Adding a team no impediment to ’20 lockout
WOULD the NHL actually lock the door on the Seattle Totems just as this 32nd franchise is ready to drop a $650 million puck on the 2020-21 season? Or is the league simply going to dare the NHLPA to go out on strike after either or both sides exercise reopeners to the collective bargaining agreement in September 2019?
I’m thinking the latter, given Canceler-in-Chief Gary Bettman’s offer a year ago to expand the league’s international calendar to include the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in exchange for a three-year extension of the current agreement.
That has always struck me as strange within the context of the league attempting to make a legitimate case for an Owners’ Lockout IV.
“This is a terrible CBA but we offered to extend it so we could shut down for the Olympics, which we claim without basis
hurts our business.” But then, legitimate cases are often extraneous to collective bargaining, especially when one side owns the muscle and is not shy about exercising it.
Correct me if I’m wrong (please don’t; this is a figure of speech, not an invitation), but I do not believe Bettman wants to go four-for-four (after 1994, 2004, 2012) when it comes to lockouts following the expiration of labor agreements. The NHL can be expected to give the players a way out of striking by proposing a narrowed band within the 50-50 split of hockey related revenue that would reduce both the cap and escrow.
This, of course, would be a terrible solution that would reduce choices for pending free agents, increase the number of buyouts and arbitration walkaways, and eviscerate the ability of powerful teams to remain intact. But the league will push it with the expected backing of many agents, who attempted to influence the union into taking this path in 2006 before activists shut it down.
This time and in this environment, the players — for whom escrow is the kind of galvanizing single issue that Vietnam was in the 1968 Dem- ocratic primaries — might go for it. And if that is the case, both sides should do a favor for their own constituents and all of the rest of us and begin negotiations this summer.
There is no doubt Seattle fits perfectly into the league’s geographical vision of manifest destiny. But does anyone believe the quality of play will improve by adding a 32nd team that will further dilute the rosters of the existing 31 that are all pockmarked by flaws?
More to the point, has anyone on the Board of Governors even raised the issue? Or do the owners have approximately $21 million reasons apiece (the $650 million take divided by 31) not to want to know?
At least this time, league general managers will have some time to prepare for a known expansion draft process. In light of the Vegas experience, you would expect teams to be far less amenable to granting a no-move clause to anyone other than an essential franchise player.
Since 2005-06, the Rangers have had one No. 1 goaltender in Henrik Lundqvist, and the Devils have had two in Martin Brodeur and Cory Schneider.
The Flyers, meanwhile, have had 10: Antero Nittymaki, Robert Esche, Martin Biron, Michael Leighton, Ray Emery, Brian (Shootout) Boucher, Sergei Bobrovsky, Ilya Bryzgalov, Steve Mason and current incumbent Brian Elliott.
That might help explain why Philadelphia — which in 1998 swooped up John Vanbiesbrouck as a free agent when both Mike Richter and Curtis Joseph were available and waiting to be wooed — has won four playoff rounds the past 12 years.
There haven’t been many one-for-one trades as successful for both sides as the one in which the Devils acquired Schneider from the Canucks for the ninth overall pick in the 2013 draft, which became Bo Horvat.