The NHLPA's firing of Paul Kelly leads one to believe that the union may be ready to take a hard line in its next round of contract negotiations.
Unless you were inside the union walls this weekend, it is difficult to know this soon exactly what details define the firing of National Hockey League Players’ Association executive director Paul Kelly.
You can observe that the union is a mess right now. But you could have made that point off and on for the past 30 years, so there has to be more.
Today we have deposed ombudsman Eric Lindros, lurking in the background with a knife in his hand, and former auto union czar Buzz Hargrove’s damning report on Kelly that appears to have convinced the 30 player reps that someone other than Kelly could do a better job.
Then there is general counsel Ian Penny, who somehow ended up with a new contract recently, which reportedly was news to his boss Kelly. Now Penny has taken Kelly’s job, named interim executive director.
That’s how it works in third world countries, for gosh sakes, when the general assumes control after a military coup.
Pat Flatley, who we know for certain to be a good, intelligent and experienced man inside the NHPLA, has walked away. Not a good sign.
For the sake of the NHLPA, here’s hoping the anti-Kelly faction comes up with a few game-turning plays here. Because the players who are starring early in this game have highly suspicious motives, and histories that truly make you shake your head at a players’ union that just can’t cease its imploding ways.
Let’s start with the assumption that Hargrove — who started as a line worker at a Chrysler plant in Windsor and rose to the top of the Canadian Auto Workers’ union — is once again making his way to the top of a union. He is known as a highly political, hard-ass union man.
Hargrove promises he does not want to head this union. Perhaps, as it appears he has been doing thus far, he will be satisfied with a spot off-stage, pulling the strings and writing the scripts.
But if you are an NHL player who has decided the auto workers union a model worth following, here’s an idea: Fly into economically depressed Windsor, grab a rental, and drive across the border and into the Michigan interior.
There you will see an economic landscape that has been obliterated by the failure of the Big 3. Giant factories with 3500-stall parking lots, housing 50 or 60 cars — everyone else has been laid off. Businesses are boarded up. Third-generation auto worker families are looking elsewhere for work, bitter that the gravy train stopped before they could collect their ridiculously high retirement packages, the way their father and their fathers’ father did.
The entitlement and greed of the auto workers’ unions played a leading role in the downfall of the American auto maker. Those traits became deeply seeded among NHL players too, as former union head Bob Goodenow expertly orchestrated player agents to take advantage of a disorganized group of NHL owners.
He successfully drove salaries far beyond what the NHL economy could afford, to the point where players were reaping 75% of the NHL’s revenues. Thus the year off in 2004-05.
In October of 2007, Kelly came in as a cooperative alternative to the confrontational Bob Goodenow.
"I think someone can effectively represent the players of the NHL, and at the same time do it in a manner that is constructive, co-operative with the NHL, with the owners, and good for the game as a whole," Kelly told me when he first took the job. "We should be able to solve complex problems without firing at each other; without not being able to be in the same room with each other; without the bitterness and emotion that existed the last time."
So fractured was Goodenow’s relationship with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, that in the end the two couldn’t even be at the table when the collective bargaining agreement was being negotiated. Ted Saskin and Bill Daly did the deal.
Saskin learned everything he knew from Goodenow when it came to the NHLPA, and would eventually go down in a hale of accusation that included tapping into players’ email accounts. Nobody ever proved that Goodenow invented that practice. Many suspect so, however.
Now, with Kelly out, we can assume the NHLPA will harden up its stance again. The CBA can expire in 2011, which means we could face another work stoppage after two more seasons.
"Another labour interruption in this sport would be devastating," Kelly said in Oct. of ’07, a statement that perhaps should be carved into his NHLPA tombstone, because it killed him. "The Canadian crowd ... they would come back. But in the United States, where you have so many other sports, the lockout hurt us.
"It hurt us in television, in advertising... There was a profound negative impact. If there were another stoppage, it would be extraordinarily harmful in the U.S."
Truer words have seldom been spoken, yet now the NHLPA takes a turn for the militant.
This, in a union where the members fractured like a bad composite stick during the lockout.
If you can’t figure out what the plan is at the NHLPA, don’t worry. It is plainly evident, they don’t know either.