October 5, 2007

I have no problem with watching Phoenix or Chicago get relegated.

posted by igottheblues at 11:27 AM CDT on October 5

This could actually work. First, though, you would have to re-organize the lower league structure. I'm thinking about the rather bloated AHL here. Perhaps if you have 3 major second-tier leagues, each with 2 divisions, a very nice 8-team playoff (6 division winners plus 2 wild cards) could be set up. The top 3 (winner & loser in the championship game plus the winner of the "consolation" game) move up to the NHL.

The threat of relegation might be exactly what the Jacobs family needs to start caring about more than the bottom line in Boston. With 5 or 6 AHL teams within easy driving distance of Boston, the Bruins would soon begin losing fans, and more importantly, ticket sales.

I somehow can't see too many NHL owners agreeing to something like this, but if it were to mean the long-term survival of the NHL, perhaps they could be talked into it. Another point is what happens to player salaries on the relegated teams? Could all NHL contracts be altered to the "2-way" contract that many fringe players work under? You can bet there'd be some real passion on the ice if players on the relegation-threatened teams suddenly started looking at their personal bottom line.

posted by Howard_T at 11:58 AM CDT on October 5

Nope. Don't like it. I'm for contraction - not relegation. The competition level in the AHL, ECHL, etc. is so far from the NHL it would be embarrassing. And it's yet again a scenario where the actual fans of the sport are slapped across the face in favour of trying to woo some fence-sitting sportsfan who couldn't really give a crap.

posted by WeedyMcSmokey at 1:01 PM CDT on October 5

Thank you weedy, someone had to say it. This is a direct slap in the face of the fans. I have been a rabid pens fan my whole life. I hate the Flyers, Devils and Rangers in that order. It would be possible for my favorite team to fold, or rivalries may disappear for years, decades or forever. This is the single dumbest idea I have heard yet to fix the NHL.

posted by Steel_Town at 3:19 PM CDT on October 5

For those with opinions like Weedy's, who think relegation/promotion would create such mismatches, please look more closely at the experience in European soccer leagues. Teams coming up know they have at least one season of vastly larger revenue and buy players to help close the difference--Wigan and Reading the last two seasons have shown its possible to be competitive, and Reading even qualified for Europe their second season up. As for rivalries, I understand the sentiment but don't agree; why should you care who the opposition is if you're a fan of a specific team and the game? There will always be six players in different kit on the ice when the puck drops to root against.

Of course neither contraction nor relegation/promotion will happen in the NHL or other major American professional league, even MLS, not as long as owners have to pay multimillion dollar fees to get a franchise, expansion or existing. Do the math: Either change in the NHL would need the votes of 2/3rds of the owners, which is 22, and a 20 team league would mean 12 departures (temporary or not). A 24 team league proposal might squeak through, somehow, if the situation gets dire enough.

The threat of lawsuits, though, does not seem like a big obstacle to me (note: IANAL) as long as the Player's Union accepts the deal. Contraction or, even more so, R/P would be a clear business decision and courts generally give a very wide berth to them. Possibly a breach of contract claim might be viable but defensible if the reality on the ground is dire.

Of course the league could try some type of prepackaged Chapter 11 deal if they find a really creative legal team.

Returning to reality, as long as there are suckers willing to step up and buy any franchise that comes available, or do a Mario and get it from a default, then the league will stay at 32 teams. Or more.

Media deals make up only 4 percent of each of franchise's revenue. Your league is almost entirely dependent on gate receipts and arena revenue.

Wow, I did not realize the situation was so bad for the NHL!

posted by billsaysthis at 4:27 PM CDT on October 5

You know you could have promotion/relegation within the NHL. Everyone who discusses the promotion/relegation idea in North America always talks about promotion/relegation between leagues, but for a variety of obvious reasons that's not going to happen in the North American sports cartel system (unless the leagues in question do some kind of merger).

Don't think of promotion/relegation as demotion to the minor leagues. Think of it as a yearly scheduling readjustment - ie, you have a crappy season, the next year, you get a crappy schedule playing against the other crappy teams. You have a good year, the next year you get a good schedule playing against the other good teams. You're still in the NHL, you still have to meet all of the financial and other requirements of an NHL franchise, the only thing that changes are the names of the teams you are playing against and the name of the trophy you are competing for and/or the name of the division/conference/whatever that you are playing in.

Same thing goes for MLS/USL in soccer here in North America. Promotion/relegation can't happen for a lot of economic and political reasons due to the way that the professional game is organized here. But promotion/relegation within a single league, as described above, is entirely doable. It means that you keep reshuffling each team's "schedule set" each year, based on ability, thus, "like plays against like" and you have far fewer mismatches and blowouts. And you double the number of teams that have a realistic chance of having a winning season (assuming a two division pro/rel settup).

I don't know if such a system would "save" the NHL, but it would make it a whole lot more fun to watch.

posted by dave2007 at 7:20 PM CDT on October 5

The author of this article called the work stoppage a strike. It wasn't a strike, it was a lock-out.
That is all.

posted by NoMich at 11:19 PM CDT on October 5

For those with opinions like Weedy's, who think relegation/promotion would create such mismatches, please look more closely at the experience in European soccer leagues. Teams coming up know they have at least one season of vastly larger revenue and buy players to help close the difference--Wigan and Reading the last two seasons have shown its possible to be competitive, and Reading even qualified for Europe their second season up. As for rivalries, I understand the sentiment but don't agree; why should you care who the opposition is if you're a fan of a specific team and the game?

There are wayyyyy more futbol players than hockey players. Europe has the advantage of having less distance between teams and many cities have many teams.

Plus, I don't see how relegation improves TV revenue - and with gate receipts so important, there's an arena problem, too. There aren't enough big ones.

posted by WeedyMcSmokey at 1:56 PM CDT on October 6

"As long as you have revenue sharing, that idea only hurts the good teams as they end up having a significantly harder schedule than crappy teams. It's almost the opposite of teams' incentive to excel during the regular season to play the 8th seed round one."

This is a typical reaction from North American sports fans, and it is caused by a number of misconceptions that I'd like to address.

Revenue sharing. This concept often gets confused with the concept of parity. The two are completely different things, though they do influence each other and thus get confused. The purpose of revenue sharing originally was to financially stabilize the league in question, by ensuring that clubs having a bad year would still get enough income coming in to be around the next year and have a chance to improve their situation; it was not originally intended to cause parity.

Parity on the other hand is the idea that you have to punish successful teams and reward unsuccessful teams in various ways so as to "handicap" or even things out, and this is done in various ways (at least from my understanding of the NFL; NHL may do some of these things differently) such as through college draft picks and jiggering the schedule to give poorly performing teams easier schedules the following season, etc.

I don't see how my proposal above conflicts with either revenue sharing or parity. In fact, it's just taking the concept of fiddling with the next season's schedule to give poorly performing teams an easier schedule, to its logical conclusion. In point of fact, the existing parity system, in the way it addresses schedules (at least in the NFL the last time I checked; I'm not as familiar with the NHL scheduling system), already "punishes" the good teams and rewards the bad teams. So this proposal I'm discussing isn't really that radical of a change from the already existing systems used in North American sports, once you get over the initial conceptual hurdles.

As for the rest of the objections above, IMO it is looking at things a bit backwards. You seem to be thinking that the good teams get a harder schedule but still have to compete against the bad teams with their easy schedule for Stanley Cup playoff spots; that is not what I am proposing at all!

Sure, the better teams get a harder schedule; but really that's a reward, not a punishment, because being in the upper division (or whatever it would be called) means you have a chance to compete for the Stanley Cup that year, and that means a lot of prestige and chance to earn money in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Being in the lower division means you are in competition that year not for the Stanley Cup, but rather for a chance to get back into the upper division and a chance to compete for the Stanley Cup the next year. There could also be a post-season playoffs and cup competition for the top lower division teams so they could get some post season revenue, too.

What this means in practice is that the top half of the league are only playing against other top half teams, so sure their schedules are "harder" but by not having all those games against the bottom half of the league, fans get to see better matchups and fewer craptactular mismatches and blowouts. The same goes for the bottom half of the league: you get better, more even matchups, ie, you get "parity" by adjusting the "schedule set" every year by moving the top two or three or four teams up from the lower division, and moving the bottom two or three or four teams down from the upper division. Better matchups, more evenly matched teams, means a better product, as well, for the fans to watch.

Yes, this means for the year in question all the lower division teams are "out" of the Stanley Cup playoffs, but they have that year to turn things around and get back into the upper division. That's their motivation, that's their fan's motivation, it works quite well as an incentive for players to play and fans to watch. It may take away the illusion that "any team can win it all" in any given season, but we all know that that is just an illusion. It takes more than one season to turn around a cellar dweller into a championship contender; this system acknowledges that fact and gives the lower teams an easy schedule for a year and a better chance to turn things around, and it gives the upper teams a chance to compete just amongst themselves and thus makes their games that year that much more meaningful than they would have been under the existing system.

posted by dave2007 at 7:06 PM CDT on October 6

Not a bad idea but the money grubbing owners would never go for it.

posted by SportsNarrative at 7:47 PM CDT on October 11