The hockey lockout continues. My attempts to ignore it and everyone involved with it have failed miserable, as I continue to watch this ongoing train wreck with a morbid fascination. I almost can’t help myself, because this is so unutterably stupid and unnecessary.
There was a significant change in the tone of the lockout this week, and unfortunately, it’s not a positive one. The owners have been continuing their “do what we say or don’t bother” stance on negotiation, and the players made some significant changes to their proposals and presented it to the owners. The owners spent about 15 minutes looking at it, rejected it, and effectively walked out. Again.
As I suggested three weeks ago, this isn’t about finding a compromise both sides can agree on. The owners have made a decision that the players are going to surrender, that there won’t be a deal until the players break and accept what the owners demand. There has been little to no real negotiation, the owners have taken a hard line, and are willing to give up most or all of the season to fracture the players.
The real goal here seems to be to depose Donald Fehr; the owners seem more afraid of a strong and unified players union than they are of losing significant revenue and perhaps the entire season. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post has a very well done article talking about this, having lived through watching the baseball owners fight (and lose) this same battle.
It looks to me that the owners are playing right into Fehr’s hands; rather than fracturing the players as has happened before under Goodenow and Kelly, Fehr seems to have growing support. It’s not unanimous: Roman Hamrlik piped up today and was quickly shot down as not being representative of the players in general. The owners, despite million dollar fine threats for talking out of turn, had their own “leak” pop out when it was reported that Ed Snyder of the Flyers was unhappy with what was going on. That was quickly denied and suppressed, but I have to think that was a carefully planned and deniable shot over Bettman’s bow — Snyder and the Flyers are owned by Comcast who stands to feel a huge amount of pain if the season is lost.
When we talk about Bettman and “the owners”, one thing we need to keep in mind that the negotiation process is in face controlled by a small group of owners led by Jeremy Jacobs — even though there are 30 owners in the league, it only takes 8 owners to make decisions on negotiation issues – if Commissioner Bettman agrees. This lets a small group of the owners who are making good money with their teams to effectively disenfranchise the rest, and push an agenda that suits them, even if it hurts the other owners. The million dollar gag rule makes sure those disenfranchised owners aren’t heard from.
It’s important to note how the two sides are handling this. On the player’s side, Fehr holds regular open discussions and conference calls open to any and all players; players are welcome at negotiating sessions. Players have the ability to comment in public — the only pressure is peer pressure. On the owner’s side, no owner can talk about anything without league approval, and only invited owners are allowed at negotiations. It’s carefully orchestrated to limit the ability of owners not in the ruling group to influence the negotiation, either behind the scenes or through the press. To step out of line risks a million dollar fine.
In my about 20 years of writing and blogging about hockey, I’ve been accused of being pro-team a lot more than I have of being pro-player. In practice, I try to be balanced and call the shots as I see them; my interest in the business side of sports means I see the owner’s side of things more often than fans who don’t care about the business part. In this situation, I find it difficult to find any sympathy or support for what the owners are doing. It sucks.
It sucks and it’s unnecessary. This lockout really comes down to two things: first is the owners fear of Donald Fehr and a plan to try to push the players to the point where they’ll oust him and cut a deal, leaving the player’s association weak and in turmoil; second is an attitude of believing the players are property and not partners. This lockout really seems to be an attempt to rebuild the idea that the owners are in charge and the players will take what the owners want to give them.
NHLPA’s 2nd in command, Steve Fehr summarized their view of things after this latest round of meetings:
Steve Fehr: “We moved a couple of miles, they moved a couple of inches.
I agree completely with that sentiment. In the reports on the player’s conference call after the meetings, the reports make it clear there’s a change of attitude among the players. it’s not towards finding a settlement and giving the owners what they want, it’s about moving towards the idea of decertifying the union.
Decertifying the union is a huge hairy deal. As a quick summary, the player’s association blows itself up and stops existing. This, in turn, throws the whole labor situation into the courts and turns this from a negotiation into a lawyer fight. James Mirtle of the Globe and Mail did a good overview of what this means if it happens. In short form, if the player’s association decertifies, you can kiss the entire season goodbye (unless one side or the other blinks).
Effectively, the owners have had a nuclear weapon pointed at the players this entire time: “do what we tell you, or we shut down the league for a long time and cost you lots of money”. Now, the players have pulled out their nuclear weapon and have told the owners “forget that, we’ll blow it all up first”. Does this sound like insane mutually assured destruction? It is.
But now, it gets serious. both sides have to decide if the other side is bluffing. There will be a period of time (long? short? I have no idea) where both sides are going to see how the other side reacts. The league’s “big red button” is canceling the season; the players is filing the decertification papers and throwing this into the courts.
And right now, what’s going on behind the scenes is the factions within the two camps are trying to figure out what they can do to avoid actually pushing those big red buttons. Can the more moderate owners force the Jacobs group to moderate their position, or wrest control from his faction? Bettman clearly doesn’t think so or he wouldn’t have pushed this hard to this point.
Will the players break rank? This kind of hard line threat to the season puts a strong wedge between a couple of groups of players. The well paid players, the younger players and the franchise stars will do fine no matter what. The marginal players, journeymen and aging players really feel the pain here, because they’re the ones with short careers, not many season left, and smaller, not guaranteed contracts. If you’re Sydney Crosby with endorsements and a 15 year career at millions a season (plus guaranteed bonuses) you can ride this out. If you’re a guy who may only get 3-5 seasons in the league at $900K a year, losing a season (aka 20% of your career earnings) is a cliff you don’t want to jump off.
The owners are depending on those journeyman seeing that cliff and refusing to jump. It has worked in the past. It’s effectively what killed the last two player association heads.
I expect this is going to blow up badly in the owners faces, but time will tell.
My sense right now is that the players are more pissed at how the owners are treating them than they are at the thought of losing a year’s salary. My sense is that Fehr has helped the players see what’s going on and educated them on what the implications will be for any decision they make. Right now they seem fairly strongly behind Fehr and unwilling to back down and give in to the owners.
So right now? We stay at stalemate.
What next? Good question. Lots of questions, no real answers.
Will the factions within the ownership group mobilize and force the Jacobs/Bettman group to moderate their position? Or wrest control from them? Do the owners believe the players will decertify, or that it’s just a bluff?
Will the players decide it’s more important to get a paycheck and cut a deal to the owners demand? Or will they decide they’ve had enough of the owners bullying and push the big red button and decertify?
There are two key points in time, coming between now and probably the end of January. One is where one side or the other decides it can’t risk decertification. If the players choose against it, then the owners win, and ultimately the players settle on the owners term. Or the owners decide the players are serious and cut a deal rather than let it get to decertification. That point will hit sometime between now and Christmas, I think.
If we pass that point without a deal, then the players have chosen the path to decertification. In the time prior to decertifying, and even for a period after, the league can choose to cut a deal; if they play chicken and guess wrong, they lose a lot of leverage if they decide to cut a deal after the paperwork is filed.
Or both sides can dig in and if it moves past that point (decertifying would likely happen in January, and if there’s a deal past that point, it’s likely in the first week or so; after that, both sides have decided to fight it out in the long fight in court).
In and around those two points in time, there will be a lot of public positioning and bickering, but little real movement. Behind the scenes, a lot of informal discussions, but even more than that, within each group there’ll be a lot of discussion as the disagreeing sides work out what to do and who’s in charge.
My hope is that the threat of decertifying and that we now have a big chance at losing the entire season and ending up in an extended court fight gives the more moderate ownership faction that’s currently disenfranchised what it needs to inject itself into this and modify the owner’s hardball stance. I would LOVE to see an owner come out and say “the hell with this, if the union decertifies I’m selling, even though I’ll take a big loss because of this crap”, but I doubt it’ll happen. I do wish I had some sense that the owners that are unhappy with this are pushing to make changes, but the gag order has been very successful to date.
My guess is that sanity won’t happen until just before the players follow through with decertifying. If then. I expect the owners to wait until the last moment here. And I do expect the players to agree to move forward on decertification. And this means that I expect this all to drag out into January. And yes, that means that we’re now looking at at best a partial (30-35 game) season.
My fear is that the hard-line owners will maintain control here and this will all blow up in a big, bad mess because there are egos in control on the owner side that seem willing to do vast damage to the game and its finances rather than let the players have some say in things. If this is true, they learned the lessons well of their predecessors in baseball — but seem to have missed the chapter explaining how that all ended.
And however this ends, it will be the defining moment of Gary Bettman’s legacy as commissioner. And if I were him, I’d be scared crapless about that, because right now, the players don’t seem to be interested in following the plan, and that’s leading this league further towards when those big red buttons get pushed. And once that happens, anything else that happened during Bettman’s tenure will be forgotten.
Our big hope here is that the moderate owners will organize and reshape how the league is managing this lockout. So far, I’m not seeing it, but this league is far beyond the need to get leadership shifted from folks like Jacobs. The day of treating players as assets and property is past. This lockout is about trying to hold on to that past, pure and simple. And ultimately, I think that’s why it’s going to fail. The only question is how much of a mess the owners are willing to create along the way.
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at And in hockey, the word of the day is decertification. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.