The Puck Stops Here

There was an interesting lawsuit where the New York Rangers sued the NHL over its insistence to run NHL website claiming it to be an illegal cartel. US District Judge Loretta Preska ruled there is nothing illegal by this practise and the New York Rangers have shown no harm from it.

This lawsuit is the first public sign of a breakdown between the larger market NHL teams and the NHL itself. Since revenue sharing is incorporated into the CBA, there is less reward for a team seeking new revenue streams - as a significant portion of that new revenue will go to smaller markets via revenue sharing. The Rangers were hoping to generate new revenue that was not bound to revenue sharing on their website (for example by selling Rangers products outside the NHL's marketing). The Rangers are unhappy that central NHL marketing has not had revenue grow as fast as they think it should. This is to the benefit of smaller market teams that have trouble paying salaries today (with salaries linked to revenue, growing NHL revenue makes small market payrolls even larger). From the point of view of the fan, the centralized NHL team websites force teams to meet minimum standards on their websites (before doing this some teams had awful websites) but also serves to limit the creativity that teams more adept at the internet might have offered. It serves to silence the voices that might have existed on these websites if they were more independently run.

Here is TSN's story on the court ruling.