Good bye NHL. We hardly knew ya.

A few days ago, the National Hockey League officially cancelled its 2004-2005 season, becoming the first major sport to cancel an entire season. Whether it will still be a major sport if they ever resume playing is an open question.

The season was trashed after about five months of a lockout, which is the term used when employees want to work but management refuses to let them.

The key issue is this. Owners say they are losing money. There doesn't seem to be a lot of dispute about this, though I don't know if the owners opened their books to the players or not.

The owners' solution was to demand a league wide salary cap. This means that no team could spend more than a fixed amount of money on all player salaries. The players objected to this because it would obviously artifcially reduce their earning potential.

I was often asked who I supported: the players or the owners. I am a hockey fan. I enjoy watching hockey. The fact that the two sides could not reach an agreement and prevented NHL hockey from being played meant that I couldn't actually support either. Though the fact that the owners were the ones who imposed the lockout and thus were the direct cause of the stoppage made me somewhat less sympathetic to them.

In reality, the people I sympathized with were neither the players or owners. It was everyone else associated with hockey. The people I sympathize with are the people who earned money by selling food or programs at the rinks. The people I sympathize with are the people who run restaurants and bars and souvenir shops near the arenas. They didn't have large salaries to build up some savings. They didn't have huge "war chests" to fall back on.

So don't ask me if I support the owners or players. A more pertinent question might be whose POSITION I support.

Intellectually, I have to support the players' position, if only because the owners' position so violate the basic tenet of 'give me a break.'

The simple fact is this. No owner needs an externally-imposed salary cap in order to make money. In order to make a profit, all you need to do is take in more money than you spend. If you are losing money, there are two ways you can change that into a profit: spend less money or take in more money.

In the NHL's structure, increasing revenues is a lot hard to do for individual teams. Revenues can increase a lot faster due to decisions made centrally, most notably when it comes to national television contracts in Canada and the US.

Yet, spending less money is easier for individual teams to do. All it requires is discipline from management. It requires them to say, "No, I am not going to pay $5 million a year to a slug who can barely skate." No one, not even the much demonized players' union, puts a gun to an owner's head and forces him to pay ludicrous salaries to mediocre players.

So naturally, the owners demand the centralized solution that's unnecessary.

Some teams don't spend bucketloads of money. Some offer reasonable salaries and develop younger players from scratch to build a team rather than trying to buy championships through the free agent market. Two of those teams that did not spend bucketloads of money (relatively speaking) last year were the Calgary Flames and Tampa Bay Lightning. Those were the two teams who qualified for the Stanley Cup Finals.

Here's what any owner can do without externally-imposed salary caps. a) Figure out how much revenue he projects his team will take in, b) Spend no more than that amount (if he wants to not lose money) or spend less than that amount (if he wants to make a profit). A 12-year old running a lemonade stand could probably figure that out.

Fans can complain all they want about overpaid players and how they cause high ticket prices. This is ironic since while most people complain about the high cost of movie ticket prices, hardly anyone complains about overpaid actors.

But at the end of the day, you can't blame the players for being overpaid. Players sign a contact. A contract is a mutual agreement between the player and a particular club. If the employee is overpaid, he is so not simply because he wants x amount of money, but also because the employer AGREED TO PAY HIM x amount of money. If a team agrees to pay a player x dollars, it is because the team thinks his services to the club are somehow worth the investment of x dollars. That's a judgement of the club, which should not be overrided by a centralized authority.

Essentially, owners are asking to be saved from themselves, to be saved from their own recklessness. This is why I can't support their position. I advocate personal responsibility. Any individual owner who wants to make a profit can do so by restricting expenses to an amount less than revenues.

There is no rational reason why an owner in Detroit or Toronto should be limited in how much he can offer a potential employee simply because an owner in Anaheim or Miami can't manage his money responsibly.

If the players want to accept a salary cap as part of a broader collective bargaining agreement, that's certainly their prerogative. But I can't blame their long time refusal to be obligated to save the owners from themselves.

At the end of the day, the players did accept a salary cap so it ended up being a question of numbers.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman rejected the players' offer of a $49 million per team limit on salaries. "If every team spent to the $49 million ... total player compensation would exceed what we spent last season," he said.

This is a great example of faulty logic bordering on the disingenuous.

The cap would not have REQUIRED each team to spend $49 million, contrary to the doomsday scenario implied by Bettman. A $49 million cap would merely have LIMITED each team to a MAXIMUM of that amount. Surely, a man as smart as Bettman knows the difference.

But this is in line with the owners' consistent position throughout: "we owners don't trust ourselves to manage our own finances in a sane way so we need externally-imposed forces to do it for us. And we expect the players as a whole to sacrifice for our own inability to say no."

A responsible parent sometimes has to say no, or perhaps give the child less than he wants, even though it might displease the child. A responsible parent manages the family's finances in a sane way. A responsible parent doesn't expect the government or some other central authority to arbitrarily limit their spending; responsible parents can do that themselves.

The owners' position is that of an immature parent. The parent who can't say no. The parent who can't control his impulses and expects others to bail him out when that happens. The parent who is more concerned with keeping up with appearances than building a solid family. The immature parent thinks, "If I can't have a BMW, then no one in my neighborhood should have one either."

Ultimately, the NHL (and most North American sports leagues) is a restrictive cartel, much like OPEC. And the NHL is trying to manipulate the overall market like OPEC too.

The NHL contains 30 different businesses. They are competitors, yet they are linked as well. If 10 teams go bankrupt and fold, it does affect the other 20. Perhaps this isn't a terrible thing, though. If South Florida or Southern California aren't viable markets for NHL level hockey because too few people there care about ice hockey, is it the worst thing in the world if those franchises move or cease to exist? (Sorry Panthers and Ducks fans)

Maybe this whole situation begs a re-examination of the cartel structure of North American sports. Look at the setup of soccer in "socialist Europe," a setup which is far closer to Darwinistic capitalism that Americans usually prefer.

Take England, for example, There are 92 teams in the country's professional football (soccer) leagues. 20 in the top level, known as the Premiership. 24 in each of the other three levels, known as The Championship, League One and League Two.

In each division, three teams are promoted and three teams are relegated. Except no one is promoted from the Premiership because it's the top league. And the bottom clubs in League Two get relegated I believe to the amateur level.

In other words, the three best teams this year in The Championship (top two teams in the regular season and the third as decided in a playoff involving #3-6 regular season teams) will be promoted to the Premiership next year. The three worst teams in The Championship will play in League One next year..

I like this because it's a very meritocratic way of doing things. You can't be like the LA Clippers and have crappy seasons for 20 years in a row and still be allowed to call yourself a 'top flight team.' If you stink, you're punished. If you are good, you're rewarded.

There is no salary cap in English soccer.

Yet the structure punishes fiscal irresponsibility. A few years ago, the club Leeds United were in the Premiership and even in the semifinals of the pan-European Champions League. However, in order to do this, the club had to spend like a drunken sailor and racked up enormous debts. As with most debts, they had to be re-paid. With the club spending more and more on paying the debt (and their credit worthiness ruined), they had less and less to spend on players. The level of the team dropped as the best players were sold off. And last year, the team was relegated from the Premiership into The Championship. The demotion will cost them further revenue as they will get less TV money and play less glamorous opponents thus attracting fewer fans. Other clubs were more fiscally responsible. They didn't reach the romantic heights of European glory, but they're still playing top-flight soccer. Leeds were reckless in their spending and got punished. Leeds supporters aside, is that really such a horrible thing?

Yes, it makes for less parity. NFL(the American gridiron football league) is generally acknowledged as the best run of the American sports leagues and is the most popular team sports league in the country. It also has a salary cap, which I'm sure some people will be quick to point out. Parity is the patron saint of the NFL. Nearly any team can win the NFL's Super Bowl in any given year. And this is the be all and end all of sports. Or so we are told.

Any good story needs a villain. Baseball fans hate the New York Yankees. English soccer fans hate the Yankees' Siamese twin, Manchester United. A lot of fans will say something like this: I have two favorite baseball teams. [My team] and whoever's playing the Yankees. They are vilains and it makes their games and rivalries that much more exciting.

The idea of promotion and relegation adds one other benefit: rendering late season games meaningful. Even in the parity-laced NFL, a late season game between two bad teams is going to spark little interest, even from fans of those teams. Promotion-relegation makes these games just as important as a game between the two top teams. Whichever of the bad teams lose is that much closer to relegation, and all the bad things that implies. In soccer, these 'relegation battles' are matches which have all the passion and committment (if not skill) as any clash of titans. In North American sports, they are yawn fests played with second string players in half empty venues.

All of the above is what I believe intellectually.

Emotionally, I want to give the whole NHL lot of them the finger and offer them a great variety of expletive deleteds. Ultimately, the hockey players and owners are vastly overestimating the NHL's importance to North America's sporting landscape.

The NHL is the fourth major team sport in the United States, and might even be surpassed by MLS soccer if this nuclear labor war goes on a lot longer. It is not important enough to have this kind of catastrophe.

In 1994, Major League Baseball cancelled the World Series. It took 5 years before interest in baseball to be revived... and that was with the help of great stories like Cal Ripken's streak and the Mark McGuire/Sammy Sosa home run derby. The NHL is in nowhere near as strong a position in the US now as MLB was back then.

Even in Canada, the ancestral home of the sport, there are concerns. Ken Dryden, who was both a legendary player in Montreal and general manager in Toronto, recently opined, "I think that there are a number of fans in this country [Canada] who have sensed over the last number of months that actually, maybe, it was more habit than it was passion."

And ultimately, this is the NHL's biggest danger. Their main concern should not be fans who are furious, like the blogger Bobochan. Their biggest concern is fans who simply stop caring.

Anger subsidies over time.

Apathy usually does not.

Even me, I was not crushed by the season cancellation. I accepted in late-November that there wouldn't be any NHL this season. Even in past years, I didn't really follow the NHL much until April. Because the Stanley Cup playoffs are the most exciting tournament in any professional sport I've ever seen. (Only the 3rd round of the English soccer FA Cup comes close and that's only one round) But I stopped following the NHL regular season a long time ago. Simply put, the regular season really doesn't mean much. As long as you win about as many games as you lose, you'll probably make the playoffs. And the playoffs is when the real hockey is played.

Another downside is that simply put, the NHL isn't as exciting as it was 10 years ago. Watch an NHL game from last year (or a minor league game this year) and notice how much hooking and holding and interference you see. Notice how much time is spent by players stuck in the corners grinding away for the puck. See if you can stay awake long enough to follow it.

Then watch a game on ESPN Classics from the mid-80s through, say, 1994. Notice how much stickhandling you see. Notice how much skating. Notice how much faster the game was, how much more flow there was, how much time you spend on the edge of your seat. See if you dare change the channel.

Last spring, the NHL had its most breathtaking Stanley Cup finals since 1994. It was a final dominated by skaters and scorers and exciting players, rather than defenders, goaltenders and the neutral zone trap (for you soccer fans, the trap is ice hockey's equivalent of catennacio). After the '94 finals, the NHL ruined this momentum by having a labor dispute cancel half the season. After last year's finals, they ruined it again.

Except this time promises to be even most devastating.

Good bye NHL. We hardly knew ya.