Labor Trouble Brewing Again In The NHL?

by | Dec 14, 2020 | Soapbox | 7 comments

 







7 Comments

  1. What a hundred grand each when you’re making around $1-9 million a year?!?! Stop acting like a bunch of spoilt brats and get back to playing what you’re paid handsomely for. I wasn’t good enough for junior A playing a step below that. If I could Make the nhl I’d be happy with 50 grand a year which is bit less than I make now, Shut up and play hockey.

    • Rick, let’s assume you work for a corporation and the CEO (who makes $500k) asks for you to give back $10k of your $50k salary, because the company isn’t doing well. That’s what we’re talking about.

      • Except, we’re not talking incomes of $50,000 per – we’re talking 10x that and up – none among them will be clipping coupons

    • The problem from the players’ standpoint is the league agreed to the CBA extension with the worst-case scenario (no fans for a full season) taken into account. Four months later, Bettman asks them to give back more, claiming he’s not trying to renegotiate the deal when in fact his requests are an attempt to renegotiate.

      As I said, Bettman’s not wrong about the overage the players will have to repay based on the rules of the CBA. However, the PA could be arguing (as I noted above) that the cap on escrow during this agreement combined with uncoupling the salary cap from actual HRR for at least the next two seasons (and possibly longer) means the rules on a 50-50 split no longer apply.

      Perhaps Bettman would’ve received better results had his requests come with a giveback from the league of some sort. But he didn’t, and the players got their backs up, and it quickly became an unnecessary impasse that slowed negotiations for the start of the season.

    • You make less than 50 grand a year because you don’t have a significant skill set in any field. NHL players are the best in the world at what they do. Even then many play for the league minimum and have careers that are 5 years or less. They are not your minions to be ordered around for your entertainment.

      And if you worked under a collective agreement would you agreed to amend it to take less? No you wouldn’t.

      If you guys want to complain about people making way more money than the value they contribute start with real estate agents and their commissions.

      • Agree LJ, add stock brokers to that list. They don’t have a better understanding than you or I of what the market will do if you spend any time doing research. Even then it is a bit of a crap shoot, especially these days. The guy I used to pay did worse than I did.
        All a real estate agent does it look at comparable properties, and come up with a price. I can do that too if I had access to the same info.
        You would have a hard time finding anyone with a functioning brain who didn’t think that they would have to play most or all this season without fans. We saw that on this site with the odd exception, most on here expected it. In fact this vaccine is by far and away the fastest in history. They may get some fans in the spring.

        A deal is a deal, off we go.

    • The pandemic was ongoing in July when they agreed to the Memorandum of Understanding for a six-year extension to the CBA. Various scenarios were taken into account for 2020-21, including playing an entire season without fans.

      It’s been reported the NHL owners agreed to the MOU almost sight unseen on the basis of Bettman’s recommendation. It was after the deal was ratified that the owners supposedly discovered what it contained. They were said to be displeased, including the chairman of the board of governors, Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs.

      My initial sympathy was with the league when they made their requests for increased escrow and salary deferral from the PA. After all, the course of the pandemic had changed since July. My opinion changed once I learned that the MOU took into account the worst-case scenario. If the owners truly didn’t know the full details of what was in the MOU and approved it on Bettman’s recommendation, that’s on them, not the players.