And Still Going Up

When the NHL's board of governors meets Tuesday morning in Manhattan, you can bet Lou Lamoriello will try and make a case that the punishment far exceeded the crime.

Lamoriello is a principled fellow. His hero is Vince Lombardi. He thought he was just playing by the rules when he signed Ilya Kovalchuk to one of those absurd "back-diving" contracts during the summer, contracts than other teams like Boston, Vancouver, Philadelphia and Detroit had signed. Heck, Chicago had done similar deals with Duncan Keith and Marian Hossa, and the Hawks had won the Stanley Cup.

But first an independent arbitrator slapped down the Devils' initial deal with Kovalchuk, and on Monday the NHL chimed in with heavy penalties including a $3 million fine, a forfeited third round draft choice, and the loss of a first round pick sometime in the next four years.

Lamoriello will try to make his case that this punishment is unfair. And it will fall on deaf ears.

See, Gary Bettman has been practically begging teams not to sign these double-digit term contracts for years - Rick DiPietro, Alex Ovechkin - and redoubled his efforts when teams began twisting the CBA even more with torqued contracts that dwindled down to tiny salaries in the final few years just to get a more appealing cap number.

So Bettman and his deputy, Bill Daly, will have no sympathy for Lamoriello. And neither will at least 20 other teams, maybe more, who either couldn't afford to agree to these Kovalchuk-type contracts or saw them as cheating and didn't want to.

Simply put, Lamoriello can complain, but nobody will be listening.

It's too bad, because given Lamoriello's history and background, he undoubtedly wasn't intentionally trying to cheat. He just ended being the wrong GM in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now the price of acquiring a player who really didn't help the Devils in the playoffs last spring has become astronomical.

First, the Devils sent forward Niclas Bergfors, defenceman Johnny Oduya and Canadian national junior team captain Patrice Cormier to Atlanta to get Kovalchuk, along with a first and second round pick. New Jersey also got a prospect and a second rounder back.

Then, after arbitrator Richard Bloch rejected the first contract, the Devils finally came up with $100 million deal that, after much discussion, was approved. Now they've been fined and had draft choices revoked on top of it, plus they still have to dump contracts to get under the salary cap.

it's hard to put a value on all of that. How much is a first round draft pick worth in dollars? But you could argue Kovalchuk will, when its all said and done, cost the Devils somewhere between $150 million and $200 million in salary, fines, prospects, draft picks and players. And it's quite likely that he won't put another body in a seat in the notoriously fickle New Jersey hockey market.

Unless Kovalchuk turns into Mario Lemieux, he can't possibly be worth all this. It's like the Devils got on a speeding bus and just couldn't get off.

Perhaps they hoped Bettman would let them off the hook after Bloch ruled Jersey hadn't intentionally circumvented the salary cap. But the commissioner really couldn't. For starters, teams were clamouring for him to take action. He'd fined the Leafs $500,000 and taken away a fourth round pick for messing with the contract of a middling defenceman named Jonas Frogren. He'd hammered the St. Louis Blues back in 1999 for tampering five years earlier with Devils defenceman Scott Stevens, fining the Blues $1.5 million and taking away two first round picks, effectively.

There was just no chance the Devils were going to get away without punishment. In fact, it could have been worse. Under the collective bargaining agreement, they stood to lose the same amount in cap space that they were fined, a nightmarish prospect given that they are already over the cap. But as part of the larger, complicated deal that allowed Kovalchuk's contract to be approved and new CBA rules to be installed making it more difficult to sign these kinds of contracts, the league and union agreed that the Devils wouldn't be fined more than $3 million and there wouldn't be any salary cap implications.

So, yes, it could have been worse for the Devils.

The likely outcome at today's board of governors meetings will be a brief discussion, and then on to other business. If the Devils try and pursue this much further, they risk becoming the kind of renegades they were perceived to be back in the 1988 playoffs when Jim Schoenfeld told Don Koharski to have another doughnut.

They can scream about the Bruins, Canucks, Flyers, Red Wings and Hawks getting away with the very same crime for which they are being punishment, and they won't be wrong.

But it won't get them anywhere, leaving them married for the next 15 years to a player who, unless he becomes a hockey version of Peyton Manning or Kobe Bryant overnight, can't possibly deliver value for the cost of acquisition.

Ominous Rumblings. . .Or Maybe Not That Ominous

So Don Fehr, sooner as opposed to later, will be running the NHL Players Association. No big surprise there. The entire membership still has to vote, but given this groups reputation as a bunch of lemmings, nobody imagines this is anything but a straightforward, rubber stamp process. They're not even insisting on getting the full report into the firing of Paul Kelly first, which is just kind of sad.

As soon as Fehr is installed, the rumblings will begin towards 2012 when the currect collective bargaining agreement concludes. Fehr's reputation in baseball is a mixture of hardnosed negotiator and pragmatist. Sometimes he fought with Major League baseball, sometimes he co-operated (steroid era). Few would think he'll be a pushover, and if he can actually get the players to stand behind him - no easy trick, given the history - the next fight could be a big one.

Maybe a strike. Maybe a lockout. Maybe a resolution. But if there is a work stoppage at the initiation of either side, there will again be suggestions that it will cause terrible damage to the game if it goes on for months or ruins an entire season. Apocalyptic results.

Only thing is, that is quite what happened last time, was it?

The NHL and NHLPA were co-conspirators in wiping out the 2004-05 season - technically, it was an owners lockout - and the consensus then was that it would take years for the game to recover, if it ever did.

Instead, what has happened is that the NHL, as a whole, is bigger and probably better than it has ever been.

Just look at how the coverage of the sport alone has grown. Events that once weren't the subject of much public attention at all or didn't exist - the prospects combine, rookie camps - are now not just covered, they're televised. The annual Winter Classic didn't exist before the lockout, although some games were played outside, and is now one of the NHL's splashiest events. 

 The NHL is playing more games in Europe than ever before. Overall league revenues continue to increase, which is why the salary cap keeps going up. Remember when the financial meltdown south of the border had some predicting the cap would drop by $6 million or more? Never happened. Compared to the first year after the lockout, the cap has risen by an astounding 51 per cent, to a significant degree because of the strength of the Canadian dollar vis a vis the U.S. greenback.

The game itself is sure better. In fact, without the '04-05 lockout, all the changes that have made the sport better - taking out the red line, removing the hooking and obstruction - might never have occurred. The league is blessed by a plethora of dazzling new stars, all given a much better opportunity to show their skills in the league as competition is structured today.

Not a single team went out of business. In fact, the Canadian teams are all stronger - Ottawa might be the exception - and teams in cities like Washington, Boston and Chicago are riding the wave of new popularity with their fans. Quebec City and Winnipeg both want back in, whereas before the lockout, it was assumed that the absence of a salary cap would make it impossible for any other Canadian cities to join the NHL.

There are teams in trouble - Phoenix, Atlanta, Florida - but there were teams in trouble before the lockout. In fact, ever since the NHL doubled in size back in 1967, there have been teams in trouble. So that's not new. Neither is the absence of a large U.S. television deal.

So five years after the lockout, what you have is a bigger industry, not a smaller one, a better game not a worse one, more outstanding young players, not fewer.

The apocalypse never happened.

Maybe Fehr, then, is what the sport needs. Maybe if he's going to make the NHLPA more militant, and more likely to lock horns with the league in another work stoppage, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

The last lockout, after all, apparently did nothing but good.

Puzzling Numbers

Used to be Blue Jays fans, and the organization, would look fondly back upon the championship years of the early 1990s when packed houses of 50,000 or more were all but guaranteed every night.

These days, the good old days that spawn fond memories seem to be 2007 and 2008, at least from a business standpoint. Average attendance of 29,000-plus seemed to indicate local interest was on the uptick.

Now, it doesn't seem that way.

With a shocking attendance figure of 10,658 from Thursday night, the Jays average attendance for this season has dipped a little further to around the 20,700 mark, a stunning 30 per cent drop over the past three seasons. The last time attendance was this low was way back in 2002 when the team average 20,208 per game.

Baseball in general, of course, is down, and has been for two years. This year it appears the overall figure will reflect a league-wide drop in attendance of about seven per cent, while, the Jays will be down about 10 per cent from last year.

Not good.

The confusing part is that with Paul Beeston back in charge, the disliked J.P. Ricciardi gone, a local boy running the front office and an appealing youth movement, it was expected this would the year GTA baseball fans began to feel more enthusiastic about the team.

Instead, attendance suggests the Jays are less popular now than they were last year, and definitely from three or four years ago.

'Tis a puzzlement.

Wtih Jose Bautista swatting homers at a major league-leading pace, an impressive young pitching staff featuring Brandon Morrow and some exciting prospects on the way, one might have thought there was an opportunity at hand for the Jays to recover some lost ground, not lose more. Generally speaking, local media types have approved of the direction of the team, some suggesting this has been nearly a triumphant season despite a record just about .500. Moreover, its not like any of the other pro teams in town are producing championship-quality teams.

So what's the reason behind the drop? Well, the stadium, of course. The Rogers TV issues haven't helped. Having a caretaker manager doesn't exactly get the masses excited. And, as has been the case for a long, long time, no meaningful games in August, let alone September, kills interest. Playing in the tough American League East continues to be an issue, although another competitive season from low payroll Tampa Bay is gradually taking away the division in which the Jays play as a meaningful excuse.

The season began with some shockingly low numbers, but then there was some recovery. Now, it seems the season may end on a low, which has to leave the Jays thoroughly puzzled as to what it will take - if anything - to bring the people back.

Wondering

You wonder why some CIS freshman is taking human growth hormone. You wonder why anyone would think the Tomas Kaberle story is going to just go away now because the veteran defenceman wants it to. You wonder if this is the year the Lions (York or Detroit) don't completely stink.

You also wonder:

--If there's still a chance the Bettman administration will take action against the New Jersey Devils for trying to circumvent the league's salary cap. The fact the league got a CBA concession from the union and now wants to put the entire issue of so-called "back-diving" contracts to be makes you think that the Devils will get away with this one. Then again, the fact the Leafs got fined a half-million bucks and docked a fourth rounder for screwing around with Jonas Frogren's contract - Jonas Frogren!! - makes you think they won't let the Devils walk.

The board of governors meets on the 14th of this month. The commish has until the 17th to announce any team discipline on this.

--If there's any real chance the NHLPA will do the right thing and release the results of their investigation into last year's disgraceful firing of Paul Kelly. These guys have become more secretive than The Vatican. But as long as there's any suggestion that Donald Fehr was in any way involved in the back rooms, it behooves the union to make it clear exactly what Fehr did or did not have to do with Kelly's ouster before hiring him as the NHLPA's new executive director (while he writes a book on baseball, of course.)

--If the good people of Quebec City understand it is pure folly to build a new arena in hopes that the NHL will someday give the city a franchise. 

Without some sort of guarantee or semi-guarantee from the league, building a rink just sets up Quebec City to be more leverage existing NHL owners can use against their cities when it comes time to negotiate a new lease or force it to commit taxpayer dollars towards a new arena. 

This is what happened to Hamilton. It certainly worked that way for Kansas City when the Pittsburgh Penguins wanted a new arena.

Everybody wants another team in Canada. It would be terrific to see the Nordiques live again. But doing it this way just sets up Quebec City to get used.

Tough to Find A Better Spot

For $10, the elderly lady let me park on her front lawn on Balsam St., just up the road from Scott Park Secondary School, which in turn is just up the road from Ivor Wynne Stadium.

More than six hours later, I returned, and there she was, still sitting on her porch, keeping an eye on the last remaining vehicle on her property.

If and when the Hamilton Tiger-Cats get a new stadium, that part of Steeltown's football tradition will be lost. So much of the debate about the location for a new Hamilton stadium revolves around parking that it's hard to believe there will be anything left over for local entrepreneurs if the joint gets built.

It was a perfect afternoon on Monday for CFL football, which has to be taken into account when stating what seemed so obvious after the Tiger-Cats and Argos played, that while Hamilton owner Bob Young and local politicians spar over alternate locations for a stadium that will also be used for the 2015 Pan-American Games, Ivor Wynne is a pretty darn good location as it is.

Or maybe that's just the Hamilton boy in me talking.

There's a shortage of official lot parking, sure, but lots of places to leave your vehicle with local residents. If not, you can park a distance away and use your game ticket to hop aboard city buses for free. The pre-game parties, mostly in the field adjacent to Scott Park, are much more extensive and start much earlier than was the case 10 or even five years ago. The view from the stands is of a neighborhood, not of expressways and office buildings. Ok, a neighborhood with steel mills as a backdrop.

The stadium itself, well, once you're in your seat, there is no better place to watch a football game in the country, although people in Montreal and Regina would beg to differ. When it's jammed, as was the case on Monday, Ivor Wynne remains the perfect home, particularly for a football team that still wants to reflect the personality of its city.

If there is to be a new Ivor Wynne Stadium - and no way does that name surivive, right? - there's almost no chance it will have the same sightlines and personality as the Cats current home. Something will be lost, and it will be lost forever.

That said, there seems to be some agreement that the new Longwood location, just off Aberdeen not far from Chedoke golf course and Highway 403, is a spot both Young and city fathers can live with. McMaster University owns the land, and if there's a deal, maybe Mac ends up with the West Harbour site that the city orginally wanted and develops that for the future.

Young loves the east mountain site, but he and, I would imagine, the people who live in that part of the city would be the only ones. Certainly, that site would have little charm or poetry to it. It would be about ads on the building and expressways and parking, period.

The Longwood location at least allows the chance to retain a sense of the personality of Hamilton, of this being a downtown Hamilton team, not a surburban team. 

I know some people who live in the area. Maybe they'll let me park on their lawn for $10.

Grasping for Easy Answers

CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR

Donald Fehr speaks to the media after a NHL Players' Association meeting on July 14, 2010.

The NHLPA, to be fair, has tried diligently in recent months to get its house in order, whether it's getting rid of the final sniffs of the Ian Penny-led coup brigade or drafting a new constitution. Actually, to be accurate, the small proportion of the 700-plus members of the union that actually care about this stuff have tried diligently.

Now, however, the union is apparently trying to hire Don Fehr as it's new executive director in the middle of a very complex fight over these absurd long-term contracts that were designed by agents and teams to flout the league's salary cap structure.

Hire Fehr on the fly, as it were.

Yes, they've been considering this appointment for a considerable period of time. Some might suggest that ever since Paul Kelly was decapitated last summer, Fehr has been in the picture. Even before Kelly was canned, really. Some say he's been helping out of pure goodwill, others suggest this is a guy who can sniff out easy money from a group of hockey players who are easy to direct and order around.

Take your pick.

But now is not the time to hire Fehr. In fact, I'd argue there never would be a right time. It's just too easy an answer for a players union that loves quick, convenient answers and has paid dearly for them over the years.

Funny, isn't it, that good, active union men like Brendan Shanahan and Chris Chelios have chosen to go and work for management as soon as their playing days were done, either because the union didn't want them or they didn't want it. Instead, we have this apparent attraction to a former baseball union head who doesn't exactly seem like he wants to make the NHLPA his life's work.

Some say he'd be the Clint Eastwood, tough guy the union needs. Well, they had such a person in Bob Goodenow, and chose to stage a mutiny partway through the last collective bargaining process because influential players saw too many paycheques evaporating.

Fehr couldn't be tougher than Goodenow even if he put Gary Bettman in a headlock. What this remains about, really, is the committment, or lack thereof, of NHL players to be masters of their own affairs. They don't trust one another, quite obviously, are generally terribly uninformed about their own organization, and most recoil when asked to participate in even a conference call, let alone a full-blown meeting.

The personalities involved are curious, sometimes bizarre. Last summer it was Andrew Ference, of all people, leading the charge to take down Kelly, while Dan Hamhuis put his name behind a letter suggesting Penny was doing a wonderful job. Now, you have various union figures leaking out every detail of both ongoing negotiations with the NHL and, apparently, Fehr's contract demands. The office intrigue just never stops with these people.

To paraphrase a prominent U.S. political commentator, it's about the players, stupid.

Now you've apparently got a group of player reps trying to muster a vote on hiring Fehr in order to help guide them through the ongoing Ilya Kovalchuk mess, which may or may not come to a conclusion by 5 p.m. today. Is the NHL seeking to exploit the absence of credible NHLPA leadership to get something it couldn't get through collective bargaining? Of course, it is. Certainly Goodenow was all in favour of exploiting the competitive nature of teams during his reign to get better salaries for his players. This isn't a friendly game of tennis. It's hardnosed, high finance over billions of dollars. You fight to win.

But Kovalchuk isn't the fight this union needs to win right now. Neither is this battle over these silly contracts, which benefit only a tiny minority of players and a minority of teams.

The NHLPA needs to win the fight from within. It needs to stick with the process, avoid easy answers and find a new, fresh, energized, focussed leader, one tied to this sport and to tomorrow, not some other sport and yesterday.

 

Worth Resolving

See, there really is nothing for either side in this fight.

Having teams cook up bizarre, front-loaded contracts that whittle down to $50 a season in the 45th year doesn't help NHL players in general. It may help teams like Chicago win the Stanley Cup, but the vast majority of NHL clubs don't benefit from these kind of deals that most GMs see as a form of cheating.

Everybody knows how much money is on the table for the players. It's set out in the collective bargaining agreement. It's just a question of how its divvied up. The more Ilya Kovalchuk gets, the less somebody else gets, or at least the bigger the escrow cut that comes the way of the average NHL player.

So if the NHL and the NHL Players Association are really using the 48-hour extension in the Kovalchuk decision to hammer out some kind of mid-CBA agreement on how to handle these deals, it's probably a good thing for everybody. Well, everybody except maybe Kovalchuk. And a few others.

Larry Brooks of the New York Post delivered an intriguing scoop late Wednesday night in which he reported that the league has offered to approve the newest Kovalchuk contract with the New Jersey Devils, and stop threatening to invalidate a few other similar deals, if the union agrees to some new rules that will make these kinds of contracts less attractive to teams in the future.

Brooks also reported that if the PA doesn't agree to these terms by 5 p.m. on Friday, commissioner Gary Bettman will reject the Kovalchuk deal, invalid Roberto Luongo's new contract with the Vancouver Canucks and hold a more formal probe into Marian Hossa's contract with the Blackhawks.

This is some heavy poker.

It's a tough fight for the union, particularly given the fact it doesn't have a leader. Moreover, 80 per cent of the players in the league don't benefit from these kinds of contracts. In fact, through the escrow system, you could argue these deals are under-written by the vast majority of players.

That said, there's pride on the line here. If the union agrees to these conditions with two years still to go on the existing CBA, it's essentially allowing clawbacks in the middle of a contract. 

The league, meanwhile, would still be under the gun to deliver some form of punishment to the Devils for attempting to circumvent the salary cap in the first place. If Bettman can cut a deal with the players union now, and then chooses to let the Devils off the hook, he'll have some explaining to do to about 20 other franchises.

Lots to look for in the next 48 hours. 

 

The Money Game

Looking back, the telling sign was the deal inked by St. Louis defenceman Erik Johnson, the most coveted draft eligible player on the planet just four years ago.

Coming off his three-year entry level deal, all Johnson could squeeze out of the Blues was a two-year deal worth $2.6 million. To a working stiff, that's the moon and more. But for an NHL player, it's just above the NHL average, and to a league in which many teams have tried to lock up their best young players to long-term, lucrative deals at that point in their careers, it marked a sea change.

From there, it's not that big of a jump to where we are now, with more than a dozen talented restricted free agents sitting on the sidelines without contracts as training camp looms. Years ago, this would have been controversial, with holdouts once the scourge of the league as players knew they had leverage and, particularly under the Bob Goodenow regime, weren't afraid to use it. They could stay out, knowing that without a cap, the pressure was all on the team, which looked cheap if it couldn't win without them.

These days? Not so much. Right now, the only restless rustling seems to be coming from Montreal, where unsigned goalie Carey Price, according to a CBC Montreal report, is "ready to strike" if he can't get a deal worth $3 million per season out of the Canadiens.

Otherwise, there's an expectation that all of these players will ultimately sign a new deal. That applies to the high end players like Bobby Ryan, and to the lower end players like Maple Leafs forward Christian Hanson, forced to hold his nose and sign a one-year, two-way contract ($650,000 for the NHL, $105,000 for the Marlies) after trying to wait the Leafs out all summer. Hanson had exactly no options, and the Leafs played somewhat of a game of hardball, although six-figures to play in the AHL isn't bad.

So what's the story? Why so many unsigned?

For starters, money is tight, tight, tight across the league, with many teams already close to the payroll cap of $59.4 million, and others determined to be closer to the floor of $43.4 million. Adding to the complexity of the market is the fact some teams are in ownership flux, notably Dallas, which still hasn't signed 27-goal scorer James Neal or defenceman Matt Niskanen and may be hoping to stick to a budget of $45 million as owner Tom Hicks looks to unload the team.

Some clubs are generally being more hardnosed about their money. Atlanta walked away from a $2.4 million arbitration award to winger Clarke MacArthur, and have yet to come to terms with winger Niclas Bergfors, who played well after coming over in the Ilya Kovalchuk trade last season and ended up with 21 goals.

"We will not do a deal where if there is a situation where we placed a player on waivers tomorrow, would he be claimed?" said new Thrashers GM Rick Dudley in some telling comments to reporters.

The brutal reality, of course, may simply be that the unsigned RFAs out there just aren't that good. Specifically, they're not perceived as good enough to attract an offer sheet, like Edmonton laid down for Dustin Penner and Toronto was prepared to do last summer for Phil Kessel..

Ryan would be the possible exception. But he turned down a five-year, $25 million contract offer from the Ducks and wants a shorter team deal that would walk him right up to UFA status in a few years, something the Ducks don't want to do.

Otherwise, players like Marc Staal, Martin Hanzal, Chris Stewart, Peter Mueller and Andrew Cogliano find themselves looking for substantial dollars from teams without the threat of a possible offer sheet. Colorado is looking at having the lowest payroll in the league this season, and even with Stewart coming off a 28-goal season and having traded Wojtek Wolski to land Mueller, the Avs don't feel compelled to give these players big money or term.

Edmonton's Sam Gagner, who was in the league at 18, signed a two-year, $4.55 deal, not bad for a 15-goal scorer, but not anything comparable to, say, Jordan Staal's four-year, $16 million extension or the six-year, $18.75 million pact signed by Florida's Rostislav Olesz back in the summer of '08.

Times have changed, particularly with only two years left on the current CBA. Smart agents and players have already figured that out.