The NHL Lockout
It appears that the player's union's startling offer of a 24 percent rollback in salaries is not enough for the undisciplined hockey owners. Unable to stick to budgets in a sport that has proven year after year that payroll size doesn't matter, they demand a salary cap instead. So the season is probably over, which is unfortunate because I actually like hockey.
The thing that isn't being talked about is what a disaster a true hard salary cap would be in the NHL. This isn't the NFL, where fans don't care who the left guard is as long as he wears the proper colored jersey, and in many cases whichever team you have money riding on. The NHL is still driven by fans clicking through the turnstiles. Striving for a system like the NFL's would make it even harder to be a fan. Hockey, if it comes back at all, is going to have to rely on the fact that most of the players are good guys who do good things in the community to create goodwill. Creating a system that forces players to leave town every year as a matter of course is a bad a idea. I mean, this is a league where most even the most rabid fans can't pronounce the names of half the players in the league, and that includes broadcasters on the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The union can't win this fight because, the owners are actually making money (read losing less) on the work stoppage. And, not surprisingly, the brain-dead moron who run the sport are steering it toward Armageddon.
The compromise position here is an NBA-style soft cap where teams can make exceptions to sign their own free agents. You would have to insert a tax threshold, based on revenue calculations to make sure that teams who let their payrolls get too high are punished. In the long run it's probably better for the game. The next order of business is eliminating the neutral zone trap, which is what really killed hockey in the late 1990s.
The thing that isn't being talked about is what a disaster a true hard salary cap would be in the NHL. This isn't the NFL, where fans don't care who the left guard is as long as he wears the proper colored jersey, and in many cases whichever team you have money riding on. The NHL is still driven by fans clicking through the turnstiles. Striving for a system like the NFL's would make it even harder to be a fan. Hockey, if it comes back at all, is going to have to rely on the fact that most of the players are good guys who do good things in the community to create goodwill. Creating a system that forces players to leave town every year as a matter of course is a bad a idea. I mean, this is a league where most even the most rabid fans can't pronounce the names of half the players in the league, and that includes broadcasters on the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The union can't win this fight because, the owners are actually making money (read losing less) on the work stoppage. And, not surprisingly, the brain-dead moron who run the sport are steering it toward Armageddon.
The compromise position here is an NBA-style soft cap where teams can make exceptions to sign their own free agents. You would have to insert a tax threshold, based on revenue calculations to make sure that teams who let their payrolls get too high are punished. In the long run it's probably better for the game. The next order of business is eliminating the neutral zone trap, which is what really killed hockey in the late 1990s.
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