Hockey's Big Gamble
Upcoming NHL labor problems and the gold rush to conquer territory is about to come to a head.

BRIAN ROSS
MLNSportsZone.com
Updated 08.17.03

Right now, there are seismic forces in hockey about to rip up the ice.

If it goes as predicted, every hockey league, from the NHL to the EMHA will feel its wrath.

The tremors have been felt from Virginia to Alabama, where a new minor league breaks ground for a new major league.

By the time that the main fault snaps, they could be thrown into a chaos that re-writes both major league and minor league hockey forever. Or disaster will be averted, a bunch of rich guys will be a lot poorer, and they'll have a lot of egg on their face.

The Major Catalyst

The National Hockey League (NHL) is about to face the most significant challenge in its history. Living under the delusion that they are a major league with full-on television revenue and overflowing arenas, they have been spending money on players like there is no tomorrow. Which there might not be, as a result of the lofty payrolls that the league now faces.

Some teams are looking at $80 or $90 million dollar player payrolls. Even teams with far more modest payrolls in the $60 million range can't afford to be where they are now. The whole league needs salary rollbacks. Dramatic ones. To remain viable, most organizations need total payrolls around $30 million dollars.

Television revenue, attendance, and merchandising aren't getting much better. In fact, they may be getting a bit worse. Rollbacks seem laughable when you've been listening to this summer's juicy star signings.

All the more laughable because the players aren't likely to take a 66% pay cut across the board. That spells problems with a happy negotiation on the collective bargaining agreement: L-O-C-K-O-U-T. It could last possibly for as long as two years. Or the NHL may not be able to come back, opening the door for other possibilities.

What might happen in that long, dark night? If some wealthy folks and a few aspiring wannabees have their way, the schism of the seventies that split major league hockey may make a comeback, and re-write the landscape of the hockey world yet again.

Let's Do The Time Warp Yeaaaaa....

As we leave the plucky major league owners locked in a room with guys who normally carry sticks and have little to lose, let's take the WayBack machine to June 10, 1971.

Before the red, white and blue pucks, very similar to the balls of the upstart American Basketball Association, hit the ice, there were a number of shifts.

The Miami Screaming Eagles looked for a better hockey audience in Philadelphia. The San Francisco SeaHawks found that the Bay Area had too many rocky shores and moved to Quebec. The Dayton Aeros flew down to Houston. The Calgary Broncos hit the trail for Cleveland.

The league had its die-hard fans, saw some great players grace its ice, and struggled throughout its existence.

It was run like some of the shoot-from-the-hip minor league organizations of today. Lots of rush to action to get cities up and running. Very little long-range planning to keep them operating more than a handful of years.

While the product on the ice was anywhere from fair to great, the business and marketing acumen of the WHA league and front offices was, at times, sorely lacking.

The league liked to make announcements that it couldn't back up. The opening ten cities included San Francisco and Miami. After the league found that those markets couldn't become viable quickly enough to make the stated schedule, they then made announcements of moving these founding franchises elsewhere.

The rush to announce brought the league's stability into question. It's marketing put the league in jeopardy.

The plan to be in major markets where the NHL wasn't already serving seemed like a good idea. The WHA never really executed the plan well, though. They opened franchises with the "If you build it, they will come" philosophy.

There was little investment in the kind of fundamental outreach to develop hockey as a sport in the community that many of the more successful minor leagues practice today.

Where WHA teams did make outreach, there was not the ability to wait out the years that it takes to seed the soul of a sport where it has had no prior existence, and has no other similar sport from which they could draw fans.

Smaller markets with no hockey history like Birmingham, Phoenix, and Houston could not sustain major league attendance numbers in the 1970s.

Cash is king in sports. The NHL came into some markets, like L. A., with deeper pockets and drove the upstarts out. Ownership did not have the pockets deep enough to sustain the losses. The league's pick of cities did not yield enough revenue to help prop up the league. The WHA kept opening in new cities, and running into the same problems.

Like the NBA, the NHL's television revenue was the ultimate difference between the major leagues. Hockey was given little airtime on the big three networks. Cable was in its infancy, and the burgeoning ESPN was still a decade away from hitting stride.

By 1979, the WHA tent was folding. The Winnipeg Jets, the Edmonton Oilers, and the New England Whalers were able to migrate to the NHL. The Houston Aeros, with a smaller market, became part of the International Hockey League (IHL.).

The dream of two major hockey leagues was dead. Or was it?

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