NHL Should Disclose Contract Details to Media and Fans
After reading Sean’s post on Down Goes Brown about the rampant speculation going on over what some players contracts actually say, it strikes me that things would be a lot simpler if the National Hockey League simply required that all contracts signed between players and teams be disclosed to any interested fans and media.
It would be as simple as a scan of each players contract being uploaded in PDF format to a publicly accessible database on the internet. That way when people wanted to know wether or not Tomas Kaberle’s NTC would expire if the Leafs miss the playoffs this year, they could simply browse to Kaberle’s contract, open it up and read the section outlining his NTC.
The costs associated with having someone scan some paper wouldn’t be particularly high and it would save the massive ammouns of crap that go around about who’s contract says what and who can and can’t be dealt, etc.
If the players’ salaries in dollar ammount are already known to the media, what would be the harm in making the entire details of the contract easily accessible?
Well actually, the answer is obvious.
If it was that easy to get the facts correct, the number of “stories” broken by the media would plummet. They probably prefer to have to speculate as it makes for more headlines.
Stumble it!
February 19th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
You have to wonder if this sort of thing isn’t done because the owners don’t want it done. Remember, it was the owners who fought for years to keep player salaries private. It seems bizarre now, but it was only 20 years ago that nobody knew how much players made. Once the players knew what everyone else was making, they wanted more for themselves and salaries started to take off.
Still, at some point you have to hope that somebody in the NHL will figure out that whatever minimal gains might come from keeping this stuff secret is going to be offset by the loss of fan goodwill over the shoddy reporting.
February 20th, 2008 at 8:40 am
It is mind-boggling that these things are still kept under wraps and we are subjected to the insane ramblings and guessing of the media.
If salary figures didn’t get out that would be one thing but you basically know what every player is making so why not give us the rest of the terms?