I wrote about the Hockey Lockout earlier this month, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2012/12/08/my-two-cents-about-the-hockey-lockout/. Sadly the lockout continues though there are some signs that it may be finally coming to an end.
It seems to me that the fundamental problem with the NHL is that the owners have not come to terms with the economic realities of modern professional sports. The current labor struggle is a symptom of this but not the actual problem. From what I have read the likely agreement will put a Band-Aid on the problem, but not really fix anything.
The issue that the NHL needs to deal with, like all professional sports leagues, is to recognize that they are first in the entertainment business, competing for a higher share of the overall entertainment money that is spent, and only second in the fielding a team most likely to win an individual championship business.
While I have written that dichotomies like this ultimately require a balancing act, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/06/28/dave-wennergren-solving-problems-vs-managing-dualities/, one still picks one focus or the other.
Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner from 1960 to 1989, in my opinion decided that entertainment was the primary focus. The combination of a long career plus the NFL still being relatively weak financially allowed Rozelle to setup a system where TV revenue was heavily shared. Thus regardless of the popularity of any one team, the overall league would have relatively equal revenues and thus there were institutional limits, eventually supplemental by salary caps, which prevented one team from just buying championships.
Other sports have wrestled with this issue. For example, baseball imposed a ‘tax’ on teams that pay too much on salaries, but in the end the large market teams still tend to dominate which teams make the playoffs.
Academic studies, one example is linked to here, http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/js_0011.pdf, show that a case can be made that 100% revenue sharing ends up with the most profitable league result. An analysis of current revenue sharing, http://slapshot.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/how-to-share-the-revenue-could-be-stumbling-block-in-n-h-l-negotiations/, showed that where the NFL shares as much as 80% of their revenue, MLB shares around 30%, the NHL shares less than 15%.
For those who love to hate NHL commission Bettman, an easy target with his lousy public persona and arrogant demeanor, they are aiming at him in the wrong direction. It is not his poor relationships with the players labor unions that is the problem it is his inability or lack of interest in changing the overall owner relationships within the NHL and how they deal with the league as a whole. The current labor negotiations do not seem to be likely to change this situation though like all hockey fans I hope they come to closure soon.