Foul Territory
A sports blog with no specific focus, though I like wrestling and baseball
2.10.2005
lf the NHL falls in the woods.....
There has been some news today about the NHL labor dispute, so I thought I'd write a little bit about labor troubles in professional sports.
I think professional athletics are one of the few places where the general consensus in the public is sympathy with management. I could be wrong about this for any given labor dispute, but I think that sports team owners are more likely to have the public on their side during a labor dispute than the owner of the local steel mill trying to get a collective bargaining agreement signed or the CEO of a national airline trying to extract wage concessions from its pilots, mechanics, or flight attendants. I think the main reason that professional athletes get so much less slack in the eye of the casual observer is the same reason it always is: money. To your average person who watches SportsCenter, reads the morning paper, and occasionally turns on sports talk radio, the amount of money taken in by these players is staggering. The wealth of the owners is rarely mentioned, unless someone is talking about Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who became very very rich at a fairly young age. Therefore, it seems like these players for are rich enough, gosh darnit, are petty and out of touch with reality. What I think a lot of people know in the back of their minds, yet don't think about too often is how the owners have way more money than individual players. They have to. That's how they got to own a professional sports team worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Few people know how much Arte Moreno or Jeffrey Lurie is worth, but lots of people can tell you all about Alex Rodriguez and his $252 million salary or how Roger Clemens avoided arbitration by agreeing to the largest one year contract in baseball history at $18 million. This is the sort of information that is all over the news, so when players strike or the owners lock them out, it's hard for the manager at the local Kinko's to get on the same bandwagon as hockey players who have an average annual salary of $1.3 million, especially without having the context of the net worth of the group they are fighting put in the spotlight.
Some discerning fans, media, and bloggers, though, have done some work to dissipate the backlash against professional athletes and their high salaries. It's true that the players can only make as much money as at least one team is willing to pay. The players are not holding the owners hostage with contract demands, as an owner can choose to let a player walk as easily as the same player can refuse a contract offer. Now, there are times in a labor dispute where the players are right, and there are times when the owners are right. This is why they have the negotiations, so that each side can gain concessions from the other so that both sides can live with the arrangement that is reached. People are starting to understand that player salaries don't skyrocket as a matter of course, they skyrocket because of competition for scare resources. The scarcer the resource, the more someone is willing to pay. That's why Barry Bonds is worth a lot more than me to the San Francisco Giants.
This brings me to the current labor dispute between the NHL Players Association and the team owners. It is expected that the season will be officially canceled during this coming weekend. As widely publicized, the owners want "cost certainty," which is code for a salary cap, and the players are having none of it. This has caused the death knell to sounds on this season, and possibly next, depending on how hard each side wants it to be. Eventually, they may end up with replacement players like what happened in the NFL and almost happened after the 1994 MLB strike. This is the sort of thing that can result in the owners getting their way as players realize they need to play so they can get paid. However, I'm not sure if this will work as well as it did in football or baseball. This is mainly because there are other options for NHL players to play professional hockey. Canada has a lot of minor professional hockey leagues, and there are countless other spread throughout Europe. The big money is still in the NHL, but at least there are options, which there really aren't for baseball and football.
I'm not really sure what will happen here. Will the NHL come back in its present form? Hard to say, though I can say that in the year and a half I've lived in Raleigh, I've never once heard someone talk about the Hurricanes, and they made the Stanley Cup finals in 2001. There is the possibility that the players will eventually come back and accept some sort of cap, or the league will become totally restructured. I would be very accepting if the league announced that it realizes it expanded into too many Sun Belt states and would be contracting to a much smaller league with teams only in places that have proved to be willing and able to support a professional hockey team. I really don't know what will happen. I guess it depends who blinks first, or who the NLRB sides with in the possible governmental intervention. In this specific dispute, it's hard for me to not side with the players, especially after they gave a long list of concessions they were willing to make, and the owner's rejection sounds an awful lot like them deciding that they just can't control themselves and need a salary cap to keep them from setting fire to a big pile of money. I'll admit I don't know all the details, but it seems like the owners should be able to control their own checkbooks. As I said, it will be interesting to see how it all turns out, even for a non-fan like myself.
I think professional athletics are one of the few places where the general consensus in the public is sympathy with management. I could be wrong about this for any given labor dispute, but I think that sports team owners are more likely to have the public on their side during a labor dispute than the owner of the local steel mill trying to get a collective bargaining agreement signed or the CEO of a national airline trying to extract wage concessions from its pilots, mechanics, or flight attendants. I think the main reason that professional athletes get so much less slack in the eye of the casual observer is the same reason it always is: money. To your average person who watches SportsCenter, reads the morning paper, and occasionally turns on sports talk radio, the amount of money taken in by these players is staggering. The wealth of the owners is rarely mentioned, unless someone is talking about Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who became very very rich at a fairly young age. Therefore, it seems like these players for are rich enough, gosh darnit, are petty and out of touch with reality. What I think a lot of people know in the back of their minds, yet don't think about too often is how the owners have way more money than individual players. They have to. That's how they got to own a professional sports team worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Few people know how much Arte Moreno or Jeffrey Lurie is worth, but lots of people can tell you all about Alex Rodriguez and his $252 million salary or how Roger Clemens avoided arbitration by agreeing to the largest one year contract in baseball history at $18 million. This is the sort of information that is all over the news, so when players strike or the owners lock them out, it's hard for the manager at the local Kinko's to get on the same bandwagon as hockey players who have an average annual salary of $1.3 million, especially without having the context of the net worth of the group they are fighting put in the spotlight.
Some discerning fans, media, and bloggers, though, have done some work to dissipate the backlash against professional athletes and their high salaries. It's true that the players can only make as much money as at least one team is willing to pay. The players are not holding the owners hostage with contract demands, as an owner can choose to let a player walk as easily as the same player can refuse a contract offer. Now, there are times in a labor dispute where the players are right, and there are times when the owners are right. This is why they have the negotiations, so that each side can gain concessions from the other so that both sides can live with the arrangement that is reached. People are starting to understand that player salaries don't skyrocket as a matter of course, they skyrocket because of competition for scare resources. The scarcer the resource, the more someone is willing to pay. That's why Barry Bonds is worth a lot more than me to the San Francisco Giants.
This brings me to the current labor dispute between the NHL Players Association and the team owners. It is expected that the season will be officially canceled during this coming weekend. As widely publicized, the owners want "cost certainty," which is code for a salary cap, and the players are having none of it. This has caused the death knell to sounds on this season, and possibly next, depending on how hard each side wants it to be. Eventually, they may end up with replacement players like what happened in the NFL and almost happened after the 1994 MLB strike. This is the sort of thing that can result in the owners getting their way as players realize they need to play so they can get paid. However, I'm not sure if this will work as well as it did in football or baseball. This is mainly because there are other options for NHL players to play professional hockey. Canada has a lot of minor professional hockey leagues, and there are countless other spread throughout Europe. The big money is still in the NHL, but at least there are options, which there really aren't for baseball and football.
I'm not really sure what will happen here. Will the NHL come back in its present form? Hard to say, though I can say that in the year and a half I've lived in Raleigh, I've never once heard someone talk about the Hurricanes, and they made the Stanley Cup finals in 2001. There is the possibility that the players will eventually come back and accept some sort of cap, or the league will become totally restructured. I would be very accepting if the league announced that it realizes it expanded into too many Sun Belt states and would be contracting to a much smaller league with teams only in places that have proved to be willing and able to support a professional hockey team. I really don't know what will happen. I guess it depends who blinks first, or who the NLRB sides with in the possible governmental intervention. In this specific dispute, it's hard for me to not side with the players, especially after they gave a long list of concessions they were willing to make, and the owner's rejection sounds an awful lot like them deciding that they just can't control themselves and need a salary cap to keep them from setting fire to a big pile of money. I'll admit I don't know all the details, but it seems like the owners should be able to control their own checkbooks. As I said, it will be interesting to see how it all turns out, even for a non-fan like myself.
Andy, 9:41 PM
