Quote:
Originally Posted by Skin Blues
You didn't do much to justify flushing 25% of ticket revenues down the toilet. I like the idea of the tournament, but it makes no sense from the owners' perspective to lose 330 regular season games per season. Since the players' salaries are tied to HRR, they wouldn't want that either. Travel savings would recoup a negligible amount compared to what's lost, not only in ticket sales but also TV revenue which for many markets, is pretty big. Regionalizing the schedule is a separate issue so any savings on that front have nothing to do with a shortened season.
I think a more reasonable option to reimburse the players for the additional games they'd have to play would be to give them a cut of the ticket revenue from those games. Makes a lot more sense to give up partial revenue to a handful of games than 100% of revenue from 25% of games. I think it's all moot because these two groups can't even agree on the basic stuff, so throwing this wrench into it would screw things up even more.
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Well the tournament and shortened schedule are two separate issues and more importantly it's not like this tournament is even on the table. We know the owners would never do anything like this because as I keep saying they'd have to remove their own heads from each other's asses so as a fan I'd want to see a 60-game season with a loser's tournament to determine the first overall pick. In my opinion this is the best way to improve the quality of the hockey being played and if you improve the quality of the hockey you will encourage viewers and increase revenue.
And you do make some great points regarding giving the players a cut of playoff ticket revenue for the loser's tournament but the owner's don't even give players a cut for the Stanley Cup playoffs so that would be the first hurdle to climb. Should it be climbed? Yes. I actually think that performance based incentives should be much more substantive in all professional sports because it would help to eliminate the case of a guy getting paid way too much or a rookie out-performing his contract by way too much and I'd say performance based bonuses with regard to team standards would ultimately be the best way to go. But these are separate issues as well.
The biggest thing for me is whether people would watch the loser's tournament or not. I think they would so at some point the owners, players and league should find a way to make it work. But as we keep circling back to, the NHL can't even get it's product on the ice for a normal season.
In any case, my original sentiments are that the NHL's proposed altered draft lottery would not help matters any because as we've seen in the NBA it only exacerbates tanking.
