Owners of major market teams went all George Steinbrenner with their checkbooks. Players, whose careers are intense but often quite short, pushed the envelope on salary as far as they could.
The problem is that the underlying fan base for hockey in those major league markets will not support either the owners’ largesse or the players’ greed.
Players hate the word “greed” when discussing their salaries. After all, it seems so “greedy.” Yet they stood there, like children at the candy counter, arms outstretched, not caring where the money comes from as long as they get their taste.
Still, you can hardly blame the athletes: Owners have exercised all of the impulse control of a drunken businessman with a wad of twenties at a strip club. Caught up in the superstar salary syndrome, owners have bought big ticket players to aid in playoff runs. A few teams in particular overheated their own economics. Collectively the owners have inked checks to bring them near the point of ruin. They have no one else to blame.
Yet there will be plenty of blame to go around, as the Hatfields and McCoys of hockey continue to slug it out. Even Jeb and Daisy (Owner/Players Gretzky and Lemieux) couldn’t patch up the differences between the feuding families of the hockey dogpatch.
Ending this labor dispute still won’t solve the bigger problem that has brought the sport of hockey to its knees.
Serving the Almighty Tube
Television is hockey’s biggest problem.
In the modern world it is the fountainhead of money which hockey approaches with a battered tin cup full of holes.
Owners and players alike assumed that they would enjoy the lift from television that has propelled revenue of other major sports into the stratosphere.
Today, fans whose butts are parked at an arena are really window dressing. Basketball teams can charge outrageous prices for the few ducats that exist for each game because it’s a drop in the bucket relative to pay per view television, advertising revenue, merchandising, and other spin offs. You don't want to come see Shaq at the American Airlines arena? Catch him on our freebies, or pick up his games on pay-per-view.
It’s no secret that hockey doesn’t televise well. The puck moves with the velocity of a baseball, without baseball’s single focus line from pitcher to home plate. It darts across the rink rapidly, deftly defying the cameras that easily follow footballs, basketballs, and even golf balls.
The sport, for better or worse, is heavily defensive. Traps are common. Action takes place simultaneously in two, three or four areas of the rink, some of which is critical to the goal but may not involve the puck.
It’s great for fans at the game who watch live at the arena because there is always action in front of them. That action is largely lost on the television cameras, which mostly still focus on one line of action around the puck.
While the tube remains hockey's big challenge in its current revenue model, its other problem is trying to lure people who aren't hockey fanatics to the rink and the tube. You can't get the pay-per if you don't have the view.
The Non-Casual Fan
Most sports have been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by tapping into fans who may come to one to four games, and might watch a handful of games on television.
Hockey Fails the “SSS” Test
Three “S”s bring in new fans: Starpower, Scoring, and Setting records.
The NHL has done a lousy job of marketing its players to all but core fans. The Great One was the last player to really get that kind of star treatment. While rightly deserved, the league needs other players whose first, last or nickname can strike a chord of recognition with people who don’t know much about hockey. Cynics point out that, with a collective bargaining agreement pending, the league had no incentive to invent stars. To get fans back, though, and to climb over NASCAR into the number four sport slot, they will need to make a big marketing push to create superstars with household names.
Scoring is a problem for hockey players (At least on the ice). Hockey is low scoring, with defensive traps that keep the puck away from the goal. Casual fans want more action, and more goals.
Other sports abound in records. In baseball, there’s a celebration for the most home runs hit on the third Saturday of a month with an R in it. People become fans, then fanatics, by remembering achievements great and small. They share them with friends. Their enthusiasm brings in more casual fans, and turns them hard core.
Hockey has many distinctions. Few, if any are played up enough to excite anyone other than hard core fans.
Hand Wringing
Hockey experts in the NHL know that a collective bargaining agreement alone will not solve hockey’s problems. Ideas are being floated around, from changing some of the rules to allow for more scoring, to better ways to make the game more attractive to television.
There is a lot of hand wringing and hot air expelled from talking head “experts” without stepping back and looking at the big picture:
Hockey is different.
Right now, millions of people are watching hockey. Just not NHL hockey.
The American Hockey League (AHL), which is AAA level sport, is leading a half-dozen other leagues from the ECHL and CHL down to the SPHL and the LNAH through another very successful season. What is it that the minor leagues are doing right that the major league isn’t? What can the NHL learn?
The Television Twelve Step Program
Unless there is some radical new way of capturing the action, perhaps the flying X-Box-style camera used in football’s backfield these days, or multiple shots of action displayed at the same time, then the NHL needs to change their financial model to something radical:
No TV.
Outrageous! Absurd! It calls into question a half-century of sports marketing, a thought only slightly more blasphemous than attacking the Constitution or motherhood!
Yet the NHL could learn a lot from watching the huge and largely successful proliferation of hockey around the United States. Hockey is played in the desert and on the bayous, and even on the Las Vegas Strip.
What the minor hockey leagues do well is bring the sport in LIVE, up close and personal. They make it affordable. The players are more accessible to the community. There is outreach to casual fans in a way that television just can’t touch.
The NHL needs to draw upon that power to connect at the local level with hockey fans.
It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. It’s SUPER NHL
Instead of league contraction, a favorite option of a few multi-millionaire hockey players what might happen if the NHL expanded its presence?
We’ve already witnessed what a few reasonably good players parked in the AHL a year longer than need be can do for the quality of the game at the minor league level.
What if the NHL was set up differently, regionally, to maximize its ability to draw to live events locally over short distances?
Establish a system that plays in dozens of cities that funnels a few of the best players to six or eight regional super-teams. Each region has its own teams and play-offs. The best players from the regular season of each region by record or selection of the region’s coaches are sent to the super team.
The six super teams then enter a playoff system to challenge for the Stanley Cup.
Instead of having fans from the Tampa area being the only ones excited about the Stanley Cup, you have fans from Atlanta to Durham to Miami who are pulling for their hometown heroes as well as for the regional team as a whole.
Super NHL also addresses the scoring issue. We’ve seen from the AHL, ECHL and CHL that a few good players can score like wolves amongst the sheep at the local level. Improving the level of play at the local level makes the game more exciting, but still allows for enough improving players in the mix to make the game a little more exciting. More goals with the same rules, bring in fans who want to see more scoring.
If the regional system were two tiered, say an AHL and then use the existing CHL/ECHL/UHL clubs as a AA system, the dynamic competition for jobs could again make for a lot of connected fan support from enough markets to put hockey back on the sports map as perhaps the biggest of all major leagues.
Players have an opportunity to become the stars that they've always wanted to be. Increased fan base would also give them a shot at those astronomical salaries paid to baseball, basketbal, and football players
While the television coverage itself may not improve, strong regional hockey may pave the way for more fans to tune into the area networks, improve hockey's advertisers and bring in more revenue A regional team will have bigger ratings across several states than one major market team can.
To address the concern of those in the NHL cities who say you’re not seeing the best and brightest play together, the regional super teams pick up that slack.
Most importantly, a tiered regional system builds player name recognition from the ground up.
Those vying for a spot on the super teams become household names over a wide region.
Even if there weren’t enough rabid fans in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or New York, stack up all of the fans from California, Oregon, and Washington that could watch local market teams contributing to a super team, and you’ve got a very potent fan base.
The other positive to the Super Team is that it’s performance based. You don’t play well every year, you don’t get the invitation to the big dance. Players have more opportunity to be the name draw. Teams can contribute money to a centralized league super fund to pay bonus salary to the Super players that is on a fixed scale in the CBA. In that way ownership has no incentive for the binge spending that has brought the current state of depression to hockey.
Hockey’s strength has been as a community, sport. The minor leagues have proven that it still works that way.
Ownership has to shake off the notion that it needs to be the NBA to succeed in the sports world. They brought Mr. Bettman in from basketball to make it the next NBA. Clearly he, and the owners have failed in that mission. Hockey needs to rediscover its roots, get back to hometown America and Canada with the blue collar, everyday people whose passion for the game will nurture it back to health and fiscal stability again.
