Today's New York Times had a very interesting article on the economics behind the NHL lock-out including this analysis:

Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies sports business issues, questions if some small-market and Sun Belt franchises will survive longterm. Within 10 years, he envisions a North American super league stripped of perhaps a dozen current franchises, which would fold or become minor-league clubs. "The notion that the NHL can solve its problems with a salary cap is ludicrous," Noll said. "It will increase profits for the best teams, but it doesn't make the small-market teams viable. The disparity of revenues across the league is greater than in any other sport, and there's no salary solution to that problem. Some teams have 25 times (the local TV revenue) of other teams. The only solution is to get rid of the small-market teams or subsidize them. Even if salaries were zero dollars per year, I question if some small-market teams would have enough revenue to cover costs. Blowing up the league is the likely outcome because the big-market teams don't see revenue sharing as being in their best interest," Noll said.

By that logic, the players are like the fans, witnesses to the tensions among the owners, the rich against the poor. With an average player learning curve into the NHL taking five years, even trying to break the union won't help either through replacement players. No one will buy that product. S+R is now running radio ads saying they are selling off hockey fans stuff for 50% this week. Don't expect them buy stock from the wholesaler early for 2005-06. The discounting of the league's product is already embarrassingly plain.

My question is this - what is Bettman's end game? When advising clients on negotiation, it is always necessary to formulate where you want to be and determine whether there is an available path to that goal. I cannot figure out his path let alone his goal except that the path requires drastic loss of good will, market and long-term stability. Does Bettman think is going to watch five or ten years of bad scab hockey to get to the point that the game resembles what ever it is supposed to resemble? The good mature players will be elsewhere in Europe with new found television access to the North American market. We are already getting some Swedish league games here. A sector of the current NHL fan base will be happy with that. Through the process of scab hockey he loses say five to ten franchises and much of the TV coverage - those teams' live and sofa fans aren't coming back. He will have pissed off Canadians, the game's core, generally by messing with the game. That will hang in the air for years. So who wins? What if the WHA makes a go of it with the NHLPA behind it this time? Half of the current hockey fans would support that - I sure would. I simply do not see the upside he imagines. And what of his own plan of outcome? Quit his job the summer of 2006 after another season is lost taking solace in the fact that someone was going to have to pull that card out of the bottom of the whole thing, that the NHL he had grown was never going to be viable?

If Nole's analysis is correct, it is interesting and, yet, odd to think that the NHL could take a page from the CFL's business plan - viable, smaller, focused. Like hockey was before Bettman.