So the NHL lockout is finally over. Let me be the first to say, great timing! I don't mean that it was just in time to avoid cancelling the season all together. I mean it's great that just as football is winding down and the holidays are over, hockey is starting up. It's the perfect time; We should do this again next year.
The big disappointment in all this is how ordinary the final deal is. After all the delays, the walking away from the table, the mediation, you start to assume that nothing is getting done unless either one side totally caves (like last time) or the solution is a radical departure. The way the two sides were carrying on, I assumed that getting a mutually-agreeable deal would require inventing new branches of mathematics to divvy up the revenues. But nope, it just took boring old compromise and splitting differences.
So why couldn't this have been done in the fall? No idea. It confirms the low value the business of hockey places on actually presenting a product. No, I'm not one of these naive fans who expects everyone to come together because they care about he fans. But I do expect the leaders of any business to put the long term health of the business ahead of petty bean-counting, reasoning that at some point it's important to keep the product in the public eye than to maximize profit in every conceivable way. I suspect that the NHL has put short term thinking ahead of long term once again.
But maybe they know the fans will come crawling back like the last few times. The possible reasons they might not:
Watching the NHL try to re-win its fans may be more entertaining than the games.
The big disappointment in all this is how ordinary the final deal is. After all the delays, the walking away from the table, the mediation, you start to assume that nothing is getting done unless either one side totally caves (like last time) or the solution is a radical departure. The way the two sides were carrying on, I assumed that getting a mutually-agreeable deal would require inventing new branches of mathematics to divvy up the revenues. But nope, it just took boring old compromise and splitting differences.
So why couldn't this have been done in the fall? No idea. It confirms the low value the business of hockey places on actually presenting a product. No, I'm not one of these naive fans who expects everyone to come together because they care about he fans. But I do expect the leaders of any business to put the long term health of the business ahead of petty bean-counting, reasoning that at some point it's important to keep the product in the public eye than to maximize profit in every conceivable way. I suspect that the NHL has put short term thinking ahead of long term once again.
But maybe they know the fans will come crawling back like the last few times. The possible reasons they might not:
- This work stoppage seemed so arbitrary and unnecessary
- They don't have a new overhaul of the rules for fans to anticipate this time.
- Being half-way through the season this time, a lot of fans may have found other ways to spend their time, whether that's through junior hockey, basketball, Netflix, Downton Abbey or whatever.
Watching the NHL try to re-win its fans may be more entertaining than the games.
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