King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The NHL -- remember the NHL? -- is about to ditch the whole season because team owners can't abide the players giving back a quarter of their salaries.

Dec. 14, 2004 | The NHL appears to be on the verge of exploding any hope for saving the 2004-05 season, the first two months of which have been wiped out by a lockout of the players by the team owners. The players association made a surprising offer last week, the highlight of which was a proposed across-the-board 24 percent pay cut.

Union representatives and league officials were to meet Tuesday afternoon in Toronto, where the league was expected to reject the offer and continue to insist on what it calls "cost certainty," which means a hard salary cap that would be a percentage of league revenues. The union has said it won't negotiate on a hard cap, mostly because it wisely doesn't believe the league tells the truth about revenue, which in the sports biz is easy to hide.

TSN, a Canadian sports network, got its hands on a memo to the teams written by NHL executive vice president Bill Daly and dated Sunday.

"We believe the union's offer was more about trying to unify the players and ensure player solidarity with what they would perceive as a very substantial proposal than it was about making a good-faith effort to reach agreement with us," Daly wrote.

Yeah, that sounds right. I've been a union member, I've been on strike. If my union leaders had said they were going to try to end the impasse by proposing an across-the-board 24 percent pay cut, that would have been a terrific way to unify the membership and ensure solidarity. We'd have been as one as we threw them under a streetcar.

But Daly's correct that the union surely didn't think its offer would result in an agreement with the owners, because the union knows the owners won't budge. There's no such thing as a "good-faith effort" the union could make to reach an agreement other than simply capitulating.

Aside from the 24 percent cut, there were concessions about arbitration and entry-level pay scales. There's a luxury tax that would kick in when a team's payroll tops $45 million.

Last year 12 of the 30 teams had a payroll above $45 million, according to USA Today's salary database. After 24 percent rollbacks, seven teams would be over that figure based on their 2003-04 payrolls: Detroit, the New York Rangers, Dallas, Philadelphia, Colorado, Toronto and St. Louis. That reads like a salary upper crust, all right.

The highest-paying teams below the cutoff, Los Angeles and Anaheim, would be more than $4 million below it, in danger of crossing the line, but only if they bump their payrolls by more than 9 percent. Given the sport's economics, raising pay by 9 percent makes no sense at all. Given the track record of NHL owners in making smart business decisions -- especially when they have windfall cash to play with, as they did every time the league grew and collected one-time expansion fees -- raising pay by 9 percent is practically a foregone conclusion.

This is the nut of the matter: NHL owners are like idiot children. They cannot be trusted with money, so they have to have a spending limit at the player store. They deserve credit for realizing what boobs they are, but for not much else, other than driving a perfectly good professional sports league into the ditch of history.

Next page: Owners to players: You can't just give us back our money, we'll spend it on candy