If the puck never dropped, would anyone notice? And if they noticed, would anyone care?
Eventually, sports fans will come to the realization that the National Hockey League is now working on its second month of a lockout that threatens to endanger the 2004-05 season. But for now, with the excitement of the baseball playoffs headlined by the Red Sox' historic playoff run, it is no wonder that hardly anyone has noticed the relative silence that has fallen over the FleetCenter ice.
Next week, however, baseball will go into hibernation for another cold Boston winter. While a Red Sox World Series win may be enough to tide Boston fans over until spring training, the NHL lockout will very soon become more visible to fans across the country. An extended squabble between the team owners and the NHL Players' Association seems inevitable, but with each passing day it creeps closer to permanently crippling the sport.
When NHL commissioner Gary Bettman officially announced that which had long been a foregone conclusion on Sept. 15, he cited a cavernous divide in negotiations between the owners and players to reach an accord on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement as the cause for the lockout.
In recent years, the gap between wealthy teams in large markets, such as the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings, and poorer teams in smaller markets, such as the Pittsburgh Penguins and Nashville Predators, has risen to a dangerous level.
In the 2003-04 season, the Red Wings had the highest team salary at $77.8 million. The Rangers were second at $76.5 million. Conversely, the Predators had a team salary of $21.9 million, while the Penguins paid its players $23.4 million. Thus, one of the owners' goals is to eliminate this divide and "level the playing field," giving each team the chance to compete against other teams in a similar salary range.
While this is an important issue, the major stumbling block for the owners is that many have been operating at a loss for some time, actually losing money on a season-by-season basis. To remedy this, the owners have proposed establishing a strict salary cap at $32 million. This represents a 58.9 percent cut of what the Red Wings' shelled out in 2003-04, and a 28 percent drop from even the league's average team salary of $44 million.
Additionally, such a cap would result in the need for the end of guaranteed contracts, as teams would need to be able to cut underperforming players making too much money to abide by the salary cap and still be competitive.
Not surprisingly, the players, who stand to lose not only $12 million on average in salary per team from such a "hard cap" but also the comfort of guaranteed contracts, have scoffed at the owners' proposal. The NHLPA has countered with a reduction of current salaries by five percent, trimming rookie salaries, or even establishing a luxury-tax system similar to the one imposed by Major League Baseball, all less drastic measures in addressing the league's financial woes.
Though the owners' demands seem daunting, if not completely unrealistic, they have not budged from their position and show no signs of compromising in the near future. From a business standpoint, the owners have no incentive to compromise. The NHL released the findings of a study last season that showed $273 million in losses on players' salaries of around $2 billion. Relatively speaking, the owners are making money on the lockout by not losing it.
This reality to which the owners are holding is short-sighted, however. With college football, baseball, and the NFL in full swing, the NHL is not being held accountable for its current work stoppage. But when the lockout takes center stage, the public backlash could rival that of the 1994 Major League Baseball Players' Association strike. It took years for fans to forgive baseball for its apparent greed that resulted in the cancellation of the World Series, a reaction that cost the sport millions of dollars in revenue and threatened to decimate the sport.
Though baseball recovered, it is very possible that hockey, given a similar occurrence, will not be so lucky. The Stanley Cup finals have never been cancelled due to a strike or lockout, and there is no telling what effect such a scenario would have on its already-thinning fan base. Potential disaster was averted as the last NHL work stoppage (in the 1994-95 season) ended with an accord establishing a 50-game, shortened season with a Stanley Cup winner.
The last time the NHL cancelled its championship was in 1919 due to World War I. With every day that goes by - 43 days of work have been missed since the Collective Bargaining Agreement expired at midnight on Sept. 16 - the NHL creeps closer to exactly that happening.
Canadian business has already felt the crunch of the lockout, as bars and restaurants are empty with no games to show. The effect in the United States is likely to be less pronounced, as the perpetual stream of entertainment will go on without the sport.
But this is far worse than just the Canadian predicament. If the NHL does not begin to play soon, people will notice its absence and find something to take its place. When the league finally does return, it risks the chance that nobody will care. America is a land of the perpetual sports season, and hockey's void will be filled. The costs of that occurrence for both the owners and the players are immeasurable.
