It’s not often I have the opportunity to link to the New York Post, but this article pretty much nails what is coming: another NHL work stoppage, the third since I started grad school – and every one of them an ownership lockout bent on raking money back from the players. In this case, a unilateral 24% giveback on player contracts, with no justification beyond “we want that money back.” And this after a similar unilateral cut as part of the deal to bring hockey back the last time things went south.
This is hardly unexpected. Hockey owners, by and large, are swine and scum – they think of the players as a pack of Saskatoon wheat-shuckers and impoverished Warsaw Pact refugees, all of whom should be grateful for the opportunity to make $2.13 an hour to play a game for a living. Which is more or less par for the course for most sports owners. But the problem for the NHL is that they don’t have nearly the popular demand of the other big North American sports. The NFL and NFLPA would never risk losing a season – they freaked out after losing a single utterly worthless and meaningless exhibition game in 2011. MLB is still gun-shy after the apocalypse of 1994 and loss of the World Series. Even the NBA and its players did a deal eventually, because they saw the writing on the wall. But the NHL owners – with the worst TV deal of any league, with two major losses of game time since 1995, with the last few years played under the very collective bargaining agreement they extorted from the players last time out – are somehow convinced that they can get away with it.
Except they can’t. At. All. Because hockey is of tertiary interest at best in the United States. Ownership has only itself to blame – for handing out expansion franchises and allowing moves to Sun Belt towns with no business having a hockey team (looking at you, Atlanta-Phoenix-Nashville), for decade-long contracts that aggregate to billions of dollars in future obligation, for spurning ESPN and banking themselves on NBC Sports as their sole national outlet. And if they slough off a season, nobody will care – or at the very least, not enough people will care to force the issue.
The problem is, this is of a piece with the wider world these days. Just look at things like the Ryan budget’s approach to Medicare for anyone who won’t turn 65 within the next fifteen years. “Welp, sorry, know you paid taxes and everything, you held up your end of the deal, but we can’t afford to hold up our end anymore so don’t be greedy and ask for what we actually agreed on – take what we give you and be grateful.” Look at Caterpillar, profitable for six years, demanding salary givebacks just because they can. Look at things like government pensions, paid into for decades and now being arbitrarily sandbagged as a quick way to balance the books.
Fuck. That.
This shit has to be nipped in the bud with a quickness. Oh the deal isn’t working for you anymore? Well guess what, you don’t get to walk away from the deal. Contracts shouldn’t become unenforceable just because the side with more money and lawyers didn’t feel like meeting their obligations. The business isn’t making money and you want to get out from under your promises? Shut it down and make good on your obligations, and no, you don’t get a fat severance bundle to parachute yourself out. Stupid should hurt. If Ed Earl Brown has to show some “individual responsibility” when his mortgage goes tits-up and his job gets outsourced, why exactly shouldn’t the NHL owners pay the price for their complete inability to run a sports league?
As ever: buy the ticket, take the ride.