Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

Is the NHLPA ready for the kind of power that Donald Fehr brings?

That's Fehr. As in, F-E-A-R.

The emergence of Donald Fehr as the executive director of the National Hockey League Players' Association is fantastic news for the players, but what does it mean for you, the fan?

Well, Expos fans? Care to chime in?

The NHLPA now has a leader with 26 years of experience in leading Major League Baseball's PA He is a director under whom the average MLB salary climbed from $289,000 to $2.9 million; under whom the 1994 World Series became a casualty of a players' strike, crushing the Montreal Expos most promising campaign and denying baseball fans of the Series for the first time since 1904.

And of course, Fehr is a leader who will prove every bit the adversary for NHL commissioner Gary Bettman that the belligerent Bob Goodenow was, and more. Sportsnet's Nick Kypreos reported Wednesday that Fehr is poised to become the NHLPA's new leader.

History tells us however, when the various Players’ Associations win, the fans lose.

So for NHL players, who have spent the last couple of years wrapping their association around a tree like a spoiled 16-year-old with a new BMW, Fehr represents a dangerous new tool.

His wealth of sports labour experience is now at the disposal of the players. With the stroke of a pen the NHLPA will have a leader with more experience and labour savvy than Gary Bettman, Bill Daly and all of NHL lawyers combined.

But has this group of players displayed that it is ready for that kind of power? Is the fragile sport, mired in far too many soft American markets, ready for the labour strife that follows Fehr like dust on the Charles Schultz character Pigpen?

Or, like Iran and North Korea, is the NHLPA a body that has shown no signs or responsibility or maturity, which now has a powerful new weapon at its disposal?

As Pink Floyd once said, “Careful with that axe, Eugene.”

Sure, the NHLPA fell apart during the last CBA negotiations. But that doesn’t mean this union warrants any sympathy, when you consider the annual rise in the salary cap since its inception in 2005.

The players folded in the lockout of 2004-05, accepting the salary cap they guaranteed us they would never accept. But if you are one who believes the union has been abused by ownership, consider the fact that ever since, the average salary has only gone up.

Players take home 54% of an ever-growing pie — a pie that the disheveled union has had little part in growing over the past couple of seasons, so busy have the players been with their internal coups and Bonnie Lindros-like power struggles.

This grand “partnership” has been a one-way street, and the players have done just fine as passengers while the league did the lion’s share of the work in growing the game. Now, in comes Fehr, no doubt with a mandate to be the hard-liner that Goodenow so famously was.

His arrival comes on the heels of the decision made by arbitrators Richard Bloch to overturn the Ilya Kovalchuk contract. And the two are being linked by some, as if the league somehow overstepped its bounds by actually winning an arbitrated decision, rather than chalking up its usual loss.

Don’t forget, the NHLPA has as much say in the naming of Bloch as the league did. If they didn’t like the guy, they could have refused him.

In Goodenow’s day the NHLPA won the vast majority of arbitration cases, simply because the NHLPA head was savvy enough to only allow agents to take winnable bases to arbitration.

That’s smart business. Perhaps that is why, when the NHL wins in an arbitration case involving a charade of a contract offer between Kovalchuk and the Devils, it is seen as a weak point for the union.

That is where Fehr comes in.

He’s a fighter, and he’s a winner.

Remember that, now that the work stoppage of 2012 is officially on the hockey world’s calendar.