NHL Ends Faceoff by Canceling Season

Apologizing to fans on what he called “a sad, regrettable day,” National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the 2004-05 season Wednesday, unable to wrest from the players’ union the sweeping concessions he deemed essential to reinforcing the league’s shaky economic footing.

The NHL, whose small TV revenues and limited fan appeal rank it behind Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball Assn. among the “big four” sports, became the first major North American sports league to lose an entire season because of a labor dispute. The Stanley Cup, awarded every year but one since 1893, will not be kissed and cradled and paraded before a roaring crowd this spring.

“We’re done losing money as a league,” a somber Bettman said at a news conference here. “We weren’t looking to make a great deal, we were looking to make a fair deal.... There’s no reason, with the right economic system, we can’t have 30 healthy, competitive teams.”

The announcement ended two days of intense negotiations marked by major moves on both sides but not enough progress to produce a consensus and play the 28-game season the league had prepared last week.

The NHL Players’ Assn., tacitly acknowledging Bettman’s assertions that clubs had lost money, if not agreeing with a league-commissioned report that put losses in the last decade at more than $1.8 billion, dropped its opposition to a salary cap. That concession came after the NHL proposed setting a cap at a negotiated figure and not linking it to league revenue. Players had resisted that link because they said they did not trust owners’ accounting.

The union, whose members earned an average salary of $1.83 million in 2003-04, proposed a cap late Monday of $52 million per team. The NHL proposed $40 million. Each budged, and the final difference appeared to be small: The Players’ Assn. proposed operating under a salary cap of $49 million per team, and the NHL’s maximum was $42.5 million. Bettman said, however, that the league-wide difference would have been $200 million, “which we didn’t have.”

Tim Leiweke, president of the Los Angeles Kings and a member of the NHL’s executive committee, said Bettman did what owners had asked him to do in attempting to fix the league’s broken economic system. But, he added, no one felt triumphant.

“Smart people should have solved this by today,” Leiweke said. “I’m ashamed of what we just did, and I hope all of us feel that way.”

There were no negotiations between about 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, when the union rejected Bettman’s final $42.5-million cap proposal, and the 11 a.m. Wednesday deadline Bettman had set for the basics of a deal to be in place. The silence was a contrast to the frantic final hours of the last labor dispute, a decade ago, which was resolved in time to save 48 games of the 1994-95 season.

“We had momentum this week. This had a chance to get done,” said Pat Brisson, an influential agent. “I blame the league. The league did not move much after the players moved so much. The league is to blame for not closing the gap.”

Bettman, whose league generated revenue of $2.1 billion in 2002-03 but lost its five-year, $600-million TV contract with ABC/ESPN after last season, said the NHL had given all it could give. And union leader Bob Goodenow, after saying the league would “receive nothing from us,” kept his word.

“I hoped we’d never see the unthinkable,” Goodenow said during a news conference in Toronto, where the union has its headquarters. “The players never asked for more money. They just asked for a marketplace to exist so they could negotiate with their clubs for what they’re worth....

Bettman “owes an apology because he started the lockout. Yes, we apologize to the fans. We’ve done an awful lot to get to a fair resolution, but it’s the other side we have not been able to make contact with,” he added.

Each side said its previous proposals would be off the table when negotiations resumed, after a cooling-off period. Bettman said the NHL would revert to linking payrolls and revenues “because nobody knows what the revenues are going to be.” Goodenow said the 24% across-the-board pay cut players had accepted was no longer automatic. “It’s a fresh start,” he said.

Bettman said the league would soon discuss plans for the entry draft and the 2005-06 season. One option is to declare an impasse, unilaterally implement labor rules and bring in replacement players, which surely would result in legal battles.

Leiweke said next season might also be wiped out.

“I’m only one of 30 owners and just one voice,” he said, “but I will tell Gary that we should not and will not come back until we get an economic system that works.... This is not a sport that will easily survive.”

How much it has been missed is open to question. Replacement programming on ESPN2 has averaged a 0.4 rating, double what the network’s NHL telecasts averaged at this point last year.

Fans were quick to express their disgust.

“I mostly blame the players,” said Kristen Mazza, 33, a Kings fan and UC Irvine business assistant who lives in Huntington Beach. “I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes more in one year than I’ll make in 30 years.”

Alienating fans could take years to undo.

“People are going to spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere and won’t come back,” said Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports who runs a sports television consulting firm. “The league has made a miscalculation. In my opinion, the entertainment dollars directed toward hockey will not come back to the game for years once we have a new deal, and certainly not as fast as the league thinks it will.”

Paul Swangard, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing School at the University of Oregon and an avid Vancouver Canucks fan, said the NHL’s biggest loss might be its standing.

“This sport has maintained a place in the big four of United States sports, while never really having all that the other three had,” he said. “Perhaps in giving up the entire season, it will lose that stature. That is the risk.... I’m still on the owners’ side and believe that for a league that’s not built on TV revenues, tying its player costs to revenues is even more important.”

Wednesday’s announcement completed a precipitous fall for a league that a dozen years ago was touted as the next big thing in American sports.

The 1988 trade that brought Wayne Gretzky, the game’s greatest player, from Edmonton to Los Angeles gave hockey a glamorous and marketable figure. From 1992 through 1994, the Chicago Blackhawks, Kings and New York Rangers, major-market teams that sparked interest beyond traditional strongholds in the Northeast U.S. and Canada, advanced to the Stanley Cup finals.

Hockey had never been hotter than in 1993, when Walt Disney Co. launched an Anaheim expansion franchise, calling it the Mighty Ducks after the fictional hockey team in its movie of the same name, and Blockbuster video magnate Wayne Huizenga joined the league with the expansion Florida Panthers. The NHL moved into the South and Southwest, mirroring the country’s population shift; Ducks’ merchandise was among the most popular in sports, rivaling the Dallas Cowboys’.

A decade of expansion, however, stretched its player pool. And although the NHL had devised stern penalties to end the bench-clearing brawls that marred its image in the 1970s, it couldn’t fix a decline in scoring.

The NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball, with wider audiences, marketed themselves well and won lucrative TV deals. Each also adopted a salary cap or luxury tax, which the NHL has never had.

The NHL let the Winnipeg Jets move to Phoenix and the Quebec Nordiques move to Denver, losing traditional strongholds. And when the Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium and Montreal Forum were replaced by cavernous arenas with expensive suites, the blue-collar fans who were the backbone of the sport were pushed toward the rafters, or priced out altogether.

The cancellation coincides with this month’s 25th anniversary of one of the sport’s high points: the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s stunning victory over the Soviet Union at Lake Placid, N.Y., en route to its gold-medal triumph.

“Perhaps everyone at that level involved in the taffy pull between owners and players needs to go back 25 years,” Jack O’Callahan, who played on that U.S. team and for the Blackhawks, said this week. “They need to take a look at the landscape and be a little more thankful and humble and sit down and work to bring hockey back.”

Times staff writers Chris Foster and Ben Bolch in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Managing their money

How other major professional sports leagues try to control costs:

National Football League

* Has an $80-million salary cap.

* The league has been able to maintain the “hard” cap because there are few guaranteed salaries, unlike in baseball, basketball and hockey. In those sports, even if a player is cut, the team still has to pay him.

* Has about 1,800 players, roughly 60 per team.

National Basketball Assn.

* Had a nearly $44-million salary cap heading into this season.

* The cap is considered “soft” because it allows teams to go over the limit to re-sign their own players.

* Has about 450 players, 15 per team.

Major League Baseball

* No salary cap; owners agreed to a luxury tax instead.

* The tax charges teams a penalty for exceeding salary thresholds.

* Money generated by the tax is used for player benefits and development programs.

* Has about 800 players, roughly 25 per team.

Sources: NFL; NBA; MLB; slam.canoe.ca

Los Angeles Times