Clayton Dyer-

Hockey fans do not have any easy life. Aside from minimal coverage from major sports’ networks such as ESPN and Fox and game times scattered across multiple time zones, NHL fans have endured two lockouts in the past 14 years, the most of any professional sports league. When the NHL returned to action after shutting the lights off for the entire 2004-05 season, officials branded it as a “new league”, a fresh start; scoring was up, the game was faster, and, most importantly, attendance was climbing. Small market teams such as the Tampa Bay Lightning and Phoenix Coyotes started rising in the standings, proving that small market teams could win in a highly competitive league.

Great! The players are happy, thus the fans are happy, thus the owners are happy, and the NHL lived happily ever after… Well, not exactly.

A mere eight years after the NHL locked its players out in 2004, the league is headed for a third lockout. Whoever is running this ship must be either asleep at the wheel or a fan of watching their passengers panic and squirm.

C’mon down, Gary Bettman!

Whether it’s his weasel-like face, obnoxious public demeanor, or apparent desire to watch NHL fans grow increasingly anxious as the league nears another season without hockey, Commissioner Bettman is not popular amongst hockey die-hards. If hockey fans can agree on one thing, it is their collective hatred of their commissioner. Bettman is berated with boos in every arena he steps in, and even at events such as the NHL Awards Show and Draft.

It’s not hard to see where the loathing is coming from. According to the Winnipeg Sun, the NHL’s revenue has skyrocketed from $2.2 billion to around $3.3 billion annually since the last lockout. So everything is good, right? Bettman should just let the NHL continue to grow in popularity, allowing the cash to flow in, right? Nope. Instead, Bettman has said that, “the owners are not prepared to operate under this collective bargaining agreement for another season” (CSNPhilly.com).

Wait, what? The NHL is bigger than it has ever been, NBC Sports just signed a huge contract to broadcast games for the foreseeable future, and the league has numerous, marketable super-stars… So the commissioner wants to shut down for a year? If you’re not following Bettman’s logic here, join the club.

Bettman’s firm decision to lock his players out next season if a new Collective Bargaining Agreement is not reached becomes even more confusing when you consider the fact that the NHL can continue operating under the current contract, even if it expires. As Don Fehr, executive director of the NHL Players’ Association plainly put it, “if there’s a lockout, somebody has to choose to do this.”

So, let’s review the facts; the NHL owners have seen the league’s revenue shoot through the roof since the 2004 lockout — and they claim that they have a broken system?

When the NHLPA agreed to a new CBA after the NHL’s most recent lockout, players swallowed down a 24% salary cut. This time around, the owners want to knock the players down another peg, reducing their revenue from 57% to less than half. Ouch.

And that’s just the start of the owner’s extremely one-sided proposal. Shall we recap the proposed fix for the “broken economic system” that is the NHL?

The NHL is proposing to cut players’ share of revenues from 57 percent to 46, which translates into a colossal $450 million shift in revenue, according to CSNPhilly.com. That doesn’t seem very fair to me; after getting banged and bruised for a grueling eight-month season, the players get to watch as their owner takes away more than half of the money that their team earned by marketing the players.

The league wants to limit length of contracts to five years. Currently, there is no maximum contract length, granting teams (predominantly big-market clubs that have money to spend) the ability to lock up players for as long as they want to. This part of the deal would all but erase any possibility of dynasties forming, and would create rapid rises in salaries when players hit the market after their short contracts have expired.

The NHL also wants to extend entry-level contracts from three years to five, which basically means young superstars are forced to earn a smaller salary than they deserve until they have been in the league for five years. If this plan was in effect right now it would mean that the league’s leading scorer last season, Steven Stamkos (who has only been in the NHL for three years), would still be making a measly $875,000. Translation: the owners get to hold on to their young stars for longer and cheaper.

Finally, the league wants to basically destroy the current restricted free agency system by lengthening a time a player must wait to be eligible to become an unrestricted free agent (from seven years to ten) and eliminate salary arbitration. That would mean that the players would basically be locked up by their owners until they have been in the league for ten years, and be forced to play on an entry level contract for the first half of their decade in NHL (see above).

I’ll try to put the league’s proposal in simpler terms: a man (we’ll call him Wayne) walks into a pie store (“Philadelphia Pies” [not a very catchy name, I know]) and asks for a pie. The man at the register says that, if Wayne wants to buy a pie from them, he has to sign a contract saying that he will buy pies only from “Philadelphia Pies” for the next five years. To make matters worse for poor Wayne, he can only buy small pies from “NHL Pies” during his five-year contract with the store, pies not nearly big enough to satisfy his pie-hungry family. Only after Wayne’s five-year contract is up can he order the large pies, which are now 13% more expensive.

The bad news keeps coming for Wayne when he finds out that when his five-year contract with “Philadelphia Pies” has expired, he can’t buy pies from any other store without the other store submitting an offer sheet for Wayne, which “Philadelphia Pies” can match.

Wayne, who just wants to eat some damn pie, becomes irate, and calls up to the franchise that owns “Philadelphia Pies”, “NHL, Inc.”. Wayne demands to talk to the CEO of this dastardly company, and when he finally gets to speak with him, the CEO tells Wayne“tough luck”, and reminds him that “NHL, Inc.” owns all the pie stores in the United States and Canada. He tells Wayne that if he doesn’t like the way “NHL, Inc.” runs its pie stores, he can go buys pies from companies in Switzerland or Russia.

Wayne asks this wicked, evil CEO for his name, to which the man replies “Gary Bettman”.

Mouth-watering metaphors aside, Commissioner Bettman seems set on running the NHL into the ground. Hopefully Bettman and the rest of the NHL brass will see the light of day when the NHLPA submits their counter-proposal to the owner’s one-sided initial plan today. Otherwise the NHL will most likely be headed for a third lockout in less than two decades.

Then it won’t just be boos raining down on Gary Bettman’s head… It’ll be pies.

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