The Ticking Clock

January 14th might just another day upcoming in our hurried, busy lives that looms 8 days away on the calendar. But odds are it will have major significance and far-reaching implications which will be incalculable for days, months -- even years -- to follow. January 14th is the date the National Hockey League management (ie Commissioner Gary Bettman and the owners of the league's 30 teams) have chosen to meet to, ostensibly, officially cancel the entire 2004-05 NHL season. Aside from the fact that this -- the impending cancellation of an entire season due to "work stoppage" -- is unprecendented, the fact that this doesn't seem too important to too many people seems to me to be among the most significant factors of this situation in the first place.

Today marks Lockout Day 114 since, on September 15th at 12:01AM, the NHL barred its players from league play. Being a New York Ranger fan (seeing them win the cup in 1994 is and always be indelibly inked in my mind), I'm not missing much, as the Rangers have been in the tank, largely speaking, since the 1997 season. In fact, the high point, if I can even call it that without shaking my head, since the Rangers won the 1994 Cup was Wayne Gretzky's retirement. Seeing and experiencing the immense and incredibly pure, genuine emotion surrounding "The Great One" leaving the game of hockey was stirring (my entire team and I were gathered at my apartment, all of us bawling like babies, our eyes glued to the television). The current situation surrounding the game of hockey, however, is the complete antithesis of what Gretzky was about: he took the game of hockey, and the individual player's role therein, and brought it to a new level. The lockout that threatens the 2004-05 season, conversely, takes the game, and money's role therein, and brings out its most base, greedy, corrupt aspects, and shines it up, polishes it, and places it on a pile of manure in the middle of a spotlight on the ice for all to see.

In other words, this most recent development has marred the game, perhaps irretrievably.

The specifics, as I've tried to explain them to people who aren't familiar, are basically as follows: the players want to be able to attain whatever salary any owner is willing/able to pay them. Makes sense. The owners are increasingly unable to profit from ownership of a team because the NHL is not nearly as popular as are the other major US sports (baseball, football and basketball). Therefore, since the NHL TV contracts are puny compared to the TV contracts tied into the aforementioned sports, the NHL teams (ie owners) can't pay their players the same kinds of salaries that players in other sports have attained. The problem is excaberated by two issues: first, there are several teams who have endless resources with which to pay and attract players (the New York Rangers are as deep-pocketed as are the New York Yankees); second, being that hockey is a Canadian sport, the six remaining Canadian franchises (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton & Vancouver) can't compete equally because the Canadian dollar is worth about $0.60 for each American dollar. Plenty of NHL players are Canadian, but they're not stupid: if they can earn $5,000,000 American dollars annually as compared with that same amount of Canadian dollars, they're relocating South of the border and they're doing it without hesitation.

Which brings us to the crux of the dispute: because the NHL team owners are losing money, they cannot afford to continue paying exorbitant salaries, but if they refuse to pay players what some other teams are willing to, then they'll be unable to compete because the players who can command the highest salaries will, by default, go to other teams. And an unlevel playing field is unfair and noncompetitive and makes for shitty product, at least when it comes to sports. So the owners, who claim they lose more when the league is playing then when the players are locked out, are unwilling to continue at the status quo. The Collective Bargaining Agreement is the agreement that was established between the NHLPA (the hockey players' union) and the owners, which essentially outlines the terms of rights and regulations which govern the relationship between the owners and the players. The CBA expired on September 15th, and along came the lockout.

The players claim the owners are fibbing and fudging their books/figures to cast a negative light on the exorbitancy of player salaries. In addition, they made an offer (counter-offer?) to the owners which acknowledged the exorbitancy and allowed for an across-the-board cut of salaries, which, depending on to whom you speak, will mean a savings of some $20 million dollars over the next several years. But the owners refused to accept the offer, mostly because the salary "rollback" solely implies the temporary scaling back of the salaries; what happens when a free agent next hits the market? The salaries will escalate yet again, which will return the two parties either to the bargaining table or to the unemployment lines.

The owners suggested a "hard cap" -- in other words, a salary cap set equally for each team, so even teams with deep pockets (the bigger market teams like the Rangers, the Los Angeles Kings, the Toronto Maple Leafs, etc.) are kept within range of the small, less resource-laden teams. Gary Bettman, the NHL Commissioner, refers to it as "cost certainty." The players rejected it outright, on several occasions, and refuse to move forward until the owners find another way to move the two sides closer.

So that's where we are. The owners won't budge from their requirement for some sort of salary cap, and the players won't even consider discussing it. The numbers aren't that far off -- we're not talking more than $20 million either way, which, in the overall scheme of things, isn't a lot -- but the two sides aren't talking and they aren't even expecting to talk.

So 14 days from now, the NHL owners will meet and likely cancel the season. If that indeed happens, then a pretty fair question one can ask is: now what?

Never before has a professional sport in North America lost an entire season to a work stoppage, because in almost all "near misses," the commissioner of the sport, whether it was football, baseball, basketball or hockey, established a deadline, ie a "drop-dead date," beyond which the season couldn't continue. And for all prior work stoppages, the players and owners would always manage to hammer something out a few hours before that deadline expired, and play resumed. Not in this case.

There's going to be a non-hockey season. For anyone who loves the game, that is a pretty incredible statement. More importantly, if this season is cancelled, who is to say there will be a season next year? And if not, then what do we as hockey fans really need an NHL for in the first place?

As the lockout loomed, a lot of professional teams in Europe offered locked-out NHL players the opportunity to play in their leagues. So players who were teammates in Tampa Bay, New York, Los Angeles, Colorado, Columbus, Montreal and elsewhere are now teammates or opponents in Russia, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Finland and other countries which host professional teams. It's a bit strange to see Peter Forsberg wearing a sweater that doesn't bear the Colorado Avalanche logos, or to see Jaromir Jagr not playing for $20 million annually. But what isn't strange is that, as much as I want to see the NHL return, I really don't miss it all that much.

I think that the main reason I'm no longer going through "hockey withdrawal" is varied: aside from the fact that I have a lot less time on my hands these days, between my other half, work and being out in NYC, the Rangers, as I indicated above, really have been lousy for awhile, so it's sort of like being disappointed I can't watch my team win 28 games a year (they play 82). On top of that, I think the players are extraordinarily selfish. Guys who are paid these ridiculous sums of money spew the same mantra that their brethren in the NBA and the NFL and Major League Baseball spew: we should be able to earn whatever the owners are willing to pay us. Except what they are failing to realize is that there are very few teams that can afford to keep upping the ante, and while baseball and hockey are ailing, sports with a salary cap are thriving, as are its athletes. If hockey were able to keep its players from bouncing from team to team like players in the NFL do, I think it would work, and many people observing this situation from a distance think similarly.

I'm hopeful this gets resolved before the 14th and there is a season, and I am looking forward to the day the NHL gets back on the ice. But of the hundreds of games that have already been cancelled (including the 2005 All-Star game), what strikes me as interesting is that there are a lot -- A LOT -- of people that this stoppage affects. It affects the vendors at arenas around the country; it affects people who cater to these crowds prior to and after games, ie bars, restaurants, etc. And while very few are crying about, beer sales have dwindled as Molson and other Canadian breweries have had to cut waaaaaay back on their production, all because a bunch of guys stopped skating around a puck. Above and beyond the economic effects, however, is the "out of sight, out of mind" principle. Hockey is and has always been a relative "fourth wheel" when it comes to American sports culture: whereas in Canadia, our northern neighbor, there is Hockey Night in Canada, and Wayne Gretzky's Retirement in Canada was regarded as a black day among black days. It was a national event -- grandmothers and children and everyone in between stopped their lives for the afternoon and watched pre-game press conferences, the pre-game skate-arounds, the in-game "Gretzky Watch" -- everything was Big News. In this country, no one really cared, aside from hockey fans and serious sports fans, who, even though weren't very much into hockey, paid attention simply because Wayne Gretzky, like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, transcend their invididual sport. What is most disconcerting about this is that kids who might have been captivated by the game of hockey and who might have been exposed to it this year by parents looking to keep their kids entertained by something other than SpongeBob are now watching (and thinking about) something else.

Joe Dimaggio, the former New York Yankee who was as respected an athlete as there are, once was asked why he tried so hard, game after game, even if his team was losing. His answer was simple: "Because somewhere in the crowd might be a child or an adult who's never seen me play, and I wouldn't want to disappoint them." Within the last year or two, someone asked Derek Jeter a similar question about what drives him to work so hard, game after game, day in, day out, and he echoed Dimaggio's sentiments. Their comments impressed me a lot, because you never do get a second chance to make a first impression.

Especially if your sport is no longer viable because of a squabble over millions of dollars.

Little Mikey and Sammy aren't going to be asking why they aren't playing hockey this year, or even perhaps next year -- they won't care. And when -- or if -- the NHL returns to the ice, there will be a nation-full of kids growing up who feel the same way. So in essence, a sport that needs to recruit every single possible fan it can to maintain its viability in an ever-shrinking market is, in actuality, making an excellent case why it should just go away and not return.

The game is too good to be mottled with this kind of affectation, and it's a shame that these players, in a rush to grab a few extra million before they retire, have failed to protect the longevity of the game in the process. Many players would go on record and advise that they feel this action is right because it protects future players from being taken advantage of by owners. Yet they've stolen the pure, honest, genuine heart of the game by placing a dollar sign above it, and they've threatened its existence in this country, at the very least. So, despite knowing that hockey was not quite considered a major sport, they plowed ahead for the sake of "future"dollars. And disregarded the fact that they might be bankrupting, or eliminating, the game entirely.

No one wonder no one seems to care. If the players, the ones who are paid to care the most, don't, why should we?

Good question.