A Canadian NHL Commissioner Would Bring Back The Quebec Nordiques.
Scrap the Cap - Buy A Cup. How The NHL Players Union Broke and Owners Profit.
Hockey players are the musicians of bad contracts. Nobody takes a bad deal like a musician. Ask one. Every song ever - for nothing. Nice business plan. The stories of NHL owners and management co-opting and underpaying NHL hockey players are legendary, especially the big Canadian stars, well into the 1990’s. The Orr and Eagleson story alone is enough. But there are volumes written about the northern boys who just wanted to play the game and the businessmen and grifters who ripped them off. The Gordie Howe story is shocking. These books line the shelves of a thrift mart near you. A Christmas gift to dad from 20 years ago. Sports takes up too much of our culture, these days. But it’s a few days after new years and there’s a blizzard and the world juniors play tonight. So why not.
A young Connor McDavid makes what compared to an old Lebron James? Or Kirk Cousins? Kirk who? 1/5th less?
Watching footage of Gretzky in his Oilers days, one big thing pops out, the boards are white. No ads. Fast forward to today and AI superimposes gambling ads by region.
Nowadays the guard rails are gone and the money flows, except if you’re an NHL hockey star. You make less than an NBA bench player. In a world of billionaire owners, with NHL franchises worth billions and billions more, the NHL has a hard salary cap of 80 million. What percentage of franchise value to salary is that? Who signed that deal? Maybe 15 years ago NHL owners might have been able to tell you that there weren’t enough revenue streams to compete with the other big pro sports, but now, Rogers owns every pro sports team in Toronto, of which the Maple Leafs are the crown jewel and Mitch Marner makes something compared to a hack middle reliever on the Blue Jays. Same owner. Times change boys, with a new NHL salary deal coming, time to wake up and learn your history.
For all the anti-union, free market posturing of some US markets, pro athletes and now College athletes are doing quite well by their American unions. Pro Baseball, Basketball and Football all have hybrid/luxury tax systems that allows big markets to spend big money on player salaries and small markets to compete through revenue sharing. Communists! Yet, in an age where every team has a billionaire owner and billion dollar franchises are the norm, market size is relative to what petty cash owners feel like spending on players salaries that season. The Dodgers are signed into a billion dollars of salary, on just 4 pitchers.
If the New York Yankees or LA Lakers would like to buy a championship team in free agency, they can. The Maple Leafs, easily comparative in their own market, can’t. Why, because 20 years ago the players union folded under the weight of the owners and their sky is falling threats. It’s a long story for another article. For now, look it up. The world has changed and we now find ourselves here: A young Connor McDavid makes what compared to an old Lebron James? Or Kirk Cousins? Kirk who? 1/5th less? Don’t tell us that the revenue isn’t there. You’d have to be blind to not see the advertising, merchandizing and gambling revenue jammed down your throat. Where do you not see someone wearing a Leafs hat? This isn’t even about ticket sales, as outrageous as they are in Canadian markets, which is the proof in the pudding. Ticket sales are the bait and switch owners tell you about franchise revenues. The NHL is not a gate league. That’s all gravy and greed.
Toronto Maple Leaf fans might be the biggest suckers in this hard salary cap system.
NHL salaries are now such an embarrassingly small percentage of team values in all NHL markets, one wonders why players don’t just form their own Canadian league. Lord Stanley was the Governor General of Canada, after all. The 7 Canadian NHL teams provide an outsized amount of revenue compared to the 25 other US markets. It’s the US owners that profit from a system that underpays players, to the detriment of Canadian fans, in a league where 50 percent of the players are Canadian. Canadians generate their own massive sports revenues yet can’t pay their own players market value.
In a country where french immersion is the ‘wink wink’ of uppity schoolyard moms and a Nordiques sweater gets you a big high five in every province, how long would it take a Canadian NHL Commissioner to give the Quebec Nordiques back to Quebec City? It’s a no brainer. QC already has a state of the art arena, the fan base and a world class regional rivalry with the Habs. This is Cubs vs. Cardinals stuff. How much merch would the Nordiques sell in the first week…were talking Tim Hortons line ups. Every Canadian hockey fan knows damn well the heart of Quebec deserves an NHL team. It’s like pulling the Cardinals out of St Louis and telling the American midwest to suck it.
The US NHL owners are the ones who don’t want the Nordiques to come to town. Selling tickets to a game of shinny in the desert would be easier. But that’s not the market sports lives in anymore, especially hockey in Canada. Hockey is big, big, big money in Canada. Go to a local rink and price the sticks. Brad Marchand was one of the few NHL players to call out the debacle in Arizona, asking how much revenue the players were loosing propping up the fetish of a failed franchise, for Gary Bettman and his cabal of US owners. Canada should have at least 3 more NHL teams for the revenue they generate.
Toronto Maple Leaf fans might be the biggest suckers in this hard salary cap system. The value of the franchise, the loyalty of the fanbase, the revenues generated, and the Leafs can’t pay players at market value like the Yankees. The Leafs are trapped in the hard cap. Or the fans and players at least, it’s doubtful Rogers and the rest of the owners mind paying the hockey players less. 300 million or more for Vladimir, bread crumbs for Marner. Wake up Leaf fans. But that’s true for all the Canadian teams these days. We have the market, give us our players back. Canadian fans should have the players backs in negotiations and the Canadian players owe it to the fans to stay unified. Canadians already support the product and pay top dollar for it. It’s a new era, players shouldn’t let the owners’ old boys club hold them back. Lets hope we all remember that when they name another stadium the Rogers…….and the Edmonton Oilers lose the Stanley Cup to the Florida Panthers.
Let’s bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada - in solidarity.
Scrap The Cap - Buy A Cup
