Please excuse me if I don’t get too excited about the developing news that the NHL has (as early as this Tuesday if some are to be believed) discussed the possibility of swallowing up the hit involved in the “making whole” portion of a new CBA. To be honest, too much about this doesn’t pass the stink test for me, and if anything it raises more questions.
Allow me to contextualize: I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have completed a few years of training during grad school under one of the most talented and charismatic psychologists I have ever met, Dr. Harvey Mandel (may he rest in peace). Of all the things I learned from Harvey, of which there were many, the one lasting piece of advice that always stuck with me was that the most useful thing one could develop for use in their clinical skill set was a well honed “Bull%#*t Detector”. Point being (in a very pared down manner) that if we just passively accept things we are told at face value we are doing a disservice to both our client(s) and our formulation of the situation at hand. Conversely, if we question when we detect something that smells like BS, our answers can help us navigate towards what may really be at play, and while one may not choose to explicitly call someone on it, it provides you with a context with which to continue formulating the case moving forward.
Back to this evening’s news. My BS detector has been going a little wonky, suffice it to say. When I question myself as to why, I find myself asking this question:
If this such a major concession on the part of the owners, why not hold off canning the Winter Classic game at least another week, if not two?
This train of thought is driven in large part by a few factors:
1) The estimated value of this one game is $10,000,000.
2) The league covering “making whole” in the new CBA would, in tandem with the 50/50 split, be a significant move towards engaging the PA back into negotiations with some real traction for the first time in a while.
3) If points one and two are assumed to be true, from a business standpoint does it not make sense that the league would not throw in the $250,000 payment due to the University of Michigan today and buy themselves another week or two to hammer a potential deal out in light of the fact that they believe they’ve removed a major sore point from the perspective of the NHLPA. That’s a payment that represents approximately 2.5% of the payoff should a deal come to fruition.
Yet we see this news coming out hours AFTER the league has cancelled the game in question….
This does not make sense indeed Johnny Cochran. Something is starting to smell here…
So now the question becomes this:
Why make a major concession that could potentially net you a $10,000,000 cash fall for one game only to not give yourself the time to reap that benefit by cancelling said game within (if sources are to be believed) two days following the beginnings of discussions around said concession?
There are a number of potential answers to mull over here:
1) Was the concession around “making whole” not to the NHLPA’s liking?
2) Was the concession around “making whole” not, in fact, as major as reported (i.e., Held just enough features of something that the league could use to say they were making concessions while keeping a straight face, when in fact there really wasn’t much of substance there to begin with.)
3) Was this actually an orchestrated “leak” meant to follow a piece of bad PR, with the end game being to make the PA look bad for not taking a “great deal” and subsequently leaving the NHL “no other choice” but to cancel the game (as many believe the 50/50 offer may have been in light of the Levin focus group revelations a few weeks back)?
4) Is the news of this “major concession” inaccurate?
5) There is a concession but the general belief was that any talks this would generate would be held too late to salvage the game. In as much as this might be the case, any subsequent talks were intended to be a springboard to save a partial season minus the Winter Classic.
6) Combination of bits and pieces of the first five points!!!
Of these possibilities, the pessimist in me leans to two and three, the optimist to one and five, and the realist to six. Given that it’s Darren Dreger reporting this news, the only point I would be quite inclined to discount is four, although never say never.
So, in exploring the possibilities I have brainstormed, a third of them fall predominantly on the optimistic side. But even that is an overstatement, as my optimism around the first possibility (NHL concession not acceptable to NHLPA) is really optimism around the leagues’ ability to make a genuine and meaningful effort at a concession, which I think for any hockey fan should be a good sign. But alas, intentions don’t necessarily get deals done, leaving me only with number five as a startpoint for the resumption of negotiations that could logically fit with what I’ve seen go down today. A one in six, or about a 17% chance of optimism in my daily forecast…
Of course, the former would be assuming that this particular option is the one I felt was most likely given what went down not only today, but the way these “negotiations” have played out over the past two months. Given that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour I unfortunately cannot make that assumption. Rather, my gut tells me that what best fits today cannot be broken down into one simple explanation, and subsequently leads me to believe that number six is most likely: A dash of genuine offer mixed in with a heap of spin doctoring and massive dose of transferring the negative PR somewhere else. Look, I don’t want to think this, and in all honesty ignorance would be bliss in this process. But as Harvey taught me, you cannot ignore the smell of BS when it waifs you’re way, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t had to plug my nose all night…
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