Work stoppages are a pain. Employees want to work, and owners want their businesses to run, so when agreements cannot be reached people get headaches. But for someone like Nashville Predators defenseman Kimmo Timonen, taking two Tylenol is not going to come close to helping this one.
Timonen and his coworkers, the players that make up the National Hockey League, are being locked-out by the owners and League Commissioner Gary Bettman until a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) can be reached.
But Timonen’s owner-induced absence from NHL arenas isn’t the only financial aspect of hockey causing him to rub his temples. Timonen is also a part owner, along with countryman and Philadelphia Flyer Sami Kapanen, of the Finnish Elite League team, KalPa-Kuopio.
Timonen, 29, and Kapanen played together for KalPa, which roughly translates to “sword,” in the early 1990s. Timonen moved on to a second and third Finnish team, played for Finland in the Nagano Olympics, and played again for his country in the Hockey World Cup in September, seeing his team finish second to Canada the same night the previous CBA expired. After transitioning from Finland to the United States, he played for the Predators’ minor-league affiliate Milwaukee Admirals before reaching the NHL in 1999. The two-time All-Star signed a long-term contract with the Predators in 2003.
However, a long-term contract doesn’t mean much when you’re not playing hockey. The good news for Timonen, who hails from Kuopio, Finland, is that if he wants to return home and play in front of his friends and family he can give himself a spot on the KalPa roster. The bad news is that the team he owns also has been mired in financial problems and in July of 1999 declared bankruptcy, unable to pay a tax of 1.6 million Finnish markaa (roughly $330,000).
So Timonen can probably understand the headaches that both the owners and players are feeling right now better than anyone else save Mario Lemieux, the
former player-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Timonen and his agent Bill Zito did not respond to e-mails and phone calls, however The Tennessean quoted Preds’ left wing Scott Hartnell as saying on Sept. 26 that if the CBA is still at an impasse around Christmas time, he and Timonen would return to Kuopio to play for KalPa.
The main source of contention in forging a new CBA has been a salary cap. Bettman and the owners want to reduce player salaries, set a fixed portion of revenue to go to the clubs to pay the bills, and impose a salary cap that will prevent players from jeopardizing the league’s future with exorbitant salaries.
“Union leadership refused for more than a year to make any kind of proposal whatsoever,” Bettman said in his Sept. 15 announcement that the season would be postponed. “During the same period, [they] rejected six separate NHL proposals that would have modernized our league’s economic system, as other professional sports have done.”
The players adamantly refuse a salary cap and maintain that Bettman engineered the lockout so that he could force the NHLPA to accept one. Instead, players are prepared to play elsewhere, either with the upstart Continental Hockey League, Original Stars Hockey League or abroad.
“This is a disappointing day for NHL Players and fans,” says NHL Player’s Association Executive Director Bob Goodenow. “The players remain prepared to negotiate a fair agreement with the owners, but we need a negotiating partner who understands that agreements are the products of compromise. We do not have such a negotiating partner now.”
With both sides unable to see things from the other’s perspective, perhaps the league would be better off asking Timonen to mediate. After all, wearing two hats is better than none.
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