Mike Celizic

I don’t know what the answer will be to hockey’s labor negotiations, especially now that the season is done. But I do know that they are going to be won — if that’s the word — by the owners.

There is no alternative, not if the NHL wants to continue as something approaching a major team sport. And that means that the league had to do what it did — what it has been preparing for more than a year to do — and shut down the game.

Ten years ago, the average NHL salary was around $700,000. Today, it’s more than $1.8 million. This in a league that recently took a major cut in its television contract, a league that spends 70-75 percent of its revenue on player salaries.

Even the players can’t dispute that figure. More than any other major sport, hockey is financed by the fans, who have been forced to dig ever deeper into their own strapped finances to buy tickets to the game.

The fans are tapped out. The league is tapped out. Last year, the Ottawa Senators, a Stanley Cup contending team, declared bankruptcy. It was the fourth bankruptcy in NHL history. None have led to the death of a franchise, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t as sure a sign as any that the game is in financial trouble.

That’s why the owners are so determined this time around. Why the players are so dead set against it is less easy to see. They can’t say they’re not making good money, not when Bobby Holik is being paid $9 million a year by the New York Rangers to be their third-line center.

And they can’t say that some sort of cap doesn’t work. They admitted as much with their final proposal, made at the last moment Tuesday night. Dividing the proceeds of the game by negotiated agreement has helped to make the NFL and NBA thriving enterprises. Failure to do so has made baseball a game of haves and have-nots.

The hockey players want a deal similar to baseball’s, in which teams that spend beyond a certain level pay luxury taxes that are distributed to the other teams. The players also want the owners to share more revenue. Apparently, Goodenow has been talking to Donald Fehr, the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association.

But no one is buying it, beginning with the fans. When you have to shell out as much as $100 for a ticket to a regular-season game, you don’t want to hear players talking about how they won’t agree to a system that puts a brake on salaries. When you see the average player making nearly two million a year, you don’t want to hear about poverty.

This is a real problem for the players. The owners will not be vilified for locking the doors and keeping them shut for as long as it takes. The players get three quarters of the money, and if they insist on keeping that share, they’ll be seen as greedy, which is what they are.

Let’s face it. We got along without baseball and we got along without basketball. We’ve already gotten through 1994-95, when the hockey season was chopped down to 45 games. We’ll live a year without the game if we have to. Those of us who love the game won’t like it, but we’ll survive. There’s plenty else going on.

And when it comes back, we’ll like it more if we know ticket prices aren’t going to keep going up until we can’t afford even the nosebleed seats.

Sports negotiations, like negotiations in any business, are full of posturing and brinkmanship. But in this one the owners aren’t pretending, and the players are about to learn that.

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