Economic Impact

There was a lot of hand-wringing in the Ottawa Citizen on the weekend about the NHL strike, and the spin-off economic impact that said strike was going to have.

Personally I don't see the problem in the larger picture.  I have faith that my hockey fan citizens can dig deep and find other things to spend their money on: different bars and restaurants, gadgets, family, whatever.  I seriously doubt that the typical hockey fan will save their money or reduce their debts this year.

In the large view, all that money will get funneled into different parts of the economy, parts that will undoubtedly experience a return to long term norms once hockey returns.

Chirping The CBA: Selling Cap Space

So one fine idea which will never see the light of day in the actual CBA was an idea in one of the offers by the players that rich teams which found themselves in need of hockey talent but with a shortage of cap space could undertake to buy unused cap space from another team for actual cash money.   This I thought was an interesting idea.  It would be a ready-made mechanism to transfer an unused asset from a poor team in exchange for the cash money that a rich team is making hand over fist.

Of course I'd want to limit it.  Say that at opening night, your cap hit had to be in line with the regulations for the season.  Say that said cap space had to be purchased at the full year rate, even if it was only used for a third of the season.  So if you needed to hire a guy who got $3 million a year, you'd pay at least $3 million to some other team to use their cap space for the rest of the year.  And oh yes you still have to pay the trade and pay the guy.  And then find some way to be legal before the next opening night.

Of course people won't go for it.  It would let rich teams like Toronto buy their way out of their terrible management, and while I agree that's bad, something like this would be a market to permit teams with unused cap to get money from the richer teams.  And the rich teams would be getting something for their money, unlike revenue sharing.

McKenzie on the CBA

TSN's Bob McKenzie considers the CBA negotiations.  Although I disagree with his conclusions, it is a pretty good detailed survey of the situation today as we head into the lockout.  I agree with his assessments of both the league's and the PA's relative offers: they both totally miss the point.

Unrelated: The last time we had a strike, poker made its big splash into our collective attentions.  While poker has definitely had its last gasp as a "mainstream" "sport", I wonder if something else interesting will make its appearance in the gap that hockey will leave.

Ice

Ellen Etchingham fetishes ice, albeit incorrectly:

No other sport is as dependent on such a mercurial surface, and because of that, no other sport has been so dependent on technology for its evolution.

Now while hockey is the most important sport in the world, it isn't the only sport in the world. It isn't even the only ice-based sport in the world. The finest, fastest, most perfect, fresh-from-the-zamboni sheet of hockey ice isn't suitable for a rec league curling game.

You want an ice fetish? Hang out at a curling rink. Throw a few thousand rocks yourself and you'll look at ice in a totally different way; after losing an important stone to a hair, crease, or bubble you'll see that NHL-caliber ice isn't suitable for mixed drinks.

Them NHL fellers play a fine game, but they don't know ice.

Chirping The CBA: Wake Me Up When It Starts To Matter

So it's been a month since anything happened in the CBA negotiations. I mean really, the player's "counter offer" was so out there that I wondered if the NHLPA was even taking the process seriously.

When you consider that the "counter offer" basically boiled down to A) suggesting that maybe the owners should share revenues between themselves more, and B) reducing the revenue split down to 54% for three years before jamming it back up to 57% of revenues, there's no wonder that the owners thought this was a non-starter.

Now there's been a counter-counter offer from the league, which would A) redefine "hockey related revenue" (down, of course) and B) set the revenue split between owners and players at 50% for five of the six years proposed.

There's been no mention of the other details that I've been hoping for.

But since there is still two weeks before 15 September, we are still not at the point that any of this should be taken seriously.

Ottawa Fans Out West?

So last week I was in Drumheller for a family function, and I had occasion to go to the Walmart there.  And just for fun I walked through the sporting-goods section to look at the hockey stuff.

What  I found was interesting.  They had the predictable pile of Flames shirts, a bunch of Vancouver shirts, one Edmonton shirt... and a half dozen Ottawa Senators shirts.

In Drumheller.

Fascinating.

(Also no Toronto or Montreal shirts, which was more predictable.  It was the presence of the Ottawa shirts I found interesting.)

I Love The Smell Of Hypocricy In The Morning

The title of this article says it all: Minnesota Wild owner on crying poverty then spending $196 million on Zach Parise, Ryan Suter

Let's review:

In April, [Wild owner Leipold] told the Star Tribune that his team wasn't turning a profit, and put the onus on player salaries:

"We're not making money, and that's one reason we need to fix our system. We need to fix how much we're spending right now. [The Wild's] revenues are fine. We're down a little bit in attendance, but we're up in sponsorships, we're up in TV revenue. And so the revenue that we're generating is not the issue as much as our expenses. And [the Wild's] biggest expense by far is player salaries."

Three months later, Leipold authorized his general manager to sign Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to contracts totaling $196 million — including $50 million in signing bonuses in the first three years of the contracts.

Everyone keeping up now?

This is why there has to be brakes on the insanity that is player contracts.  The players themselves, while not totally blameless, are certainly not the prime reason for the hole that the Wild are carefully digging themselves.  And while I'm not opposed to Leipold being creative with his future as an owner, he's taking an awfully dangerous risk with the franchise, one that could hamstring it for the next ten years or more.  And that's likely into the reign of the next owner, after Leipold goes bust or decides hemoraging money isn't such a good idea after all.