NHL Hockey 2012-2013

[maddplotter]

Well, guess we'll start with the obvious topic this season.....

WTF? Lockout?!?!??!

Who do you blame? Owners? Players? Fans?

Maybe I'll check out the Marlies/Bulldogs games.

Let the ranting begin!

[Shyla Wild]

Let me ask you this question.....when the team is not doing well, do we say that the owner is overpayed? Or do we start blaming overpaid players?

[mc99]

Owners negotiated the deal then proceeded to find loopholes to gain competitive advantage over other owners. Now they want to take all those contracts they agreed to and roll them back. Would you let your boss do that?? Personally, I think 50% works for both sides. That said, it's hard to feel sorry for people earning an average salary of $3,000,000. Fans lose either way.

MC

[Rockheart]

Owners need to make profits.
Players should get what they are worth to a point, but it cannot be unreasonable.

As professional hockey grows the number of teams will increase and the number of mediocre players will also go up.
This also probably means more smaller markets and closer profit margins.

It also means that small market teams have to try and compete with big market teams on the same level.
Pro sports have always had this problem, evening the playing field financially.

2 things could happen,

1. Only Like sized markets would only play each other.
2. Large and small markets would continue to try and equal out.

If you want all teams to be equal it would make more sense for the NHL to hire all players on some kind of scale.
Then owners could just shop in the player pantry, based on their records and other factors.
So all players would be NHL employees first, there would be limited ability to negotiate large contracts.

If a Gretzky every came around again, there perhaps could be exceptions given.
However he would probably just be ranked higher on some sort of scale, like fantasy rankings.
I doubt we will see dominant individuals like Wayne in future, sports are too wide open and accessible to all now.

[Shyla Wild]

How about a system that rewards WINNING. I hate overpaid players (I'm a Habs Fan: see Scott Gomez). I believe a playoff series is worth 1 million in profit? That's an entire series. That means each game is worth roughly 1/4 of million each to an owner. Each team is allowed to dress 20 players...that means a win is worth roughly 12500$ per player. If the players want fair then this is fair. They are making as much as the owner per series.

As for teams only playing each other in equal markets....it doesn't and won't work. Look at some of the cities in which hockey is doing poorly...Phoenix, New York Islanders, Dallas were all at the bottom of the NHL attendance numbers last year. That is 3 of the biggest markets in the US. Atlanta is another huge market, and hockey has failed there twice resulting in the team being moved to Calgary and the second version was recently moved to Winnipeg.

When the Canadian dollar was at half the US, Canadian Teams asked the government for a Tax break to remain competitive. This was met with public outrage and declined. The result, The Quebec Nordiques were sold and moved. How much money did the government lose when that happened? Must have been in the Millions per year.

Hockey, like all professional sports is competitive. If your city cannot support a team, or is not a big enough market then you should not have a team. Final. If teams want to have special rights because they are a small market? It already exists: It's called profit sharing.

[Bawb]

The teams that are losing money is largely from Bettmans flawed business plan, he expanded the NHL too quickly [expansion fees] and into poor hockey markets [Phoenix, Atlanta, Columbus. Florida, Nashville, etc.]
Even in this economic down time, the NHL generated over 3 billion in revenues.
All profitable teams have to cointribute to an equalization fund for the money losers who are owned by billionaires, which I think is stupid.
The owners greed got them into this mess and they want to punish the players

[Rockheart]

How about a system that rewards WINNING. I hate overpaid players (I'm a Habs Fan: see Scott Gomez). I believe a playoff series is worth 1 million in profit? That's an entire series. That means each game is worth roughly 1/4 of million each to an owner. Each team is allowed to dress 20 players...that means a win is worth roughly 12500$ per player. If the players want fair then this is fair. They are making as much as the owner per series.

As for teams only playing each other in equal markets....it doesn't and won't work. Look at some of the cities in which hockey is doing poorly...Phoenix, New York Islanders, Dallas were all at the bottom of the NHL attendance numbers last year. That is 3 of the biggest markets in the US. Atlanta is another huge market, and hockey has failed there twice resulting in the team being moved to Calgary and the second version was recently moved to Winnipeg.

When the Canadian dollar was at half the US, Canadian Teams asked the government for a Tax break to remain competitive. This was met with public outrage and declined. The result, The Quebec Nordiques were sold and moved. How much money did the government lose when that happened? Must have been in the Millions per year.

Hockey, like all professional sports is competitive. If your city cannot support a team, or is not a big enough market then you should not have a team. Final. If teams want to have special rights because they are a small market? It already exists: It's called profit sharing.

The teams that are losing money is largely from Bettmans flawed business plan, he expanded the NHL too quickly [expansion fees] and into poor hockey markets [Phoenix, Atlanta, Columbus. Florida, Nashville, etc.]
Even in this economic down time, the NHL generated over 3 billion in revenues.
All profitable teams have to cointribute to an equalization fund for the money losers who are owned by billionaires, which I think is stupid.
The owners greed got them into this mess and they want to punish the players

You are both right, it cannot be artificially influenced.
The places that can support the teams should get them.
Not everywhere is going to support hockey, no matter what the size.
Sao Paulo, Brazil is 30 million or more, they probably cannot support an NHL franchise.
Saskatoon Sk, is 300,000, they probably can support a team better than Phoenix can.
Saskatchewan Roughriders are the biggest draw and largest Merchandise sales in the Canadian football league,
how can this happen.?
How can market size even be the most important thing.

Winnipeg and Manitoba were idiots to let the Jets leave in the first place.
They should have choked up the money.
Saskatoon has been choking up the money for years but everyone is scared, now with their boom things will change.
If the NHL smartens up, these overlooked Canadian cities will be included.

Every kid in Western Canada plays hockey so it makes no sense that there was 2 teams in Alberta and then none between Calgary and Toronto. Think of how many hockey players and fans there is in that distance.
Phoenix? WTF

Plus the number of teams vs population in Ontario and Quebec is crazy.
Alberta gets 2 teams?
Gotta be able to support something in Halifax too.

Do they really need to keep expanding at all?
Just put teams in realistic places.
What about Russia?

[tommygun]

Last year the NHL generated 4 billion in revenue. Only 1.4 or so went to the players, who hare responsible for every penny of that revenue. Do the owners/administrators deserve 60% of NHL revenue? I don't think so.

In Canada the average private sector wage has gone down roughly 5-10% over the last 20 years. The average owner's wage has increased roughly 800% in that same time frame. We live in a society where the business owners get rich off the efforts and exploitation of the workers. Good on the NHL players for putting their foot down.

It was pretty sad to see last week that a bunch of teams have cut back or laid off administrative employees in order to save money. Owners who already have billions of dollars cut $40,000 jobs in order to save a couple of bucks. The owners are greedy, do not deserve anywhere near what they get, and I am fully behind the players here.

[Shyla Wild]

Last year the NHL generated 4 billion in revenue. Only 1.4 or so went to the players, who hare responsible for every penny of that revenue. Do the owners/administrators deserve 60% of NHL revenue? I don't think so.

In Canada the average private sector wage has gone down roughly 5-10% over the last 20 years. The average owner's wage has increased roughly 800% in that same time frame. We live in a society where the business owners get rich off the efforts and exploitation of the workers. Good on the NHL players for putting their foot down.

It was pretty sad to see last week that a bunch of teams have cut back or laid off administrative employees in order to save money. Owners who already have billions of dollars cut $40,000 jobs in order to save a couple of bucks. The owners are greedy, do not deserve anywhere near what they get, and I am fully behind the players here.

Revenue is not profit. Revenue is the gross before expenses are taken out. Players salaries come out of revenue which is also the biggest expense. The players agree to their contacts, and many times do not live up to them. I can deal better with a greedy owner than I could a greedy player. As I said before, we rarely complain about when an owner is making money and the team is losing, but when your top paid players do not perform...see who feels the heat.

Unfortunately the owners have the power and own the stadiums. They are the investors. Do players own teams? Besides Lemieux the answer is no. Business owners are not taking advantage or as you put it "exploitation of the workers". When the average salary in the NHL is over 1/2 million dollars I do not think anyone is being exploited here. Owners are in the business of making money. Of course they are going to try to make more.

Want to know who's side I'm on.....neither. It's a game. Owners make money and players play the game. Both are greedy, and I cannot take sides when rich people fight. They are a bunch of babies.

[tommygun]

Revenue is not profit. Revenue is the gross before expenses are taken out. Players salaries come out of revenue which is also the biggest expense. The players agree to their contacts, and many times do not live up to them. I can deal better with a greedy owner than I could a greedy player. As I said before, we rarely complain about when an owner is making money and the team is losing, but when your top paid players do not perform...see who feels the heat.

Unfortunately the owners have the power and own the stadiums. They are the investors. Do players own teams? Besides Lemieux the answer is no. Business owners are not taking advantage or as you put it "exploitation of the workers". When the average salary in the NHL is over 1/2 million dollars I do not think anyone is being exploited here. Owners are in the business of making money. Of course they are going to try to make more.

Want to know who's side I'm on.....neither. It's a game. Owners make money and players play the game. Both are greedy, and I cannot take sides when rich people fight. They are a bunch of babies.

A few years ago my friends and I rented the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens. We paid about $2000 for an hour of ice time. Multiply that by about 4 hours for every home game, which is about 41 a year per team. Multiply that by the 30 teams in the league and you've got roughly $10 million to rent the facilities for each regular reason. That is about 0.25% of the total revenue. Not very much in the grand scheme of things. I don't have facts and figured for other operating expenses but I imagine they all add up to fractions of percentages too. The operating costs of the NHL are not very much considering it's revenue. If it cost the NHL 3 bllion to have a season of hockey, that'd be different. But it doesn't.

When teams lose, the top players are generally held fully accountable. When The Oilers lost in the conference finals in '86, who got the blame? It wasn't Kevin Lowe, Craig McTavish or Mark Messier. Steve Smith, the guy who scored the winning goal on his own net to essentially lose the final game to Calgary wasn't blamed for more than a couple of days. Wayne Gretzky took the burden for that entire organization. I don't remember anyone blaming Peter Picklington, the owner, either.

As a lifetime Toronto Maple Leaf fan i have done more than my share of complaining about this team. Forbes magazine listed the Leafs as the most valuable team in the NHL, and they haven't won a cup in over 40 years. They haven't even been one of the best 16 teams in the league since 2004, when the last lockout happened. A couple weeks ago ESPN ranked them as the worst professional sports franchise in North America. I don't think many people would dispute the fact that the fans and winning take a serious back seat to making money in the eyes of the owners. Not one player on the team today was on the team the last time they made the playoffs, same owners though. As long as the profits are there they don't care about anything else.

Many of the current issues the players have are not even for the multi-gozillionaries like Crosby, Ovechkin, etc. They are largely for the younger players who will likely not have long careers. For the guys who will be dumped after injuries and replaced like a piece of used bubble gum. A teammate of mine from high school moved up the ranks in hockey and eventually earned a spot with the Atlanta Thrashers for a half season, until he got hurt. After he got hurt he was cut and sent on his way. His career as a hockey player was over and it was time to find a new line of work. Same with Brett Lindros, whose career was ended by concussions and the NHL didn't pay for his medical care after he was cut. It's guys like that who stand to benefit the most from the deal the players want. It's not just a game to many of these guys. Half of all people who play in the NHL have careers less than 100 games. 5% of them will play just 1 game and their career is over in the NHL. These are not the guys who make big money, they make the league minimum which is 500k. That would pay off my house and my car, but it is certainly a long way from being rich. Only 4% of players dress for 1000 games.

The owners absolutely exploit players and it requires the entire NHLPA to bring the owners to their knees (and not in the good way) to institute any change that benefits anyone but the owners. The players are responsible for all 4 billion dollars generated each season. As we've seen, without them there is no NHL and no revenue. Their pay and benefits should reflect that.

[Shyla Wild]

A few years ago my friends and I rented the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens. We paid about $2000 for an hour of ice time. Multiply that by about 4 hours for every home game, which is about 41 a year per team. Multiply that by the 30 teams in the league and you've got roughly $10 million to rent the facilities for each regular reason. That is about 0.25% of the total revenue. Not very much in the grand scheme of things. I don't have facts and figured for other operating expenses but I imagine they all add up to fractions of percentages too. The operating costs of the NHL are not very much considering it's revenue. If it cost the NHL 3 bllion to have a season of hockey, that'd be different. But it doesn't.

When teams lose, the top players are generally held fully accountable. When The Oilers lost in the conference finals in '86, who got the blame? It wasn't Kevin Lowe, Craig McTavish or Mark Messier. Steve Smith, the guy who scored the winning goal on his own net to essentially lose the final game to Calgary wasn't blamed for more than a couple of days. Wayne Gretzky took the burden for that entire organization. I don't remember anyone blaming Peter Picklington, the owner, either.

As a lifetime Toronto Maple Leaf fan i have done more than my share of complaining about this team. Forbes magazine listed the Leafs as the most valuable team in the NHL, and they haven't won a cup in over 40 years. They haven't even been one of the best 16 teams in the league since 2004, when the last lockout happened. A couple weeks ago ESPN ranked them as the worst professional sports franchise in North America. I don't think many people would dispute the fact that the fans and winning take a serious back seat to making money in the eyes of the owners. Not one player on the team today was on the team the last time they made the playoffs, same owners though. As long as the profits are there they don't care about anything else.

Many of the current issues the players have are not even for the multi-gozillionaries like Crosby, Ovechkin, etc. They are largely for the younger players who will likely not have long careers. For the guys who will be dumped after injuries and replaced like a piece of used bubble gum. A teammate of mine from high school moved up the ranks in hockey and eventually earned a spot with the Atlanta Thrashers for a half season, until he got hurt. After he got hurt he was cut and sent on his way. His career as a hockey player was over and it was time to find a new line of work. Same with Brett Lindros, whose career was ended by concussions and the NHL didn't pay for his medical care after he was cut. It's guys like that who stand to benefit the most from the deal the players want. It's not just a game to many of these guys. Half of all people who play in the NHL have careers less than 100 games. 5% of them will play just 1 game and their career is over in the NHL. These are not the guys who make big money, they make the league minimum which is 500k. That would pay off my house and my car, but it is certainly a long way from being rich. Only 4% of players dress for 1000 games.

The owners absolutely exploit players and it requires the entire NHLPA to bring the owners to their knees (and not in the good way) to institute any change that benefits anyone but the owners. The players are responsible for all 4 billion dollars generated each season. As we've seen, without them there is no NHL and no revenue. Their pay and benefits should reflect that.

Your numbers are not correct.

4 billion dollars divided by 30 teams means each team makes 133,333,333 each. Salary cap is half of that and then you have operating expenses.

As for guys not being able to play due to careers ending early, does EA pay a programmer that was in a car accident, lost his hands and can't type? NO. Insurance does. Ask Berard, his insurance policy paid him well for the eye he lost.

When Phoenix declared bankruptcy, their expenses and revenues were released to the public.

Here are real numbers:



According to this....Phoenix generated 58,364,143$ in revenue. But Lost 67,148,136$. Once again revenue is not profit. How about we play this game. As you said, The owners generated 4 billion in revenue. Salary cap is 60 million. That means 1.8 million of the 4 billion goes to the players. They get a little under 50%.....Why is this not fair? And where is the problem? The 50% is of revenue....not profit. Meaning that the owners still have other expenses. So the players take 1.8 billion out of 4 Billion. Leaving the owners with 2.2 billion to pay the rest of their expenses. Then they make a profit. I am sure it costs more then 400,000 (the difference) to run 30 hockey teams. So who is being greedy here? Phoenix spent 85 million. Even if each team spend 80 million. 60 million in salaries, 25 million in operating expenses gives us a total of 85 million in expenses. 30 teams... means out of your 4 billion of "revenue", 2,550,000,000 are expenses. 1,450,000,000 is profit for the entire league. Profit per owner: 48,333,333.

Something else dawned on me. A player making 1/2 a million a year.... Why do we feel sorry for these guys? And as for being exploited, they are the lucky few that play a game for a living. All workers are exploited for their skills...it does not matter if you are a doctor, an accountant or a hockey player.

A 20 year old that plays 4 years in the league will make as much money as someone who has a starting salary of 50,000 at age 20. That person then has to work for 40 years to make that money. Or in an easier way, the hockey player will make as much money as someone working their entire lifetime by the time he is 24.

[maddplotter]

Game on!

Well, looks like the game is coming back. So what will you do?

(1) Cheer
(2) Jeer
(3) or just don't care

[MSanders88]

Last year the NHL generated 4 billion in revenue. Only 1.4 or so went to the players, who hare responsible for every penny of that revenue. Do the owners/administrators deserve 60% of NHL revenue? I don't think so.

In Canada the average private sector wage has gone down roughly 5-10% over the last 20 years. The average owner's wage has increased roughly 800% in that same time frame. We live in a society where the business owners get rich off the efforts and exploitation of the workers. Good on the NHL players for putting their foot down.

It was pretty sad to see last week that a bunch of teams have cut back or laid off administrative employees in order to save money. Owners who already have billions of dollars cut $40,000 jobs in order to save a couple of bucks. The owners are greedy, do not deserve anywhere near what they get, and I am fully behind the players here.

As an NHLPA employee, I have to correct a few things here.

1) "Last year the NHL generated 4 billion in revenue"

Actually, Total revenue by the NHL in 2011-2012 was $3.274B (hence the reason TSN keeps saying 3.3B) - quite a ways from 4B

2) "Only 1.4 or so went to the players"

Actually, the low end of the salary cap last year was $44.2MM, which multiplied by 30 teams exceeds $1.4B. The actual salaries paid to NHL players in 2012-2013 (as verified by the NHLPA) was $1.8B (28% higher than your number and 59% of the 2010-11 revenue numbers)

You can find a rough estimate of the salaries last season (and previous seasons) at websites like capgeek.com and nhmnumbers.com. Obviously, I'm not at liberty to provide the exact values but the information contained within those two sites is with a percent or two of reality.

So, the historical story is that while the CBA sets the current year salary at 57% of the previous year's revenues, in all 7 seasons since the previous lockout, the NHL has paid out more than the required amount (and as a side note, the 57% mark didn't kick in until the 2009-10 season - the percentage was a sliding scale from 54% to 57% based on revenues).

So, now you have owners trying to bring a number down that they have always exceeded.........doesn't make sense to the players.

Now the players understand that not ALL teams have made the same strides in revenue as other teams (4 teams have more than doubled revenue since 2005 while 1 team has only increased their revenue by 17%) but the players feel that the onus is on the owners to share the revenue, not the players. The players believe that doing their best on the ice is the best they can offer.

[Selene]

I think the owners deserve most of the blame, but at this point I could kinda care less. Just excited that Hockey is back
Go Habs go!

[Rantsalot]

...

48 games is not a season .... its a joke. I dont care that hockey is back after all that went down. The main reason that an agreement was made and this is a point that was not supposed to be leaked was that if both sides didnt come to an agreement and canceled the season it wouldve been suicide for the league, quite possibly the end of the NHL. Part of me wants to be happy but I hold too much animosity towards both parties.

I could just imagine if there was no NHL....players would have to find work elsewhere and most likely for less $$$, that is of course if they could find work and as for the owners, sponsors, agents.....oooooh, they dont get that regular cash flow.

Fuck it. Whoever wins the scoring title, rookie of the year, Stanley Cup etc etc are not true winners rather a shadow of a winner.