It’s true that some franchises are losing money, but to blame that on the players is out and out deception. First of all, the teams may be losing money, but the ownerships are not. That is an important distinction. Secondly the players didn’t approve of those franchises. The players didn’t place them in non-hockey markets. The players didn’t collect and enjoy any of the expansion fees. The players didn’t make the business decisions that financially strapped the teams. The players weren’t even in the room when those decisions were made. So how can anyone fault the players for this? The owners and the League mismanaged those teams into oblivion, so the owners and the League must bear the brunt of the repercussions.

Yet the owners, with typical near-sightedness, don’t see things that way. In every single labour dispute, the first thing they do is publicly lambaste the players. Whether they know it or not, that is killing the golden goose. The only thing the owners have of value to sell are the players. That’s it. By swaying the public to hate the players, to get the media and the average fan to loathe the surly, spoiled machismo of the professional athlete, the owners in essence are damning themselves to ruination. They are discrediting the only thing they are really marketing. What business dumps on its own product in such a fashion? What business doesn’t stop and think that in diminishing the value of its cash cow it is guaranteeing no return on investment? If the fans see the players as worthless as the owners do, then the fans will stage their own private boycott. They’ll stop attending arenas, they’ll stop buying jerseys, they’ll stop following statistics, and they’ll stop watching games on TV—which decreases revenue for the sport, and thus the owners. Fans are just as fickle as players are and the backlash is usually not worth it. Just ask Major League Baseball.

So they want to change things, but if they thought long and hard about it, they’d realize that it’s not the players they need to change, but the way they run hockey teams. For the first time ever, it is the players who are united, and the owners who are fragmented. What the owners really need is protection from themselves. That’s what a salary cap does. A salary cap isn’t for the good of the players, or even for the good of the game. It’s for the good of the owners. It keeps them honest. It’s the owners who set prices, it’s the owners who sell tickets, it’s the owners who draw up contracts, and it’s the owners who run hockey franchises. If an owner doesn’t want to pay a player an exorbitant amount of money, he doesn’t have to. But he does. Why? Because other owners will. Gone are the days when a player could be blackballed from the entire League, and all owners would honour it. Today there are no agreements. Every owner is out for his own skin, and if that means at the expense of 29 other teams, then so be it.

But as is the case in business politics, owners would rather deep six the business than admit to any wrongdoing. And part of the reason why they are even in this mess at all is because the players don’t trust them. At every step of this league’s sordid history, the owners repeatedly and continuously lied, cheated, and scammed the players out of every last dime they could, so it’s hard not to blame the players for never believing another thing the owners ever have to say. They’ve been fooled a dozen times, and they’re not falling for it anymore.

So what do the players do? Answer: nothing. And if the owners can’t see that, then perhaps the only recourse is for the players to leave the NHL forever and start their own league. Some of them may be apprehensive about that, but that’s just a form of battered wife syndrome. As soon as they realize that there’s not a hell of a lot that the owners and the League do for them, they’re going to wonder why they even miss it. Since when has the NHL ever given them a fair shake?

Neither side is arguing how much they have or how much they want, but rather how much the other side deserves. But he bottom line is: Nobody pays a single red cent to watch an owner run a team. They pay for the product on the ice, on the field, on the court, or in the diamond. Period.