Financial Impact of Lockout Different for Kings and Ducks : Hockey: With play resuming, NHL clubs will be trying to recoup their losses in a hurry.

With a fat player payroll and a skinny deal from their home arena, the Kings appear to have been hurt far less by the 103-day NHL lockout than their well-heeled cousins, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.

The Kings simply didn’t have as much to lose.

But when the games resume, the Ducks, with a relatively light salary load plus one of the league’s sweetest home-ice deals at The Pond, should recover much faster.

The Kings and the Ducks--like other pro sports teams--seldom provide specific information about revenues, expenses and profits. However, from conversations with analysts who evaluate sports teams and experts who play on the business side of hockey, some educated guesses can be made.

With revenues of about $600,000 a game at the Forum and 17 home games eliminated by the lockout, the Kings are out about $10 million.

However, given their $23-million annual player payroll and the fact that players by and large aren’t collecting for games that weren’t played, the Kings’ savings on salary should be more than $9 million, or nearly a wash with lost ticket sales.

Michael Handelman, King vice president for finance, said that the team historically was “a break-even operation” under former owner Bruce McNall. Even that characterization may be too kind because, as became embarrassingly clear in court filings connected with McNall’s personal bankruptcy, the Kings were so short of cash last winter that they couldn’t meet the payroll without tapping into advance sales of playoff tickets--and the Kings didn’t make the playoffs.

Walt Disney Co.’s Mighty Ducks, by contrast, perform swimmingly, with estimated profits of $9 million in 1994, their first season.

The Ducks are said by experts to rake in $750,000 per home game, including food and beverage concessions, so their 17 lost games cost them $12.75 million. And the Ducks’ young roster carries a payroll of only about $13 million, so their savings on salary is only $5 million to $6 million. The result: the Ducks have probably dropped at least $6 million on lost games.

The Ducks also reap money from The Pond’s 84 luxury suites, which rent for $70,000 to $100,000 a year, and 1,700 club seats selling for $4,000 to $6,900.

Neither loss estimate takes into account television and licensing deals, which are trickier to figure.

For most NHL teams, the league’s deals with ESPN, Fox and Molson’s Canadian network are the main source of broadcast revenues, which come to about $4 million per team, according to a source close to several team owners.

Fortunately for the teams, the Fox broadcast schedule is weighted heavily toward late-season and playoff games, so that money won’t be too seriously affected. But ESPN and Molson’s “Hockey Night in Canada” have lost games. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Kings and Ducks have each lost at least $1 million in national broadcast fees.

Local broadcast schedules are even more shaken up. KTLA (Channel 5) may not get any King games this season because the team’s deal with Prime Sports takes precedence, Handelman said.

The Ducks, who split games between Prime Sports and Disney-owned KCAL (Channel 9), will have to scramble to get even a proportionate share of the half-season on air because of conflicts with replacement programs that were penciled in during the lockout, according to Tony Tavares, president of the Mighty Ducks and Disney Sports Enterprises.

Let’s suppose each team also drops $1 million in local broadcast money.

On licensed merchandise, each NHL team made about $1 million last year as its share of hats, jackets, shirts and hockey cards sold nationally.

Fred Scalera, vice president for retail licensing at NHL Enterprises, said of the shortened season to come, “We will absolutely do much more than half” of the record $1.1 billion in retail sales that the league logged last season.

But the rinks were dark during the all-important Christmas season, and some retailers flooded with hockey inventory have been marking items down by 50%. Let’s give the league a break and say they’ll make half what they made last year, so the teams lose $500,000 apiece.

In addition to its national licensing revenue, every team gets to keep what it can make on sales of its own merchandise within a 40-mile radius of its home arena.

Every team but the Ducks, that is. On entering the NHL, the Ducks negotiated the right to keep the proceeds on Duck items sold at Disney stores, a chain with more than 250 outlets across the country. Depending on how Disney splits the take between its 100%-owned retail chain and its 100%-owned hockey team, those sales could bring the Ducks many times more than their share of the league’s national revenue.

On the other hand, the Slap Shot retail shops, which sell King merchandise in the Los Angeles area, are owned not by the team but by a company that was controlled by McNall and is now embroiled in his bankruptcy, Handelman said.