The National Hockey League Player’s Association

The history of the NHL is actually rife with player insurrections and the League ruthlessly cracking down on them every time.

The first came in 1910. Then, the National Hockey Association (precursor to the NHL) snuffed an attempt to unionize by the league's leading scorer, Art Ross. The League had imposed a salary cap of $5,000 for each team, and vowed to blackball any player who didn't agree to the terms. The media and the public vilified Ross, who comprised half of his team's entire payroll, for being a greedy rabble-rouser (and probably a communist), and the union idea died.

The second one was in 1925. Players had signed contracts for a 24-game season, and then the league decided to increase it to 30 games, with no increase in pay. The Hamilton Tigers threatened to boycott the season, demanding an extra $200 for the six additional games. Refusing to negotiate, the League suspended the entire team for the rest of the season and the playoffs (they were in first place), and just to get their point across, fined each player $200. The team was not asked back the next season.

That calmed the waters for about 20 years. In 1946 a group of players gathered to discuss the idea of a league-wide pension plan, operated and owned by the players. The League, lauding the idea, stepped in and took over control of the pension plan and its organization and statutes, essentially pulling the rug out from underneath the players’ feet. All players initially paid $900 into the plan (which was huge, considering the average salary was between $3,500 and $5,000), and the owners agreed to pay $600 per player. But none of that came from owner profits. They merely paid the gate receipts for the all-star game and some playoff games (both of which players did not get paid for), effectively donating the players own wages into their pension plan. In some years, there was very little—if any—actual owner contribution. By 1957, the pension had amassed over $1.5 million dollars, which the owners promptly and quietly began distributing among themselves. For the next 25 years the players would live with the belief that they had the best pension plan in pro sports.

And then there was the well-popularized "Terrible" Ted Lindsay and Doug Harvey uprising in 1957. Lindsay, Red Wings Captain and one-third of the awesome "Production Line" (with Gordie Howe and Sid Abel) during the mid-50s, was tenacious, insolent and insightful. Earlier in the decade he, Howe, and teammate Marty Pavelich decided to start a plastics business, and his knowledge accumulated there about business costs and book-keeping opened his eyes to the way the NHL operated. Suddenly he looked around and saw that while his fellow players struggled to make ends meet playing hockey, people in other occupations were building their futures. There was an awful lot of money being made in hockey, and the players were getting next to none of it. The numbers were just not adding up.

Lindsay's suspicions were given the litmus test when he, by chance, ran into Cleveland Indians pitcher and founding President of the baseball players association, Bob Feller. On advice from Feller, Lindsay travelled to New York to meet with law firm Mound & Lewis, who had just successfully negotiated a $9.75 million pension settlement in World Series broadcast revenues. Lindsay compared business practices. The results were staggering; hockey players were, in essence, indentured servants, with conditions far worse than in any other sport. Comparisons to medieval feudalism were not far off. Team Presidents—like Jack Adams in Detroit—ran their clubs like fiefdoms. Inspired by Lindsay’s plight, the lawyers vowed to do for hockey what they did for baseball. They urged Lindsay and the players to unionize.

Lindsay—and all athletes, for that matter—did not want a union. It destroys the image of the sport to make them look like petty trade hagglers, arguing over percentages and rights. They just wanted to play hockey. Even today, union is still a taboo word in professional sports. They much prefer the softer and fraternal word "association". But unions were the way things got done in the business world, and if the hockey players were going to get their fair share, a union was what they would have to be. So on February 12, 1957 they formed the National Hockey League Players' Association, with Lindsay as President.

The owner backlash was typical of the men who had been playing this sort of game—the one not on the ice—for years. Club Presidents isolated and belittled individual team members. Owners greased the palms of sports writers and newspapers, molding press and public opinion in their favour. Jack Adams, smelling the runt behind all this, began a public smear campaign of Ted Lindsay, releasing false salary figures exposing him as a greedy, selfish malcontent manipulating the players for his own end. Conn Smythe treated his Toronto Maple Leafs even less cordially: "Traitors!" "Quislings!" "Communists!" Endless tirades about all the owners did for the players, all their sacrifices for the good of the game. Talk of gratitude, loyalty, and looking after each other in this, the humblest of businesses.

Publicly, the League simply refused to acknowledge the Association's existence. It didn't negotiate, answer phone calls or respond to letters. One by one, the founding members of the Association were vilified, ostracized, blacklisted, and ultimately ejected from hockey within a year. A staggering 32% of the league were replacement players by the 57-58 season. Lindsay, Detroit's leading scorer and first team all-star, was traded to the Chicago Blackhawks—the redheaded stepchild and torrential cellar dweller of the NHL, and its poorest club—for next to nothing. With him out of the way, the blacklisting went unimpeded, as he was branded a spoiled muckraker who was betraying the interests of the players.

Facing intense public loathing and a losing battle against the League, the Association finally capitulated and met the owners for one final settlement. Out of this deal, they got next to nothing. The only thing the owners gave up was the players’ right to have the Association, as powerless and ineffective as it was. By early 1958, the National Hockey League Players Association quietly dissolved. Everything important that it outlined at the outset was instead left to the honesty and goodwill of the owners. No questions about the pension fund were ever answered. Lindsay was quietly fazed out of the League two years later. Several others—including Hall of Famers—were simply forgotten and dismissed by the League once they retired. One ended up homeless, freezing to death in 1972. Doug Harvey himself ended up penniless and living in an abandoned railway car.

Today's NHLPA that we know and understand was formed in 1967. Learning from their past mistakes and emboldened with a new sense of right and wrong, player representatives from the original six clubs met to adopt a constitution and elect a President. At a meeting with team owners, newly elected NHLPA President Bob Pulford let it be known that if the owners refused to accept the new Association, the players would seek recognition through the Canadian Labour Relations Board. The players also sought a guarantee that no player would suffer unfair treatment for being a member of the NHLPA. The owners yielded, if only because they figured that unionizing was an inevitability, and after witnessing Jimmy Hoffa’s Mafia-backed Teamsters Union threaten to take over the NFL players association in 1965, feared the same thing might happen to hockey.

Things did not get better, however. Still retaining a sort of innocence and naiveté about the business of sports, the NHLPA nominated lawyer (and non-hockey guy) Alan Eagleson as its first Executive Director. Essentially handing over power of attorney to him, Eagleson was named for his legendary bouts in winning the minor-pro Springfield Indians team reprieve from their tyrannical owner Eddie Shore (yes, that Eddie Shore), and in negotiating Bobby Orr’s sensational rookie contract with the Boston Bruins. And, subsequently, taking advantage of Orr and milking his status as the first marketable icon of the NHL, in a relationship that was very much like pimp and prostitute. Ruthless and conniving, Eagleson was a despicable mix of sleazy fight promoter Don King, slimy record manager Colonel Tom Parker, and sneaky player agent Bob Sugar from the movie Jerry Maguire, and was every bit as bad for the players as the owners were. Corrupt to the core and putting personal interests ahead of the players and the league, Eagleson stayed as Director for over two decades, treating the treasury as his personal piggy bank and surrounding himself with an entourage that did nothing but consume money and resources. In addition, he withheld millions of dollars of pension money from NHL veterans until 1991, when word of his corruption broke and he was forcibly removed from power. He went on to face criminal charges and in 1998 pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud, agreeing to pay a fine of $1,000,000 and 18 months in jail.

The players, meanwhile, were so grateful that they had an Association at all that they didn’t think to question its effectiveness. In truth, the NHLPA was toothless and complacent for most of its existence. Any concessions they won from the owners were really only what the owners were willing to give them, and in light of the leverage they didn’t know they had, such concessions were pathetic. For instance, one clause was to raise the league minimum wage to $10,000. The League agreed; there was only one player earning less than that anyway. Other things the League implemented, like increasing the schedule to 74 games (and then later to 80, and then 84), adding more playoff rounds, expansion teams (read as: expansion fees), went straight into the owners pockets. If anything, the formation of the NHLPA brought about a new level of docility for the players. With a new NBC contract added on top of that, the owners had never been more profitable. The players still didn’t even have the basic right to have copies of their own contracts. There was lots of talk and meetings, but very little ever got done. The pie was bigger, sure, but the players’ piece actually shrank.

The first collective bargaining agreement occurred in 1975. Just beforehand, the owners whipped out their most effective weapon (and one they’ve used many, many times): that the players would kill the game if they pressed their demands, or any demands for that matter. In addition, sportswriters began reporting secret financial information about weak franchises, declining profitability, and the League hemorrhaging money. Player salaries were blamed. Claims that salaries consuming 50% of total League revenue were smothering the owners’ capacity to run hockey clubs. Sound familiar?

Owners love trotting that stat out. Today they claim that player salaries consume 73% of revenue. But they only include gate receipts—which they routinely underestimate—and conveniently ignore revenue from broadcasting, promotions, concessions, licensing and expansion.

1995 was the first actual, realistic, fair, just and honest bargaining agreement the players have received by the NHL. It was finally wrought from the owners’ hands kicking and screaming, after going through a 10-day strike in 1992, a half-season lockout in 1994, and a lawsuit that awarded a group of retired hockey legends (which included Gordie Howe) a $41 million settlement—a pension they should have received 30 years ago. Finally, for the first time, the Association was using the two most powerful weapons in any union’s arsenal: strike and legal action.

The owners continued to insist that the sky was falling, however. In fact, you ask any owner anytime, he will never flat-out admit how well he’s doing. It’s a staple of professional sports business to never show how much your hand is worth, and always insist that your risk is greater than the other side’s, and that you stand to lose no matter what happens.