NHL players secretly gearing up for another potential lockout

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River Hawk
August 27, 2024 (10:43 PM)

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With little to no increase in salary caps under Commissioner Gary Bettman's leadership, NHL players appear to be secretly gearing up for another potential lockout.

At its core, the NHL is a business with workers who want to make what they consider fair wages. Part of the league's way of managing potential contract negotiations comes with a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) every so often. However, if this does not meet everyone's standards upon new drafts, the NHL can suffer a lockout, during which players will strike for better deals across the board. Though the last one occurred during the 2012-13 season, the most notorious was the 2004-05 lockout, which canceled the Stanley Cup competition for the first time since 1919, when the influenza epidemic caused a 2-2 tie finish between Seattle and Montreal.

However, reports indicate that players may already be preparing for the next one. The NHL is one of the only major North American sports leagues not to see a full resurgence after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the current CBA expiring at the end of the 2025-26 season, TSN contributor Travis Yost pointed out that contracts extending into the following season have a sharp uptick in signing bonus activity.

"Contracts loaded with signing bonuses offer one other element: they can be lockout proof. Since signing bonuses are typically paid in the off-season during the summer months, they precede whatever impact a CBA stalemate may have on the approaching regular season. If a regular season is disrupted without a contract in place, player salaries are effectively frozen.

To illustrate this, consider just the contracts signed since the beginning of the calendar year. Notably, the multi-year contracts with term extending into the 2026-27 regular season have a sharp rise in signing bonus activity at the moment the league's contract expires."

Though the current CBA is still a couple of years away from becoming obsolete, it would make sense that savvy players are already looking ahead to try to manage an incoming lockout. Hopefully, whatever issues players and management have come the next contract negotiations will be smoothed over simply and quickly enough for the season to continue as it normally would.