Saint Nik said:
cw said:
The league as a whole is very, very close to the sum of it's parts. That was revealed in the media during the prior CBA haggling, is reflected in the current CBA and was substantiated by evidence included in the Phoenix bankruptcy docket. Tallying Forbes is the best quick guess we've got at the league as a whole. The vast majority of the revenues are reflected by team revenues because those revenues include their portion of things like broadcasting and merchandising dispersed from the league to the individual teams.
But, of course, it doesn't account for everything. It doesn't account for things like what these franchises can position their ownership into in terms of side businesses or real-estate investments. Something that was always ignored by you and Leavitt and was always the ridiculous, gaping lie that the NHL refused to acknowledge.
But, again, this would be terrific fodder for discussion if I was particularly interested in rehashing the 2005 CBA debates which, again, I'm not.
It wasn't "ignored" by me, Levitt nor any of the players unions. But, as the saying goes, "it's none of their business". Those are legally distinct business entities in their own right. The players negotiating a labor agreement with their employers don't work for them. Those separate entities can be bought and sold separately from the team. They are not required to be owned by a team for that team to be able to function in the league. They are a completely separate business decision for an owner.
Where there are NHL related revenues acquired by third party businesses owned by the team owners, the players are entitled to those revenues under the CBA right now.
If the IRS audits a NHL team, they audit the distinct business entity. If the NHLPA files a grievance against the NHL, they don't grieve some shopping mall the owner might own beside the rink. It's completely outside the legal relationship between employer and employees.
What do you do when one owner owns his building and another doesn't? It gets insane - not only to figure out dollars but to legally enforce because the players don't get to haggle leases or buy and sell buildings or shopping malls etc. It's how the whole business world works - legally and evey other which way. You're not ever going to overcome that with a collective bargaining agreement between an employer and a group of employees.
And the players do see some benefit. If one owner owns a NHL team and another owns a NBA team and they both share renting the same facility, there's a darn good chance that the rent for the arena they share is cheaper than if only one of them was in it. With the volume of fans for both teams coming to the arena, parking is probably cheaper for each set of fans than it would be if only one set of fans showed up because the two revenue streams absorb some of the fixed overheads and the concessions are also probably cheaper for the same reason. That reduces the unit cost of attending an event and increases the revenue from more fans showing up attracted by the cheaper cost. So the players on a particular team in that situation would see some overhead or expense absorption benefit or revenue increase benefit when looking at operating revenues to help set their % of the revenue pie in some of these situations where an owner owns the team, the building and some of the other teams in the building, for example.
A problem is that they could see some of those benefits if someone else owned some of the other entities so the owner that owned all of them would be penalized giving money to the NHLPA compared to the owner who didn't own all of the entities. That's just plain nuts.
If the players want in on that action, their union should open up their chequebook and invest in those business opportunities so they can take on the risks (ie the lawsuits & busines failures) along with the potential rewards like every other investor does. If they're unwilling to do that, then they can go to hell like anyone else who won't risk investing in a business while expecting a reward.
The league CBAs are collective bargaining agreements between employers and employees that definie the relationship between the employers and the employees. They are not joint ownership agreeements nor venture captial/business investment contracts. If they were, how does an owner like the NHLPA would be collectively bargain with themselves? They can't.
Steve Ellman took a bath on his Westgate investment in Glendale. How come the NHLPA didn't feel sorry for him and pitch in to help him out? It had nothing to do with the Coyotes because he'd already sold them when he took his bath.
This is what I would describe as grossly overreaching. There is no required legal or direct accounting relationship between owning a shopping mall and owning a NHL team. Separate business entities have no place in collective bargaining agreements between employers and employees.
If the players unions want in on that action, they should drop collective bargaining and write some cheques to invest as owners so they take on the full risk of the investments along with the hope to obtain the proceeds of the rewards. Instead of revenue sharing as that would have to go to properly share the risk, the relationship would have to turn to profit sharing. And if it were to evolve that way, you'd have to figure out how much each player owned of the league when he got bought out, etc. Crazy stuff.
