A month before Christmas and finally the National Hockey League season gets interesting.
Not the one on the ice, of course, since the owners locked out the players.
No, this season is being played by guys in suits in boardrooms, arguing about billions of dollars, which is the first problem. As someone said recently, as soon as the lawyers and the accountants get involved, everything goes sideways.
In case you haven't bothered to keep up, here's the latest - the sides are only $182 million apart, plus a whole bunch of technical issues around free agency, entry-level contracts, pension contributions and so on.
Not joking.
Two weeks back, the league offered the players a 50-50 split in revenues and $211 million in cash to settle (what the union is calling "make whole") some of the crazy long-term contracts like the one the Canucks signed with Roberto Luongo. This past week, the union came back with a five-year deal, 50-50 revenue split, but $393 million for make-whole money.
The NHL quickly rejected the offer.
Like I said, $186 million and a whole bunch of thorny issues apart.
But now it gets interesting.
Some of the league's top players are making noise to decertify the union, a tactic the NBA threatened to do to get their new deal and the NFL outright did to get a new contract last year.
What would happen if the players voted to decertify their own union, the NHL Players Association?
Now the lawyers would really have something to do.
For starters, a salary cap in any form would be illegal and the lockout could be challenged in court under American antitrust laws as illegal collusion between competing owners. All existing contracts would have to be honoured in full and the league could not impose any limits, financial or length of time, on new contracts with players.
With those kinds of rules, it would be the Wild West and just like Major League Baseball, where rich teams in big markets pay outrageous salaries for the top players, while teams in Oakland and Pittsburgh operate at a fraction of the player payroll of teams in New York and Los Angeles. That's ok in the U.S. for baseball, where those small-market teams have built a business model around rarely challenging for the pennant (the run in Oakland by the Athletics this season being one of those rare exceptions) but still putting bums in seats.
No chance of it working for hockey, however, so say goodbye to Nashville, both teams in Florida, Phoenix, New Jersey, the New York Islanders, Buffalo and Columbus, and that's just in the States. Maybe Winnipeg, Ottawa or Edmonton could be the Oakland of the NHL but they couldn't afford to offer what Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal could pay for players so they'd be either lovable losers or gone.
From the perspective of NHL owners and league commissioner Gary Bettman, that's what the apocalypse looks like.
It's not exactly sweet for players, either. Benefits like insurance, health care and pensions would be up in the air. Already retired players might have to sue to receive their benefits. This is of no concern to Todd Bertuzzi, for example, who's made his millions and is in the twilight of his career but that's not funny to Steve Moore, whose career was ended prematurely at age 25, when Bertuzzi slammed him into the ice and broke his neck.
And then there's the hundred-odd players currently in the NHL who wouldn't even get a sniff
at playing in the big league if all those teams failed. It's easy for some of the top names in the game to favour decertification because they might make even more money in this world, but for current third and fourth-line players with the Florida Panthers, this is the difference between making $750,000 a year in the NHL and $150,000 a year in the minor leagues.
But think about it from the fan perspective for a moment.
Instead of 30 watered-down teams, how about 16 stacked teams taking the ice for a 60-game season and a six-week playoff round with the top-eight teams qualifying, culminating in a two-week final for the Stanley Cup?
As Fort St. John native son and the best living hockey announcer around Jim Hughson would growl into the microphone - "THAT'S hockey!"
