Farce of the Predators – From The Rink

January 22, 2009 by chuq · Comments
Filed under: Two for Elbowing: Hockey & Sports

One source among the NHL governors says he and some of his peers are not happy that clubs can buy tickets to hit revenue-sharing targets. They are also not pleased that some low-revenue clubs have started offering larger discounts and more incentives such as merchandise and free trips to people buying single-game or season tickets.

It is all done with an eye to raising enough revenue to land a full share of revenue sharing, which comes out of the pockets of other clubs.

No kidding.

With all due respect to Dirk Hoag, a Preds blogger and fan who I’ve got a great deal of time and respect for, this is a joke. There’s no problem with some of the NHL’s more well-heeled clubs paying out some cash to keep things a bit more equal, but when ticket sales are being distorted and ownership groups are forking out good money for unused tickets in order to beget cash from other franchises?

I’ve got no qualms with the ownership “doing everything they can to make the NHL a long-term success” in Nashville, as Hoag puts it, but not at the expense of other clubs. If Freeman and company want to legitimately prop up their team, their money should be better spent on either marketing the team or improving its chances on the ice.

via Farce of the Predators – From The Rink.

I’ll take the opposite view here.

It’s not against the rule; if the team spends a million dollars in investing in its own tickets to get back $10 million in revenue sharing money, that’s a great investment; probably even better because they can likely donate the tickets to charity, get people/kids in the seats and get a tax break, too.

Is it a loophole in the rules? Sure. Should the league close the loophole? Probably. But until they do — hey, whatever it takes. Should the owners have been smart enough to forsee this loophole and close it before ever allowing it to happen? Well, that’s why you hire lawyers and accountants. Don’t blame Nashville for being smarter about this than the rest of the league…

Heck, this is a time honored tradition in the NFL, a league often used as a “the NHL needs to be more like them” comparison. A not-very-secret secret is that one reason the NFL stadiums all play to 99.7% of capacity (except for Oakland) is that the NFL blacks out TV in the local market if the stadium isn’t sold out 72 hours before game time — and so teams, and in many cases, the TV station with the rights to the game, suck up all of the unsold tickets to “guarantee” that sellout, just like Nashville now is. And either eat them, or send them to charities.

This starts sounding a lot like one of those “against the code” arguments, like the ones used against teams that sign restricted free agents to offer sheets — legal, but ‘we don’t do that’ (at least whenever it’s done TO a team, instead of BY a team). Of course, the whole ‘we don’t do that’ with restricted free agents was modelled after Major League Baseball, another league the NHL is held up against. Only in baseball, it’s called Collusion, and they’ve paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties over it to the union. Fortunately, the GMs in the NHL have more or less gotten over it, much to Brian Burke’s dismay.

Heck, it’s really simple: if it’s not against the rules, don’t complain. Fix the rules. Until you do, don’t complain that Nashville was simply smarter about this than the teams now complaining. That’s no different than any other trade in which one team fleeces another — except in this case, the fleece is money, not players.

I think it’s a great hack, myself. And it brings the NHL one step closer to NFL, which people keep saying is a good thing, by showing that increasingly the league is getting away from things like “code” and “tradition” and realizing that it’s money and winning that matters.. Right? Except, of course, in Oakland…

Update:

The ”big story” here should be that attendance has risen significantly in Nashville despite the economic situation and a team that is sputtering of late. They’ve added new corporate sponsorships in the last few months and appear likely to hit the targets required for revenue sharing. Good News, unfortunately, just doesn’t make a catchy headline like the negative stuff.

via KuklasKorner : On the Forecheck : Predators likely to hit magic attendance mark.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the “if necessary” part of the story got dropped in the hurry by some pundits to play the “the league is doomed (move them all back to canada where they belong)” game some more. Funny how when Nashville has problems, the press is all over it, but when things go well in Nashville, the press either ignores it — or decides to spin it into a problem anyway.

Something to remember as you read some of these “experts”. More on that later.