NHL Owners Can Fix The Problem

from Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Globe, There are reasonable, perhaps even essential, tweaks to be made to the 2004-05 CBA. The ebb and flow of business almost guarantees every CBA must change, for a variety of reasons, especially in an age when constant discoveries and innovations in technology provide new business opportunities and potential growth in revenue streams. We weren’t watching NHL games on our wristwatches in October 2005.

What the owners need most today is not a radical new deal with the players, but a new way of dealing with themselves. They need to find a more honest, equitable, dare we say visionary method of spreading the profit and wealth among the 30 guys on their team. The 800 or so union members who play for their teams aren’t the problem, not anymore.

The existing deal guaranteed owners parity on payroll via fixed labor costs. The game itself is balanced, with the playoffs a two-month roulette tournament, offering almost an equal chance among the 16 qualifiers to win the Cup. And the financial growth model works, quite well, considering seven seasons of the current CBA produced 50 percent more in income than the league could build in the years 1917-2004. Amazing growth, when comparing the last seven years with the previous nine decades.

This is a deal that needs to be nipped and tucked. That’s all. The big issues can be pared, middled, modified, massaged, which inevitably means some shift in wealth back to the owners — not unlike what happened in the NFL and NBA.

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Source: http://www.kuklaskorner.com/index.php/hockey/comments/nhl_owners_can_fix_the_problem/

Brad Davis Logan Morrison Mike Stanton Josh Bailey Mark Eaton Trent Hunter