E-Mail This Article to a Friend Will hockey fans care if the NHL goes on hiatus in 2004? BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

The National Hockey League may be in trouble. Maybe you’ve heard about it. If you’re not familiar with the dire forecast, you don’t need to get your knickers in a twist over the fate of the current season. The games being played now and through next May are safe because they fit the terms of the previous collective-bargaining agreement established in January 1995 after a protracted lockout — a situation that delayed the start of the 1994-’95 campaign and reduced the season to a 48-game slate.

Sadly, that agreement will expire as of September 15, 2004, and the NHL owners are expected to prevent the next season from starting if a new deal is not in place. Similar to the issues that nearly brought about a baseball shutdown 15 months ago, the owners want to establish some kind of fiscal sanity within their sport, while the players do not want to make any significant sacrifices, especially if there's talk of a salary cap.

Experts on the subject of this labor strife contend that if a hockey lockout does happen next September, the delay to the start of the season could be protracted. Many hockey watchers can even envision the entire season wiped out, which would be unprecedented in the history of American sports. The baseball strike that cancelled the 1994 post-season was one thing, but that really just affected the final six weeks of the regular season and the eight teams that would have reached the playoffs. A labor dispute that prevents playing an entire season affects everyone, from the players and the team staff members to the folks who work the arena concessions, the minor-league affiliates, and the fan base itself.

And therein lies the underlying question: are hockey fans willing to watch their favorite team go on hiatus, and will they come back if the game is out of their lives for a year or more?

This scenario could not happen in the NFL as we know it, since everyone associated with pro football seems happy with the product as it is now, and a salary cap is already in place. The cap works so well, in fact, that it seems a new champion is crowned every season, and the fairness in requiring each team to play under the same salary constraints gives everyone the same chance at the beginning of every season. Couple that financial peace with the fact that the NFL brings in so much money from the media networks that few could complain that the product itself is overpriced or that the players themselves are underpaid.

The baseball union and the owners came to their senses a year ago last August and avoided shutdown just as the pennant races were heating up. Amazingly, all of the parties who came to the bargaining table realized that closing up shop in the middle of the season — as happened in 1994, which created all kinds of ill will throughout the sport — would have tolled the death knell for America’s pastime. The owners didn’t get their salary cap, but they got more than a few concessions from the players, and the agreement was grudgingly signed. Had it not been, more than a good share of baseball’s long-time fans were primed and ready to walk away permanently from the sport they loved so much, and ultimately baseball’s powers-that-be realized the fans just might be serious this time, and that it wasn’t worth the risk.

The NBA foolishly went about its own labor shutdown five years ago, and in many ways that game has never fully recovered. Sure, there are a lot of serious hoops fans out there, but in the big picture, basketball fans could get by eminently on their ration of the college game. Besides, back then a lot of jack-of-all-trades sports aficionados couldn’t care less whether NBA shut its doors for a few months. When the humbled players did return, they made significant concessions and pretty much gave the owners what they wanted in the first place. The league now has what could be termed a modicum of fiscal common sense, but the salaries earned by some of the marquee names are still astronomical, as "maximum contracts" often involve seven-year commitments at around $15 million guaranteed per annum.

But the NBA had created a real foundation of interest in the Magic-Bird-Jordan years, and that’s something that has not really happened in the NHL. I know that there are a lot of hockey krishnas out there who will be devastated if the league is forced to ice its season, but there are a lot of run-of-the-mill sports fans who just won’t care. The owners devote nearly three-quarters of team revenue to player salaries (which is the highest percentage of the four major sports), and that level of compensation has gone through the proverbial roof in recent years despite the fact that attendance hasn’t significantly increased and TV and radio revenue has flat-lined. ESPN and its parent company, ABC, are the only major network players covering the NHL, and their coverage is sporadic at best in the US. In Boston, the city’s beloved Bruins are broadcast on radio by its all-news station, WBZ-1030, which admittedly has a strong signal but still is not a logical spot for hockey to reside — and it sometimes seems that the station’s main focus and purpose is sidetracked when it is forced to air the team’s games.

Hockey does not have a luxury tax, nor a salary cap, nor gargantuan TV contracts, yet player contracts continue to escalate. The top players this season are Colorado’s Peter Forsberg and Washington’s Jaromir Jagr, each of whom is earning $11 million this season. As in other sports, it wasn’t that long ago that millionaires were tough to find; this season there are six players making $10 million or more, and 53 making $5 million-plus. In fact, over 325 NHL players are earning a mil or more this season in spite of the fact that team revenues have not risen at the same rate that salaries have. The average player now earns upwards of $1.4 million a year, up from $271,000 just a dozen years ago. Add to that the fact that the six Canadian teams have to pay their players in US dollars instead of the Canadian dollars (worth 75 US cents each) they’re collecting at the gate, and you can understand some of the problems that are in play as D-Day approaches next September. Teams in Buffalo and Ottawa have already struggled with bankruptcy issues, and many other teams have been forced to raise ticket prices drastically to compensate for the growing payrolls. For example, at Boston’s FleetCenter, tickets in the first 10 rows of the balcony range from $44 to $68. The balcony.

The league certainly has some strong franchises; teams in Toronto, Detroit, Minnesota, Vancouver, and Colorado routinely play to capacity crowds, and with higher revenues they're able to sign the best players and drive up ticket prices. On the flip side, one-third of the league’s cities are filling their arenas to just 80 percent capacity or less, including our reputed hockey town Boston, where home crowds are averaging just over 14,000 per game (in a venue that can hold 17,500). The Bruins didn’t even sell out their opening-night tilt against New Jersey, the defending Stanley Cup champs. Speaking of the Cup-holders, the Devils are filling their home arena at three-quarters capacity despite the team’s obvious recent success, and the Carolina Hurricanes — just a year and a half removed from a berth in the Cup Finals — are drawing fewer than 12,000 fans (63.4 percent capacity) in Raleigh, NC.

Unlike the other three major sports, the NHL has planted franchise seeds in quite a few small-market regions, and it’s difficult for some of these clubs to earn significant revenue from its local broadcasting-rights fees and advertising. Cities like Columbus, Nashville, Tampa, Raleigh, Buffalo, and Uniondale, NY are fine metropolitan communities, but they have all struggled in recent years to stay solvent competitively and at the turnstiles. Even Chicago, one of the Original Six clubs of the National Hockey League, is next-to-last (to Carolina) in the league’s attendance figures thus far this season, filling the roomy United Center to just two-thirds capacity nightly.

A prolonged league shutdown could very well doom a lot of the league’s smaller franchises, who already have a difficult enough time competing with the big-spenders of the league in Detroit, New York, Colorado, and Dallas.

Hockey has been hurt additionally by the fact that too often the sport’s superstars are hampered by the clutch-and-grab tactics of some of the league’s trapping defensive teams, a factor often highlighted when the game is criticized for its low scoring — à la soccer. Justifiably, the officiating is often criticized for inconsistent obstruction and holding calls, and when those calls are not regularly made, the inherent beauty of hockey routinely suffers. Additionally, the game has yet to become as widely accepted regionally as some other sports, since it’s still tough to find hockey hotbeds in the South and the Midwest, and it’s still considered by many to be a Canadian or Northeastern game dominated by stereotypical "Eh?"-speaking north-of-the-border folk, swift-skating New Englanders, and toothless pugilist goons.

The grand Pooh-Bahs of the NHL have tried to market the game into a sport that can possibly overtake the NBA in nationwide popularity, but all of their efforts will be for naught if any significant labor strife impinges on the coolest game on ice. Hockey already competes with pro and college basketball and football for viewership and the winter-season dollar, and sports fans today are getting just a little bit weary of hearing about pampered millionaires complaining about their lots in life. The last thing professional sports needs right now is another threat of a strike or a lockout, and if the prominent issues in hockey cannot be resolved in the next 10 months, then the game as we know it could be forever altered.

Anyone who’s been around Boston when the Bruins have reached the later rounds of the playoffs knows that the fan base is still capable of becoming awash in the team’s success. That hasn’t happened for a few years so it’s kind of hard to remember it now, but when the B’s reached the Cup Finals in 1988 and 1990, the arena was at a fever pitch that could only be rivaled by a Red Sox playoff run.

But hockey towns are getting harder and harder to find, and they’ll probably be bordering on extinct if the NHL owners and the players union make the mistake of testing sports fans’ patience one more time.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com, and Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com