The Big Question: Is the NHL headed for another work stoppage?

The Big Question will be a weekly feature on PHT where we ask a question, provide some background and ask you, the reader, to weigh in with your opinions.

Today’s question: Is the NHL headed for another work stoppage?

Type “NHLPA” and “opening salvo” into Google News and you won’t come up short of matches. Ever since Friday when the union withheld its consent to the league’s realignment plan, the specter of another NHL work stoppage has loomed larger.

The current CBA is set to expire Sep. 15, right around training camp. Suffice to say there are numerous issues that need to be resolved before a new agreement is signed – realignment being a relatively minor one.

Forget travel and playoff fairness. This labor negotiation, like most labor negotiations, will hinge on money.

From Bruce Arthur’s column in this weekend’s National Post:

The NHL currently pays out 57% of hockey-related revenue to players, which is coincidentally what the NBA was paying in its last collective bargaining agreement. That number is now between 49 and 51. The NFL was paying about 53% to its players, after its billion-dollar deduction off the top of revenues. But in a league that defines sporting success, that number is now closer to 48. Both leagues won, without much trouble.

There’s also the matter of Donald Fehr, the new head of the NHLPA. Fehr led baseball players through a 232-day strike that resulted in the canceling of the 1994 World Series. So you know he doesn’t back down easily.

Have you seen how much baseball players are being paid these days? Yeah, they have Fehr to thank for a lot of that. The owners wanted a salary cap. They didn’t get one.

That being said, the NHL is in a much better position than it was in September of 2004 when it locked out the players, a move that led to two things. First, a canceled season. Second, a hard salary cap.

Hockey-related revenue has grown rapidly since the lockout, as evidenced by the rising salary cap that’s tied to it.

Teams like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, NY Rangers, Detroit and Chicago are printing money with “cost certainty.”

The Nashville Predators are playing in front of sellouts on a nightly basis. Think they want their momentum halted?

The Winnipeg Jets haven’t even finished their first season since moving from Atlanta. Think they want a lockout?

True, there are franchises that are losing money, but some of that can be blamed on the economy.

Not to mention, for some of those money-losing franchises, another work stoppage so soon after the last one could be the final straw for sports fans in their markets. Canadians will always come back to hockey. Will Floridians?

Meanwhile, the players aren’t doing so badly themselves. Tough to complain about skyrocketing salaries and making millions of dollars in an awful economy. What’s the PR strategy for that?

For what it’s worth, I think the worst we’ll see is a handful of lost games, like what happened in the NBA. An entire lost season still falls in the “they can’t be that stupid” category for me.

In the meantime, there will be plenty of rhetoric and sabre rattling. Deadlines will loom. Deadlines will be pass.

So in the words of Frank the Tank, let’s try to keep our composure. We can’t have anyone freaking out. It’s all part of the process.

Or maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?