintained, that had to be the understood context of this negotiation from Day 1. After labor deals in the NFL and NBA last year in which players backed up financially, it was clear NHL players were going to be subject to the same end result. It's an industry standard you can't escape.

So Fehr's responsibility all along was to make the best out of that negative backdrop. And in many ways, he has. His patience in this negotiation has helped get his membership the kind of offer from the league that I never imagined would ever be available -- $300 million in "make-whole"? -- but there comes a time when you have to know when to cut your losses.

Not having a 2012-13 season will irreparably damage the NHL industry.

And in a comment that I'm hearing more and more from people on the ownership side, I'm not sure the NHL returns with 30 teams on the other side of a lost season. Can the weaker markets truly survive this? That's damage both sides would feel.

I'm not sure it's possible anymore to shake off the emotion that has suffocated logical thought. But here's hoping it is.

Because getting a deal done is the only option that truly makes any sense. Well, at least for anyone who still cares about the game itself anymore.

[Jarrod32]

Kinda sounding like the Twinkie debacle. I heard if the season doesnt start in January there are some of the smaller new owners, that will need to file for bankruptcy. They dont have the stashed revenue to pay their bills, without the season. I guess we will see.

Y'know, it crossed my mind a while back that the league might be trying to contract by weeding out the small market, weak owner teams. I think it is generally accepted that the league expanded too far, too fast.

Bankruptcy, league takeover, liquidation, contraction draft...

[OnAFly]

Uffda. There are much easier ways to contract than this. This way they are risking losing a lot more fans than just contracting.

[fishing tech]

Wes Walz on the fan today thinks there will be a season. He didn't really want to get into it but he was saying that with the players possibly voting to dump the union it may force the NHL to get this settle quick. Lets hope. I am stuck at home for 8 more weeks and need some hockey time.

[fishing tech]

Oh ya, he also mentioned that PMB is looking VERY good. He seamed excited to get the season started to see just how good PMB could be.

[OnAFly]

You can get the package to see the AHL online. So far tat looks like the closest we'll get to the NHL this year.

[Bear55]

Oh ya, he also mentioned that PMB is looking VERY good. He seamed excited to get the season started to see just how good PMB could be.

The lockout is actually helping PMB, hopefully he gets the cobwebs out of his head and he can get back to his old self. Just imagine him healthy with a Healty or Parise on his wing.

[fishing tech]

Walz was saying this delay to the season is helping the Wild as far as getting guys healthy. They should be fresh and ready to go if/when the season starts. But so should other teams.

[PierBridge]

No I did not write this article ...

Time Article

You may not have noticed that the NHL hasn’t started its season yet, which is arguably Problem #1 for the wannabe major league: Ice hockey is fourth in a three-horse race of pro team sports vying for the affection of casual U.S. fans. Problem #1A is the lockout of players that’s been in force since Sept. 15, which has resulted in the cancellation of nearly 550 regular-season games to date. But in the event you are following the inaction rinkside, don’t be fooled when league officials or anyone else claims that the main issue is greedy players. The real problem in hockey is not in the locker room, but in the owners’ suites and commissioner’s office.

The NHL would like you to believe that owners give too much money to players. That was management’s position almost a decade ago—the last time the league locked out its talent—when players were getting three-quarters of total revenues. After an entire season was voided, the NHL Players Association caved, agreeing to lower its members’ share of revenue to 57%. Peace and harmony have ensued since, but now the owners want an even bigger piece of the pie, claiming financial hardship.

Don’t believe them, not for a minute. First, as I’ve written about before, sports team accounting is misleading at best, given that club owners can claim to be losing money when a) the losses are on paper only; there are tax benefits from whatever losses happen to be real; and c) the value of their teams continue to rise.

All this is true for NHL owners as a group. The average NHL team, according to Forbes, is worth $282 million, an 18% increase from one year ago. It’s true, certainly, that sky-high values for a handful of mega-successful teams (Toronto Maple Leafs, $1 billion; New York Rangers, $750 million; Montreal Canadiens, $575 million; Chicago Blackhawks, $350 million; Boston Bruins, $348 million) raise the overall average, while some struggling teams (Carolina Hurricanes, $162 million; New York Islanders, $155 million; Columbus Blue Jackets, $145 million; Phoenix Coyotes, $134 million; St. Louis Blues, $130 million) are worth much less. But it’s also true that $282 million is higher than the price tag Forbes placed on the most valuable team in the league just a decade ago (Rangers, $277 million). And the average value for the bottom five teams today ($145 million) is nonetheless higher than the price tag for fully half the league’s team in 2002. Few teams have struggled financially in the past decade as much as the Coyotes, for example, and yet their valuation over the past decade has increased 69% ($79 million to $134 million).

Businesses don’t increase in value if the underlying model isn’t sound.

None of which is meant to say that the NHL doesn’t need tweaking. It does, in two ways. First, there’s a strong argument to be made that there are too many NHL teams, or at least too many in places where ice hockey is not exactly a native sport. i.e., the American South. This is the fault of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, long a champion of NHL expansion. But hockey in the U.S. is not a national sport; it’s a collection of regional enthusiasms, and not enough fans in the American Southwest and Southeast are as enthusiastic about hockey as they are about football, baseball, and basketball. Is it any wonder that the Atlanta Thrashers’ fortunes improved after they relocated to Winnipeg last year (changing their name to the Jets)? With a rabid regional fan base, management could raise ticket prices and secure a more lucrative local TV deal. Forbes has the franchise’s value increasing by a fifth in just a year (to $200 million). Alas, there aren’t that many large markets without an NHL franchise left north of the border, or in the northern U.S. Likewise, contraction isn’t a likely prospect. Major (or even minor major) sports leagues reduce their ranks of teams about as often as owners speak honestly about their finances.

More to the point, contraction might not be necessary if NHL owners would only grow up. The problem in hockey, as ESPN The Magazine‘s Peter Keating recently explained, is that NHL owners don’t share enough of their own money with each other. And share they must, because the nature of the NHL’s “popularity” in the U.S.—intense interest among small pockets of local fans, consistent disinterest otherwise—translates into paltry national TV contracts. As a result, Keating writes, NHL teams “share a far tinier proportion of their revenues than teams in other sports do, because NHL clubs rely much more on local media deals for money than on national TV contracts.” So big-market teams, with lots of local TV money, spend more on player salaries, forcing small-market owners to choose between paying their players more than they can afford or putting a subpar product on the ice. Either choice has unpleasant financial consequences.

This has long been a problem, of course, for all major sport leagues. But we’ve known for a while that the way mature owners and strong commissioners have to deal with this imbalance is to share revenues between teams. Practically, this allows all teams to be competitive, ensuring a consistent and popular product. Philosophically, this recognizes the we’re-all-in-this-together aspect of professional sports leagues, one of the more curious economic constructs in history. It’s not a coincidence that the most successful North American sports league also has the most rational approach to revenue sharing. Some 60% of the NFL’s $11 billion revenue pie is shared, which is why tiny Green Bay, Wisconsin can compete with big bad New York or Chicago. The other two Big Three leagues aren’t quite as egalitarian but have improved their models in recent years: MLB teams share nearly a third of local TV revenue, while NBA teams reportedly approach a 50% total revenue share (give or take a few complex calculations).

The NHL, meanwhile, has been sharing 4.5% of its $3.3 billion revenue (with not much more on the table in current talks.)

So greed is the issue, alright: owners’ greed, specifically owners in larger markets who refuse to recognize that sports leagues are in many ways socialist enterprises, in which the needs of the many fat cats should outweigh the few obese cats. At least if the obese cats want to keep purring.

Again: NHL owners with struggling teams, to the extent that they are actually struggling, are largely in the shape they’re in because of their fellow owners, not because of NHL players.

And all NHL owners would be wise to recognize their own culpability ASAP, rather than engaging in more legal maneuvering. (At the moment, the league is busy filing lawsuits and complaints, while the NHLPA is trying to decertify itself, so players can sue owners for anti-trust violations.) The urgency is not because NHL fans will give up on the sport; hockey fans are absolute gluttons for abuse and incredibly desperate to watch pro hockey. (Seriously, check this out.) No, NHL owners should get their act together because their league faces something none of the other major sports do: Russia’s KHL, an aggressive and surly rival league that has long resented how many European players in general and Russians in particular choose to play in North America rather than staying on their home continent. The KHL’s finances, like most things Russian, are a little murky, so it’s hard to know if the league could seriously compete with the NHL for top talent in the long run. But a surprisingly large number of iced NHLers are now playing in the KHL while they wait out the lockout, including a lot of North Americans.

You have to worry that at some point many will simply decide to stay for the long haul.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/12/19/hock.../#ixzz2FXAO9y3u

[Musky Buck]

10-4 Bear no doubt, the even better Cliff Ronning in PMB, he could be way way valuable, lets go need Hockey !

[archerystud]

If the players do truly de-certify the union I'm wondering how ugly this could get. At a minimum I believe it would cause some contraction within the NHL.

Not trying to steal this thread but right now we need college hockey more than 2 nights a week!!!!! Go WCHA!!!

[hoppe56307]

NHL made a new offer yesterday......

[archerystud]

Pierre LeBrun thinks this latest offer should get the 2 sides over the hurdle and onto a season.... if it does then it's about TIME!!!!

If it does lead to a deal it will be interesting to see how much fan impact there is on the game. I've never went to more than 2 Wild games per year based on the price of the tickets but I wonder how the Wild's season ticket holders will react if there is a season.

[LundProAngler]

There are lots of die hard fans like me that will watch no matter what.

I hate this stupid lockout just like everyone else, but if and when the puck drops, i know I will be watching for sure! GO WILD!

[toughguy]

There are lots of die hard fans like me that will watch no matter what.

I hate this stupid lockout just like everyone else, but if and when the puck drops, i know I will be watching for sure! GO WILD!

+1

[Bear55]

Wild shouldn't have any problems, I think we are dying to see Suter and Parise.

[mr_jman]

I've also been salivating at the chance to watch some Wild hockey and with all the excitement behind our new signings I will still be wearing my Wild jerseys and show my support for the team. The only money I really spend is on Wild jerseys that I get on the Bay of E. I have every style they've released so I won't have to buy any more for a while hopefully. Otherwise just an additional $5 a month on my cable package to get NBC Sports.

[schmitty3]

I found myself watching Wild and NHL in general videos on youtube the other day. Really miss it and hope that they get a deal done and we get to watch some hockey. This is one of my favorites from last year... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75scFG0ZTk

That game was awesome! Lindstrom is a whiny B@$#%.

[knoppers]

I don't think it will effect our local hockey enthusiasm. but some southern states might have a harder time getting fans back, since they have never been hockey states in the past. I could be wrong. lets drop the puck already!

[OnAFly]

The hardcore fans will come back. The ones they will lose this season are the casual fans. How much coverage has the NHL gotten outside of MN, MI parts of the east coast and Canada? Out of sight, out of mind.

[rich4walleyes]

TENATIVE DEAL HAS BEEN REACHED!!! Sounds like they have finally agreed to something this morning. Now let's get hockey back on the ice where it belongs!!