Boo-hoo, cry me a river.  There’s one reason they’re losing money, and only one reason.  They have a nearly $38m payroll of nothing that their fans don’t want to watch or see (and neither do the rest of us).

http://www.nhlnumbers.com/overview.php?team=LAK

$3.1m for Dan “The Sieve” Cloutier?  $2.75 for Tom Preissing?  $4m for Michal Handzus?  $3.75 for Ladislav Nagy?  $2.7m for Kyle friggin’ Calder?

There are about 2 or 3 player son this term that earn their salary night in and night out, and the rest just coast along or suck.

They don’t need to increase ticket prices.  They need to improve their on-ice product drastically.  Until they do, nobody in LA is going to care.  And they need to do it fast, because Anze Kopitar is a RFA after next season and unless they turn things around, I can’t imagine someone won’t make a run at him and he won’t gladly get out and on a team where he won’t get a -3 every game for all his hard work.

Posted by Primis on 05/01/08 at 07:43 AM ET

Soooooooo, it turns out it wasn’t the players salaries responsible for the Kings losses but that they haven’t been running their financial affairs properly.

Yep, sure was worth losing a season of hockey and killing the NHL’s visibility in the American sports market over.

As I’ve said before, the owners won’t be able to pin the blame for their woes on the players anymore. This is their CBA, the one they claimed they needed to survive, and some of the very teams that bitched the loudest against the players and fought the hardest for this CBA are still having problems. Look in the mirror, gentlemen, that’s where the fault lies, not with your employees.

Posted by Lyle Richardson from Charlottetown, PEI, Canada on 05/01/08 at 08:07 AM ET

Great post, Lyle. Couldn’t agree with you more.

Further, not only did this CBA, driven by small-market (or just plain bad-market) owners, only serve as a band-aid for some small-market teams, at best, but it punished the top owners and markets in this league.

Clubs like the Red Wings, Flyers, Rangers, Avs, Stars, and Leafs were all willing to spend money to build great teams. I know it’s easy for me to say being a fan of the Wings, but I’d gladly take a few titans over widespread mediocrity any day.

I think parity greatly improves the first, and even second rounds of the playoffs, but it greatly damages the conference and Cup finals. When I watch a conference or Cup final, I expect two incredible teams to trade blows. Even as a Wings fan, I have to say, how exciting was the Western final last season? Was that two premier teams battling for the Cup final, or two teams with massive holes seeing who could plug the dam better?

Go through almost any sport. The golden ages of sport come when two or four truly great teams play it out. In the NHL most recently we had Detroit and Colorado. The games the Oilers and Isles had, as well as the Isles and Flyers had were tremendous. The NBA’s best memories come from the years when the Lakers and Celtics were both stocked with HOF talent. Even the NFL, poster child for mediocrity, was at its best when the likes of San Francisco and Dallas were bitter rivals, each team boasting HOF talent at multiple positions, star QBs and receivers, and dominant big men in the lines.

That’s what I want in the NHL. I want to have a few GREAT teams instead of fifteen good teams.

Posted by Nathan on 05/01/08 at 09:07 AM ET

When you manage your business poorly, which, in the NHL, means a poorly-performing team in a city, which as Primis notes, is all about winning (where do you think all those sellouts in Anaheim came from?), you lose money. 

Tom Golisano is already crying poor, but a salary cap based upon league-wide revenues instead of market-by-market revenues is the animal the owners wanted, and while Bettman and Daly whine about the cap being a magnet, they seem to have forgotten that there’s something teams used to employ back in the day--and still do, in some cases (cough cough Detroit cough cough)--a budget.

Posted by George James Malik from South Lyon, MI on 05/01/08 at 10:10 AM ET

And what has the knock always been on the LA Kings? A major market team that acts like a small market team? Glad I’m not re-upping my season tickets.

Posted by theartfullodger on 05/01/08 at 03:17 PM ET