NHL owners should fear themselves, not Fehr
Don Fehr just won the right to be paid handsomely to watch the upcoming NHL labor-management negotiations from a ringside seat.
Now you may ask why he wouldn’t be one of the combatants, given that he has just been hired as the new head of the NHL Players Association. But that’s not how this one plays.
This is going to be a festival of owner-on-owner cannibalism, the big fish/little-fish war brought home for all to see, and Fehr doesn’t represent any of the owners.
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Not technically, anyway. He does, however, have to make sure that 30 viable teams keep the market open for as many of his clients as possible, and toward that end, he has to be a subtle, almost imperceptible advocate for the prerogatives of the small-revenue sides.
As in "Revenue Sharing, Part IV: The Reckoning."
The NHLPA has vacillated over the years between MLB-level stubborn and NFL-level acquiescent, and in its best times understood that the best way to beat the owners was to sit back and watch the owners slit their own throats in search of a better shave.
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| Fehr needs an owners' proposal so insulting, he can galvanize typically conservative NHL players. (US Presswire) |
The small-revenue teams want to lose less money, presumably so that they will have more to give to players (and, of course, more to pocket as well).
And Fehr needs to find an owners’ proposal so insulting that he can galvanize the players, a normally conservative lot, into standing up for their prerogatives.
Traditionally, any agreement is hailed by the owners on the day it is signed, and then they all go back and figure out ways to circumvent the agreement so that they can outbid each other for players and blow up the agreement. Yay avarice!
And while Fehr’s decision to take the job confuses some, this may end up being low-hanging fruit for the longtime head of the MLBPA.
One person it does confuse is his former superior and mentor, Marvin Miller, who told CBC’s Elliotte Friedman, "I do believe, in my estimation, that Don is far better than anything the hockey players have ever had...directing them," he said.
But, he admits, he doesn't understand why Fehr is taking the NHLPA job because of the company he is about to keep.
"I don't think highly of the management people in hockey, based on what's happened over many years," Miller said. "Miserable human beings. They don't know the meaning of competition. Their whole idea is collusion."
He also has his doubts about whether the players understand how much self-healing they have to do, through the European-vs.-North American dynamics and their own fear of unemployment.
"A union that gets beaten and broken is gone. You have to start from scratch. A union that is beaten thoroughly by management, I'm not saying can't come back [but] it's that much harder."
What Fehr has going for him, and therefore what the union has going for it, is the knowledge that the owners are traditionally their own worst enemies because they do not have a common goal. They all believe in management getting all the breaks it can get off the backs of the players, but they stop when the question of "What can you do for us?" comes from their fellow operators.
There, they break into groups of large and small, and the large-revenue producers like to beat on the small with torque wrenches to remind them of the essential laws of supply of demand.
Therein lies Fehr’s greatest advantage when negotiations for the next CBA begin. The owners don’t trust each other because they can’t, never have and never will.
And if that’s different than it was when Fehr was working the baseball owners, that only makes the gig, with all due respect to Marvin Miller, that much easier.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.
