Cole Talks Hockey: State of the NHL

In an attempt to better myself as a sports fan, I am going to attempt to understand the NHL.  To help me do this, I have enlisted the services of my good friend and avid NHL fan Cole Vanden Heuvel.  Today, we start with Cole's State of the NHL piece.  In the coming weeks, I will be emailing Cole questions about the NHL that I, as a novice, have always been curious about.  Enjoy.

As a sidenote, this is all I can think about when I see the word Cole in the title of a post.



Unfortunately, that is not Cole Vanden Heuvel in the video.
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As you may or may not be aware of, the current CBA in the NHL is set to expire on September 15^th (or the day after my birthday for anyone who cares to send any gifts my direction).  Many of you probably remember the 04-05 season when an entire hockey season was lost.  I wasn’t a fan of the sport at that time so it was nothing more than a footnote on the ESPN scroll that I happily ignored at the time.  However since then I, along with many others, have fallen in love with the game that has embraced a youthful resurgence from players that were barely out of diapers when that season was lost.  This post will hopefully give you an insight into what is currently going on within the NHL and what all these debates over the next few months are actually centered around. 

It’s easy for the average fan to be bitter and blame the players and sport for a lockout, it happened on a smaller scale to the behemoths that are the NFL and NBA this past year.  However where hockey has been lucky is that most of the “faces of the league” weren’t around during that 04-05 disaster.  Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, and Jonathan Toews are all players that don’t have any blood on their hands and fans are able to get behind.  The league now rests in their, and many other players whom are in the same boat, hands as they have hired Donald Fehr to run the NHLPA.  Fehr’s negotiating tactics are famous because he was the head man leading the MLBPA during their World Series-less season in the mid-90’s, but he is also utilizing a new technique that the talking heads didn’t fully capitalize on during those negotiations in 04.  The NHLPA has announced a 30 member executive committee made up of players with varying experience levels in the league.  On top of that the PA has also offered to pay for the flights and lodgings of any active player interested in going to NY to take part in discussions to both better understand what’s going on and get their opinion out there.

The biggest sticking points in this round of CBA negotiations revolve around the percentage of total revenue that is allocated to player salaries, player involvement in the Olympics, and closing current contract loopholes.  Currently the players get to see 57% of all league revenues by way of salaries.  To any normal person that may seem about right since it’s the players who put butts in the seats and without them it would just be a bunch of suits not generating any revenues.  However when you compare that % to those in the NFL and NBA (both barely about 50%) it results in a quite substantial difference that the owners will be looking to take a chunk out of this go around. 

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman (BOOO!!!) has made it known that he is against the idea of sending NHL players to the Olympics in Russia in 2014.  His thinking is that it does nothing to promote the game and only risks players getting hurt and owners losing out on hundreds if not thousands of dollars.  The 2010 Vancouver Olympics were a great success and did an unbelievable job promoting the sport and increasing viewership and fandom in North America mainly because the marquee games were played during the late afternoon or during primetime.  The 2014 Olympics being played on the opposite side of the planet meaning those same marquee games will take place during the middle of the night or extremely early morning for more North Americans, and when it really boils down that’s the main market that the talking heads care about.  The players love the idea of playing for their country and with their countrymen, but it may be a point they have to give up if they want to keep that large chunk of the “revenue pie”.

The third sticking point of the CBA negotiations revolves around the contract loopholes that are currently being exploited.  If you’re not an avid hockey fan, which I’m working under the assumption encompasses most of the readership here, you may just see the absurd 10-15 year contracts handed out by NHL teams and just scratch your head.  The reason that’s done is because under the current CBA the salary cap is calculated using AVERAGE salary over a player’s contract.  I’m going to launch into an example here, so if you don’t feel like putting up with all the numbers and jargon, please feel free to bypass the next paragraph.

So if you have player X signed for 5 years at $40 million total, he counts for $8 mil against your cap each season.  Whereas you could sign him for 10 years at a total of $50 million and lay out the pay scale such that he makes $8 mil the first 5 years and $2 mil a year for the last 5 years his cap hit falls to $5 mil a year.  This may not seem like a big deal, but imagine if you do this to a player who is 35 and it’s understood he’ll retire at 40.  You’ve saved yourself $3 mil a year in the cap and after he retires you drop off those last 5 years/$10 mil/$5 mil cap hit.  The new CBA will look at likely putting a max amount of years you can offer to a player over a given age in order to remove or at least curtail that sort of loophole in the future.

Of course those aren’t the only 3 issues that the NHL will be discussing, but they are 3 that you will for sure hear mentioned at some point during all the proceedings.  Armed with this info you will be at least somewhat prepared to hold a discussion with another sports fan on these issues, and if not you can show off for all the girls because what chick isn’t interest in a good CBA discussion?