How did we get here, ECHL? Why are you going on strike, and more importantly, why should we care?
Now I am a hockey fanatic, a level 5 hockey fan on the seven levels of hockey fans scale, dare I say a sicko at times. I follow the AHL and host an AHL podcast; my team, the Hershey Bears, is affiliated with the South Carolina Stingrays. I know your league is considered the AA of professional hockey, but you have been treating your players as such, and it has come back to bite you.
Many players in the ECHL have no connections to their NHL teams; heck, some are not even signed to an AHL team. Their ECHL teams sign them to very little pay; players have taken side jobs or different careers to make ends meet. Yet you want to brag about your ticket prices being only the median of $21 across the ECHL, which is not bad in this economy, but not the time for it.
The current CBA expired back in July, and both sides, the PHPA and you, acted in good faith to keep going, hoping a deal could get done. However, negotiations have not gone well, and now public jabs, public proposals, and counter-offers are being released via social media. In other words, it is getting ugly quickly, like a divorce.
You talk about mandatory days off during holidays and eliminating three games in 3 days, which should happen, but we are not getting many details. I even heard fewer games overall, like going down to 68, but that is more rumor than anything.
Things like the amount of travel between back-to-back games, mileage, and players getting increases in per diem. All these things sound great to people who are in the know, like players, media, or fan media. But to the average fan, they do not care about salary cap increases or the ECHL covering 100 of player costs.
Your league wants to go to 32 teams, yet in these negotiations, you are standing there like the Monopoly guy with his pockets emptied. IT expanded too fast, and this strike came at the worst possible time; this whole CBA issue could have been resolved on both sides.
And now a strike proposal has been voted on and handed to you as a jury summons; your league may stop on December 26 at the time of this article's publication.
Let me tell you, your fans in blue-collar cities and community-driven areas do not care about Collective bargaining agreements. The two lockouts of your NHL brethren should be proof of that, and it took years for the goodwill to return. You do not have the luxury of national TV deals in the US and Canada, you use internet streaming for road broadcasts, and some of your teams do not send broadcasters for road games.
Some of your teams do not even average 3,000 fans per year; your league is in danger of falling apart. Fans will take their time and money elsewhere if this strike lasts long. MLB went through the same things in 1994; some teams have not forgiven MLB. Ask any Expos fan if they are still around.
You have a nuclear button in front of you, yet you want to throw out a salary cap number that will increase by 27% in future years. How is an average ECHL fan supposed to get behind that?
These whole CBA negotiations are a messy divorce that has gone too far, and yet, we as fans are the children being sent to Grandma’s while Mom and Dad try to save their marriage. The fans will be the ones hurt the most by this, if a strike happens, and they will not come back right away.
And when the dust settles on this, I hope as a league you can learn from this or at minimum, look in the mirror and realize the person staring back at you is the cause and solution of your problems.