For just a short time take a break, and look at professional sports, namely professional hockey, in a more innocent and relaxed way without politics and television rating prerequisites. Let go of focus on sports market stipulations and the ratios of supply and demand. Instead focus on the required skills of each professional sport and what the fair salary average for each sport would then be. In this we might all realize just how much more professional hockey players should be paid. Or perhaps see how outrageous player salaries are in other professional sports or all professional sports. The bottom line then is no matter what the salaries of professional sports players are, professional hockey players should be paid the most on the basis of skill.NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced on February 16th that the 2004-2005 NHL season was cancelled. The inability of the league and the player’s union to consent to a new collective bargaining agreement is to blame for the loss of an entire season of the most entertaining professional sport. Although team salary cap agreements were nearly reached, the league’s move from demands of a $40 million max to $42 million did not meet the union’s minimum $49 million cap, which was lowered from $52 million. This sad situation is occurring during a time when the combined salaries of two New York Yankees baseball players totals at $44.1 million.
Recognizing the fact that ice hockey is a more difficult sport for kids and adults in North America to become involved in due to its expensive and elusive nature, which results in lower interest levels and poor television ratings for the NHL, one can understand the reason for this terrible salary difference between sports. But if for a short time one examines sports based on their physical demands rather than their fan base and television ratings, an inevitable conclusion that NHL players are deserving of the highest professional sports wages would quickly be reached. With a season ranging between 82 and 110 games, depending on playoff play, the NHL also has the second longest season in professional sports.
ESPN recently published a grid that rated the physical and skill based demands of sixty of the most popular sports. Each sport was rated on a ten point scale in ten different areas, including: endurance, strength, power, speed, agility, flexibility, nerve, durability, hand-eye coordination and analytic aptitude. Giving the ratings for the sports in the various areas was a degree of difficulty panel consisting of eight qualified professional physicians and sports analysts, including an Associate Professor of Sport Management at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Director of the Coaching and Sport Sciences Division at the United States Olympic Committee who oversees one of the world’s premier sport science departments. They found ice hockey to be the second most demanding sport, just short of boxing. Baseball fell ten points lower on the hundred point scale than ice hockey.
Taking into consideration this fact that hockey is more physically demanding and difficult than any other team-based professional support, would one not agree that it would only be appropriate that professional hockey was also the sport with the highest average team salary? The truth of the monetary matter is far from that realization though. The New York Yankees in fact pay $184.2 million to field a team with about as many players as an NHL team, and the highest NHL team salary before the lockout was only $79 million from the New York Rangers. The average MLB player makes $2.56 million a year and the average NBA player $4.9 million a year. The average NHL player makes a fraction of both figures at $1.8 million a year. The fact that the NHL’s highest paid player, Jaromir Jagr, earns $11 million dollars a year makes it seem as if NHL stars are making too much. But NFL star Michael Vick just signed a 10 year, $130 million dollar contract with $37 million in bonuses. The Yankees pay $25.2 million a year to keep Alex Rodriguez playing on their side of the diamond and another $18.9 million to Derek Jeter. Combine those salaries and you have two MLB players earning annually the same amount as the salary cap that the National Hockey League intended for an entire NHL team. Jagr’s annual salary is nothing compared to that of the highest paid all-stars of other major league sports, although he plays the most physically demanding professional team sport of them all.
Is it right that the most physically demanding professional team sport has the players with the lowest average salaries? Is it right that two MLB players can earn as much in a year as the NHL intends for an entire twenty-five man team to earn in a year? ESPN hockey analyst and former NHL coach Barry Melrose best related hockey to other professional sports in the following way: “What separates hockey is that it requires all the skills of other sports to be done at full speed, on ice, while controlling the puck and fighting off body checks. Not many people can go the length of the ice with a man on their back and still keep the puck on their stick, then unload a 90-mph slap shot or have the body control to deke a goalie and lift the puck over him. Doing all that is hard enough on a wooden floor or grass field, but making it happen on ice is what makes hockey the most difficult sport to perform.” You be the judge.