The Latest From The NHLPA On The Realignment Issue:

PA still gathering feedback from members on realignment. Exec board will decide this week whether to make call itself or hold full PA vote.

There’s a fight going on here that the fans should be paying attention to. The problem is, it’s a quiet one so it’s easy to miss.

Welcome to the world of Donald Fehr. 

If you think back to the previous work stoppage — not the one we’re dealing with this season, but the one before — the owners made big noises about wanting to make the players partners in the game, and that was part of the “concessions” that helped bring the agreement and the new CBA. 

The owners quickly made clear the whole concept was a sham; they put a couple of players on the competition committee, which was routinely ignored, to the point Martin Brodeur quit as a waste of time. And that was the most progressive aspect of “partnering”. In pretty much every other aspect of the game, the players were quickly told to go back to playing and leave the hard business stuff to the owners. 

Sometimes I think the owners forget that players have memories. And they remember this stuff. And so when a situation happens where they can “return the favor”, they will. 

After that CBA, the NHLPA spasmed, Kelly was dumped, and the players went off and decided to get serious about being a players association, and ultimately hired Donald Fehr. 

And you see Fehr at work here. One of the tenets that Fehr works under is that the players should be a business partner with the owners; everyone works together and everyone grows the game together and everyone wins. Baseball gave up on the idea that the players were property and shouldn’t have a say in business matters slowly and with great pain — just look at the hundreds of millions of dollars lost to the collusion lawsuits. But ultimately, between the work of Marvin Miller and Donald Fehr, the players were taught to get involved and be informed, the owners figured out it was better to work together than fight each other, and baseball has prospered. 

In hockey, it’s not as bad as it was in baseball in the collusion days, but you still hear the word “asset” thrown around talking about players far too often, and hockey has definitely moved back into the mode of “these are the things the owners decide, and the union should stay out of it”. To say that this doesn’t sit well with the players and Fehr is an understatement. 

But don’t expect outright war. The thing the hockey owners haven’t seemed to figure out yet is that Fehr plays a long game, looks for situations he can take advantage of and us them to his advantage. With realignment, the owners went off and made decisions without consulting the players, which gave Fehr an opportunity to push his “players are partners” agenda, and quietly threaten to bollix up the entire situation by shoving it into arbitration or even court. The owners realized that even if they ultimately won out that fight, it’d cause massive delays, and they might lose. So they backed off and agreed to bring the players into the discussion. 

Which they did. Sort of. After the decisions were done. Which isn’t what the players want. And the owners did it by offering the players the final decision to approve, and a short deadline to approve it, and more or less demanded a rubber-stamp on the decision. 

Not surprisingly, the players have decided they aren’t sure they like this plan (because, well, they weren’t in on the formation of it, among other things). And not surprisingly, it’s taking the union a lot longer to evaluate and vote on the plan than the owners asked for. Just going through the process, folks. Sorry about that (unspoken hint: if we’d been in the discussion EARLIER, this might all go faster… hint). By slipping this past the owners deadline, they create some minor heartburn for the owners. 

I expect the players will ratify re-alignment. Eventually. But along the way, Fehr has made it clear that the players have a say in these kinds of decisions, and ultimately, maneuvered the owners into agreeing to that (the owners, honestly, made that easy). And when the owners then tried to turn that into a rubber-stamp of what the owners decided to do, the players have turned it into a minor crisis as a way of spanking the owners on the wrist. 

That’s how Fehr likes to work. Not outright war, but smaller situations that allow him to push his agenda and manipulate the other side into an agreement that sets a precedent. And that precedent is then used on future, generally bigger targets (“we were involved in that decisions. How can we not be part of this one?”); a big target is going to be the next round of television deals — you can bet Fehr wants the players in on those talks, and the owners want no part of it. 

I’ll sell popcorn. But right now, the owners aren’t winning these fights, and Fehr and the players are. And they may seem like relatively small ones, but a poker player that wins a lot of small pots still ends the evening with a large stack to cash in. 

Fehr is doing a good job of accumulating chips, too, almost without it being noticed. 

Department of Player Safety examines tripping/slew-footing – NHL.com – News:

The National Hockey League’s Department of Player Safety on Wednesday unveiled its “Tripping/Slew-Footing” video, the third in a series of educational videos designed to help players and fans better understand how specific infractions are viewed and evaluated, what is legal and what merits the assessment of Supplemental Discipline.

This is awesome material, because what the NHL is finally starting to do is put the league casebook online.

If there’s a significant difference between the Colin Campbell era and the Brendan Shanahan era in NHL discipline, it’s that Shanahan and the NHL have embraced transparency. I always felt Campbell got a bum rap from many for being arbitrary and I don’t think that was really true, but what Campbell didn’t do a good job on was explaining why he made the decisions he did. Shanahan is changing that in the way he’s disclosing the information and rationale that goes into suspensions and using online video to help explain the situation. You may not agree with his decision, but at least you’re getting a lot more of what went into making it than you got with Campbell. 

Beyond that, we’re now starting to see the publication of casebook material. The game is governed by a rule book, and the official rules of the NHL (and other hockey leagues) have been available for years — I collect them and I have rulebooks going back into the early 40′s. But the way leagues have traditionally helped instruct referees and linesmen is with what’s known as a casebook. This has traditionally been some kind of publication that describes how the league wants the rules interpreted. Sometimes it’s bound and published as a book (the USA Hockey casebook is here); sometimes it’s a series of sheets or sections distributed in a binder for easier updating. 

What the casebook tries to do is help the referee interpret the rule. With descriptions and pictures in classic ones, and today increasing use of video samples, casebooks try to define where the edge cases are — if a player does THIS it’s hooking, but if they do THAT it’s not. Since interpretation of a rulebook is subjective even if the words in a rulebook isn’t, the casebook is the guide to where to draw the lines around the rules and when to make the call and when to let it slide. 

They can be fascinating reading. They also are intended to be a living document as special cases or new interpretations happen. The NHL has long updated their casebook on an ongoing basis and distributed memos with clarifications or notes describing specific situations. 

A number of years ago — more than a decade — I had a few conversations with people working in the officiating department of the NHL, and one of the things I encouraged them to consider was publishing their casebook so all fans could (if they wish) learn how the rules are intended to be called.  that won’t stop much the fan griping, but I felt it would help fans become better educated and give them another tool to study the game. 

At the time, there were people in the department who wanted to, but there wasn’t enough support to make it happen. Now there is, for which I take absolutely zero credit — but I did want to call it out and offer credit to the folks at the NHL who are now willing to take this step. If you’re interested in the details of the game, these videos will be a useful tool is learning to watch for them.

One of the things happening at that time was a lot of criticism of the NHL refereeing; I was writing about it a lot then as well, and not always positively. But a number of broadcasters and journalists (people who’s job it was to know how the rules were supposed to operate) were either too lazy to actually learn them (too true in some cases) or had made a conscious choice to criticize based on how they wanted the rules to be written (the, ahem, Don Cherry scenario). Occasionally I’d hear about something that I got wrong, and that led to a discussion about the situation. I felt that having the casebook available would give broadcasters no excuse for being lazy or craven about knowing the rules (I also suggested they look into pre-season seminars on the rules that team broadcasters and journalists could sit in on and ask questions. Again, teaching and transparency. Now, with modern online webinar capabilities, this is even easier to accomplish). 

These days, I think that the broadcasters do a much better job of being balanced and knowing the rules, and I think overall, the reffing in the NHL is better, thanks in large part to the two referee system. It creates some challenges, but it reduces the difficulty of handling the game and makes it easier for the refs to ref it appropriately. Mistakes still occur — refs are human and the game of hockey is by far the hardest game to referee, with perhaps the offsides call of a soccer game at an elite level — but overall, I think NHL refs today do a pretty good job. 

I do think there are steps the league could take to push even further into disclosure and transparency. I don’t expect to ever see these happen, however, but I’d love to see these be implemented:

• Disclosure of referee and linesman ratings, as well as discipline (fines and suspensions) when issued. Unfortunately, when i’ve brought this up, it hits the wall of this being personnel issues and not wanting to get into disclosure issues over an employee. Of course, the league does so with players suspensions and fines, but that’s negotiated with the PA. Trying to negotiate the same disclosure with the refs union would be tough. (you do know that referees and linesmen are subject to reprimands as well as suspensions? And some leagues (not sure about the NHL) they can be fined in some cases as well. you have to be careful, though, because officials get time off in-season just as teams get extended breaks between games, so just because a referee doesn’t show up in the box scores for a while doesn’t mean he got suspended. And referees get injured and sick, too..)
• Post game media access for referees and linesmen. Let them sit at the podium and talk about their decisions. Players have to man up and be responsible for what they did on the ice, I think the referees should, too. Not holding my breath. It might get uncomfortable at times; knowing that is something that I expect would make referees more thoughtful about their decisions. And non-decisions. 
• Get a referee off the ice. While I like the two ref system, at the time I felt a better option would be for the second ref to be off ice and in some kind of elevated viewing position. One ref covers the actions on ice, the other covers the entire ice surface from an “eye in the sky” position, because, frankly, there’s a lot of stuff going on that at ice level with all those bodies moving around is hard to see, even with two sets of eyes. Move one set of eyes above the action, and give them access to video replay and let them be responsible for it instead of the Toronto War Room (unless they want help). And that removes that extra body off the ice again. A minor advantage to this is that refs would end up skating half as many miles per season — so the senior refs would likely go longer before retirement. 
• And finally, I want to see coaches challenges happen. There seems to finally be some movement in that direction. Video review and challenges and all of that can really screw over the flow of the game (hello, NFL replay…. yawn) — but getting it right and giving the teams some discretion in when it needs to be gotten right is a good idea. The devil is in the details (Hello, NFL Replay, in the 93 variants they’ve tried so far…). What major league baseball does is actually pretty good, but probably doesn’t go quite far enough. What you do NOT want is to screw up the game making sure you get every call right, because we’ll all die of old age before the third period ends. but there are key plays that if you get them wrong, you can destroy the integrity and results of a given game. And for those — find a way to get it right. And what seems to work is giving the coaches a limited right to challenge, and penalize them for being wrong (yes, the NFL Replay mode…. It works). 

Report: NHL proposes conference realignment, new playoff format – NHL.com – News:

Under the new plan, the conferences would be realigned with the Columbus Blue Jackets and Detroit Red Wings moving from the Western Conference to the Eastern Conference. There would be no corresponding moves by Eastern Conference clubs, resulting in unbalanced-conference alignment that would see 16 teams in the Eastern Conference and 14 in the Western Conference.

I’ve written about re-alignment in the past, and I’ve been really critical of the NHL for pandering to the east-coast fan stronghold while not doing more to promote hockey out here on the Left Coast. I’ve been especially critical of the idea of Detroit moving to the Eastern Conference because that would mean losing another “Original 6″ team to the east, where, given the League’s propensities for unbalanced schedules, means those of us in the Western Conference got to see these teams — well, rarely to effectively never. That was made even worse when the NHL was allowing the Canadian teams  to schedule extra games among themselves to help promote Canadian attendance, because that meant that we saw even less of the Maple Leafs and Canadiens. 

Frankly, there’ve been times when a West Coast NHL fan could justifiably whine about thinking the league saw us as kind of a minor league variant of the “real” NHL, which seemed to exist mostly in the Northeast corner of the continent (more on that in a minute).

But having said that, I fully understand the challenge and problems this has caused the Detroit franchise and to a lesser extent Columbus, and I sympathize with their pain. 

So, I read the current proposal — which puts Detroit back in the east, and puts the Sharks in with the Kings, Coyotes, Ducks, Flames, Oilers and Canucks — and I think, in all honesty, that it’s about the best they can do. Somewhat separate from re-alignment is the shift to a balanced schedule, and as long as the league stays committed to a balanced schedule and home-and-home with each team every season, count me in as a supporter of this realignment. It means we’ll see Detroit in San Jose only once a year, but it also means we’ll get Philly and Washington and Pittsburgh and Montreal and Toronto every year, instead of previous years where the unbalanced schedule meant Philly and Pittsburgh every other year, and because of the Canadian variant, Toronto maybe every fourth. 

The balanced schedule means that New Jersey will actually have to get on a plane a few times and leave their timezone, which I’m sure annoys Lou, and I’m all for that, too. The schedule is still painful for western teams, but a fully balanced schedule evens that pain out somewhat, although the Northeast teams still have a favored status here. 

But all in all — I’m not a fan of the wildcards, but I see the attraction — it’s a good plan, and I hope it passes. As long as we keep a balanced schedule, which I’ve wanted for years. So let’s get it done already.

By the way, for people looking at the realignment and saying “but what about when they expand to Toronto and Quebec City?” — stand down, soldier. Expansion is a figment of the canadian press imagination. We won’t see teams added to the NHL for at least five years. I’d be amazed if the NHL even admits an interest in expansion in the next five years, much less starts the process. So there’s plenty of time before we have to worry about this. 

And when Phoenix moves, and I’m now convinced it must, it’s most likely moving to Seattle. Which won’t impact the alignment. (I must admit I’m going to be watching this with interest to see how it goes down. I do not envy a team that has to play in Key Arena for a few years while a new building is built. I’ve seen hockey there…)

Since I brought it up, a few quick thoughts on ways the league could show better commitment to the West Coast. Other than, say, convincing NBC that the Western Conference exists for its national broadcasts, which we know will never happen (don’t feel bad, as baseball fans, we got really, really tired of the game of the week being some variant of Yankees/Red Sox, too):

• Currently the league office has two official offices: Toronto and New York. Open a third, here on the West Coast. I’m guessing it’d end up in the LA area somewhere (and that’d make sense, and give a base of operations for working with the online media companies and game companies that have sprung up on the west coast.
• Open up a second “war room” here on the west coast to handle video reviews and etc. Not only would it be a good reason to have a west coast office, it’d mean your war room staff wouldn’t be up until 3AM toronto time every night covering western games. 
• Gary Bettman and NHL senior staff should commit to doing their business in the West Coast office for a chunk of the season: say 25% of the season calendar. Let Gary live with what it’s like being a west coast fan for a few weeks a year… 
• Stick the Winter Classic someplace moderately close to the west coast moderately soon — I suggest Minnesota. (I’d love to seem them do it in Vegas, just for the spectacle. I don’t for a minute believe they could get quality ice there. But then, I’ve seen Anaheim’s ice, so why complain?)

And of course, this will never happen. But it should….