They planned to bust the union all along

NHL owners, by building their own arenas the last ten years, pulled the rug out from under the players' feet, without anyone noticing a thing at the time

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

The last time the NHL was embroiled in a long labour dispute, the players took the initiative and forced the owners back to the negotiating table by threatening to start up a league of their own.

Wayne Gretzky was the mastermind in that heist, and the touring team, called Gretzky's All-Stars, played eight games around Scandinavia and Germany. They enjoyed great ticket-office success, selling out most games.

They returned to North America December 15 and, emboldened with their European success, played more exhibition games against IHL teams. In a matter of days, previously stalled talks between NHL owners and players were on again, and by mid-January, everybody was back in skates and it was game on around the NHL.

Owners were forced a decade ago to sign an agreement with the players' that guaranteed escalating salaries. It was either that or see the market value of their franchises bomb from an average of $125 million to something approximating zero once Gretzky's All-Stars multiplied into a few more teams and a bona fide league, owned by players, started up in competition against the NHL.

Competition has always been anathema to the NHL and successfully strangling it has been the hallmark of this league's long run with success. The world's premier league first emerged as only the most ruthless and cutthroat survivor from the 1920s era when there were many equal leagues competing all around North America, with the ultimate champion among them being awarded the Stanley Cup. Thus it was that cities like Hamilton, Halifax, and Victoria sported world-class competitive hockey teams every bit as worthy of the overall championship and legendary trophy as the NHL's flagship Montreal Canadians were—or the Montreal Shamrocks, or the Montreal AAA's, for that matter. (Yes, Montreal had three different professional hockey teams at the same time.)

In those glory years of hockey in Canada, teams from small markets like Winnipeg, Quebec, Ottawa, and even Kenora and (gasp!) Vancouver fielded Stanley Cup winners. It was the NHL, then just another league like any other that made a move to take over the hockey world and wipe out all competition.

First, they got their exclusive paws on the glamorous prize, the Stanley Cup itself, through nefarious means about which there had been investigations, but no charges. Next, they made a back-room deal with the CBC promising things like exclusive access to star players in exchange for the CBC broadcasting nobody else's games. Finally, they used their monopoly on broadcast revenues to conspire to raise key player salaries in order to attract all the stars to their league, thus depriving all other leagues of marquee players.

By the conniving execution of this plan, the NHL achieved its perfect world: for four whole decades, no leagues could compete with the NHL which itself remained minimally sparse with just six teams enjoying exclusive, if repetitive and boring, competition for the Stanley Cup. Players found the hockey world transformed overnight into an owners' market and could only sign what contracts were dictated to them.

Competition did not return until 1971 when the upstart World Hockey Association created ten teams and began offering lucrative contracts to NHL stars. Bobby Hull, Gerry Cheevers, Derek Sanderson and Bernie Parent gave the WHA instant credibility. The NHL was forced to counter by adding more teams in the same new markets and offering higher salaries to star players.

The competition was brought to a head in 1979, when teen phenom Wayne Gretzky spurned the NHL and signed with a WHA team. By that time, the WHA teams were already a financial mess. High salaries and thin talent hurt, but it was the NHL's ruthless strategy of propping up new teams and locking the WHA out of prime arenas in leading markets that did the fledgling league in.

It took 15 years for Gretzky to once again bring the prospect of competition back to the NHL, and once again, hugely expanded player payrolls were the result for NHL owners. Through their long history of killing off all competition in order to put downward pressure on player salaries, the owners know it is the availability of arenas in key markets that is the key to determining whether anyone can ever break their lucrative cartel.

Knowing the bad contract Gretzky forced on them in 1994 was due to expire in 2004, and determined this time to not be trapped by the prospect of a competitive league, the owners spent the last ten years building their own arenas and seeing the old ones demolished. Nearly the entire league's buildings have been rebuilt in the last 10 years, and nearly all teams now own their own rinks. The NHL owners' determination to deny oxygen to any potential siblings knew no bounds: fabled buildings akin to cathedrals in hockey-mad Canada, like the Montreal Forum and Maple Leaf Gardens, were pummeled into the ground, their very seats sold off at auctions.

This was never a plan to make money directly. What the owners had in mind was to lock out the possibility of any competitive league finding any ice to ever play on during what the owners all along planned as an excessively long labour dispute meant to starve players back to the negotiating table on the owners' terms. The lack this year of any hint of a player-owned league or any form of competition for the NHL is the direct result of that successful strategy.

It may be the players' hard work the fans come to watch, but it's the teams that own the means of production (in this case, the turnstiles in the buildings), and in capitalism, that's everything. It was the players' realistic threat of a new league that brought the owners to the negotiating table last time, but this time, with the owners now possessing the keys to all the arenas, there'll be no threat of any new leagues. The owners might have been nailed in 1994, but in the decade since then, they bought the hammer, and this time around, they'll do the nailing.

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