The National Football League isn't just profitable; it could replace the toilet tissue in the League headquarter's bathrooms with dollar bills and still have enough left over to give Roger Goodell his own Scrooge McDuck money bin. For example, only one team in the NFL discovered a way to lose money in the 2010 season: The Detroit Lions, thanks to winning just 23 percent of their games over five years and experiencing an 0-for-16 season.

This despite the NFL's players taking 57 percent of the League's $9 billion in revenue annually.

"We'd all like to have football's problems," an NHL executive told me recently.

After the NFL's lockout drama, the players' share was reduced down to a 50/50 split (on average) in what was called an "all-revenue" model. The rich will get richer; and the collective brain-trusts of Enron and Solyndra couldn't find a way for an NFL team to lose money under this CBA's terms.

But someone will. Someone always does. In a business with 30-plus franchises, there's going to be an owner who overspends or a team that fails to keep its gate up or a market that suddenly doesn't support the franchise the way the League hoped it could.

The problem in the National Hockey League is that there are, at last count, around 18 teams that Forbes.com claims lost money in 2010-11. Many of these teams are successful on ice, but that success hasn't bled over to their economics.

This has led to both sides of the CBA debate targeting revenue sharing as a panacea for these money-bleeding teams. As James Mirtle of the Globe & Mail passed along:

The players' proposal involves giving up closer to $100-million, money the union wants to put into a $260-million revenue-sharing pot for struggling teams rather than benefit those that make a healthy profit. The NHL has offered to raise revenue sharing to $190-million from last season's $150-million, with the extra likely easy to come by given it's a small fraction — just 10 per cent — of the owners' savings in their deal. "We're not interested in helping the Toronto Maple Leafs make a bigger profit," one source on the players' side said this week. "We're interested in directly targeting the teams that are losing money and guaranteeing that they don't lose money in a new system. That's what we're prepared to do."

The NHL is down with revenue sharing, too, but thinks that player costs are the real devil in the details. Its mantra leading up to the labor battle with the NHLPA: The system they put in place seven years ago works for the on-ice product, but "we got the economics wrong."

Question is: Can they ever get them right, or are NHL teams destined to always be money losers?

The NHL has said that the NFL is its own animal, which is true: Professional football's television contract and revenue streams make hockey look like a lemonade stand by comparison.

The comparison the NHL likes to make is to the NBA, where costs are fixed and capacities are similar and both Leagues have had executives named Gary Bettman in the last 20 years.

In 2010-11, the year before its lockout, there were 15 NBA teams that lost money according to Forbes.com. Will a shift in the Association's revenue split towards the owners provide relief to some of these teams? Of course. But not all. Because self-inflicted wounds aren't easily prevented.

According to Forbes, the Dallas Mavericks lost $8.9 million on average over five years. This is, in part, because they chose to spend above the cap and paid $18.9 million in luxury taxes in the 2010-11 season. The Memphis Grizzlies lost $9.7 million; again, a team with a high payroll by choice.

The New Jersey Nets, meanwhile, lost $10 million on average over five years and then relocated to Brooklyn, where projections have them potentially in the top six teams in generated revenue next season.

The Charlotte Bobcats made the playoffs once in eight years and lost $26 million in 2010-11, the year after their playoff appearance. They are the Columbus Blue Jackets of the NBA — a team in a potential hotbed market whose futility hasn't allowed it to take root.

You'll find common threads between these NBA teams with the NHL, as broken down by Lyle Richardson in his terrific take on money-losing franchises. (Check out the first and second rounds of analysis.)

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