Spengler Cup in Davos with NHL lockout stars

My recommendation to all hockeyfans on this planet: Watch the Spengler Cup! It’s aired on TV in North America and in Europe and if you are even nearby in this area: Go to Davos and enjoy this hockey-party.

The Spengler Cup is probably the best running machine to sell our great sport of hockey! It is played in a beautifully architected wood-arena in a pitoresque surrounding with snow, mountains, sun but still with the infrastructure of a modern city. This tournament is promoted on a very high level with first-class sponsors, excellent VIP- and fans-houses. If you want to make your wife happy with Champagne, salmon and designer-food in a surrounding where she can carry her new coat and the latest boots: Take her for wine & dine to the nearby Ice-Palace, Yes, go to the Spengler Cup! she will be very happy. If you want to meet hockey-people because you try to enlarge your networking within the hockey-family: Yes, go to the Spengler Cup! If the hockey family still insists to grow our sport into additional potential sponsors, fans or hockey-friends: Never touch the Spengler Cup – it’s the very best stage to promote hockey! If you want to make new hockey-friends from all over the world: Yes, go to the Spengler Cup! If you want to celebrate and drink all night with mostly happy and friendly hockey-fans in good mood: Yes, go to the Spengler Cup and enjoy the fan-house! If you want to watch spectacular hockey-pictures in super “slowmo” on TV with some nice background-stories: Watch the Spengler Cup on TV. If you want interviews with players in no stress and in good mood: Watch the Spengler Cup. If you want to witness spectacular plays on the ice: Watch the Spengler Cup. If you want to witness spectacular plays of world-class players: Watch this year’s Spengler Cup with all the great lockout-stars. Tons of reasons to follow this traditional year-end tourney in Davos. It’s a perfect promoting machine for our beloved sport of hockey, support it, celebrate, and spread good words about hockey to the world-community! Out sport has to grow and the Spengler Cup helps to do so!

Are there reasons not to like the Spengler Cup? Not really but there are some traps: If you want to analyse the game, to predict winners and losers, to judge teams, leagues or details of players: Don’t watch the Spengler Cup. You hardly can find hockey-secrets there, these are pure and straight exhibition games, and we all do know that in hockey there are games and GAMES and the Spengler Cup is games. You never will find the hockey-brain-truth in the Spengler Cup, you can’t rationalise hockey in these games, don’t read anything into results in this tourney but open your hockey-heart, show your good mood, stop the small wars with „hockey-enemies“, let’s party: Let’s go to the Spengler Cup! The sport of hockey deserves it!

 Zurich, 27 December 2012 / Thomas Roost  

NHL Player Salaries CBA Discussion Deal!

Introduction:

Average males always want to be right, it’s our men sport to be right and proof to the opponent that he is wrong. Stupid we are. The two brilliant brains Donald Fehr and Gary Bettman are now in this situation. They want to win and they want to be right. This is a wrong attitude at this point of the discussion and because they have brilliant brains they will admit that the following input is not that bad and this will reduce their personal influence without losing their faces. 

Let’s start the discussion with the question: Do the NHL-players make too much money? 

My clear answer is NO. Why? We have worldwide approx. 1'600'000 hockey-players and the best 0.05% of them play in the NHL and make excellent money. Let’s face it: If you belong to the worldwide best 0.05% percent of bakers, accountants, software-developers, cooks, journalists or you name it... you also will make approx. this money. My personal case: I’m the Head Human Resources of the middle-sized tourist company, Hapimag, in Switzerland. This is a great company to work for and I truly believe that I’m doing a good job for them. I get a good salary and Hapimag gets a fair ROI. I think it’s a fair deal for both sides. Although I belong to the Executive Board of this company I make much less money than a NHL-player. Is this unfair? Of course not because I have to ask myself the question: Do I belong to the worldwide best 0.05% of all Head Human Resources? To be honest: No, I don’t belong to the best 0.05% worldwide Head Human Resources. If I pass away tomorrow, Hapimag would find a similar good Head Human Resources for similar conditions within a couple of months. No big deal for Hapimag! Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that I do a good job for Hapimag and I truly believe that Hapimag appreciates what I do for the company. But I have to face reality: I’m replaceable on the local market. If e.g. Apple is trying to find their world-wide Head Human Resources I’m just not qualified enough, I wouldn't be on their short-list. If the Washington Capitals have to replace a player e.g. like Brooks Laich, our Swiss League A-players are just not qualified enough to replace him and that’s why he makes more money than the Swiss League players and that’s why he makes more money than me. Another example: I have a scouting-mandate for the NHL. I get some money for this and I do know all these discussions about scouting-salaries are too big or too low. First of all: I’m very proud and extremely happy to be such privileged to have a scouting-job from the NHL. I do everything to please the NHL with my reports and predictions and I try to be a good ambassador for the NHL. Hopefully I can go on with this job forever. I never will ask for better conditions or something like that. You know why? First of all I feel that I get fairly paid. Second I do know that I’m replaceable. If I stop today my scouting-job for the NHL, the NHL would have already next day hundreds of candidates who want to have my job and...some of them will be as good as me or maybe even better in the long-run, nobody knows this for sure. Most of us have a certain pride in what we are doing, right so. But also most of us have the tendency to overrate our value. Coming back to Brooks Laich: He is not easy to replace, maybe a handful of candidates are on the market to make up for him. If they want to replace me as a scout, immediately hundreds of realistic candidates are waiting to take over. Again, don’t get me wrong: I’m confident enough to really believe that I’m doing a very good job for the NHL and I truly believe that I deserve to get treated with respect and loyalty – and I can assure you: The NHL is doing so. Am I in the position to point fingers to NHL-player-salaries and comparing them with my salary? Definitely not. If we agree to a liberal, capitalistic kind of world then we have to be ready to pay the price and the price is the market and the market tells about my price-tag, the price-tag of you as an employee and the price-tag of NHL-players as employees. Don't want to discuss now whether this liberal, capitalistic view of life is good or bad...but I guess, in our western world it's just more or less reality. 

My 10 conclusions for the CBA-discussions:

1. Yes, the players deserve to have every single dollar what they have in their contracts and they deserve to be paid extremely well also in the future.

    2. Yes, if we take into consideration the history of the NHL the players derserve to have a strong NHLPA.

    3. In the very end the players and the NHLPA will remember that the owners are the bosses and the players are employees.

    4. The players will face the reality that with the latest owner-proposal they would have a bright and save future for the next 8-10 years in their careers and that greed is always a bad adviser.

    5. The owners will face the reality that what they achieved so far in these discussions is a really better deal for them than in the past and that greed is always a bad adviser.

    6. The discussion will go back to the owners and players and won’t be lost in a personal fight between Gary Bettman and Donald Fehr. Their organizations will both tell them that they did already do an excellent job in these negotiations – what actually is true!

    7. Both, the owners and the players will put pressure on their leaders now because it’s really time for a deal and the substance of the differences are just too small to fight for death. The players and the owners will remember that the NHL with it's rules of trading, drafting, salary-cap and so on is a perfect role-model for all pro-sports, it's a much more clever system than European-pro-sports and it also stands for hundreds of great and thousands of very good jobs!

    8. A deal needs some more small compromises. The NHL gives in this maybe one more year (6 instead of 5) and the NHLPA agrees to the one or the other detail.  

    9. Both sides will negotiate these last details behind closed doors without media-rah-rah-rah.

    10.  Gary Bettman and Donald Fehr will announce a deal and the NHL-season will start in January and both leaders will have a beer together.

Finally my personal Christmas-wisdom to the players, owners, to myself and all the readers:

„The death of happiness is if you have a jealous heart and you start to compare. So fight your jealousy, be happy if you are happy and stop to be just happy if your „neighbor“ has a bit less than you.“

Merry Christmas and make your kids happy with nice presents, create some magic!

https://twitter.com/thomasroost

Zurich, 15 December 2012 / Thomas Roost

Why do we overrate coach-changing effects?

If a team plays bad it’s a very common reaction to change the coach and it’s a very popular – but most probably wrong – opinion that coaching-changes lead to better results. The measure-stick are the results before the coach-changing and immediately after the coach changing. This measure-stick seems to be logical and fair but... again... it’s most probably wrong.

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I try to explain why:

Firing a coach is nearly always the end-result of not fulfilling expectations. Let’s say the expectations were realistic – in reality they are more often not realistic than the other way round – but in our example I even tell: Management, media and fans had realistic expectations about what their team is going to achieve according to potential. In every season in every sport there are phases where a team plays up to the expectations, there are phases when a team is underachieving and there are phases when a team is overachieving. A coach is always fired during an underachieving phase. So, after the coaching-change there is always a very big chance that the team plays better because an underachieving phase is usually followed by a „expectations-achieving phase“ or an overachieving phase – with the old coach or with a new coach. If it’s a new coach we just take the simple thinking and create a completely uncritical causality (we play better since we did change the coach). This is just a thinking-mistake, this simple causality is by far not proven and most probably wrong. There could be a lot of different reasons why a team is playing better, the coach-changing is just one of many possibilities. The most logical reason is as explained. An underachieving phase is followed by a phase where the teams meets the expectations or by an overachieving phase. Coming back to my examples in my last column: Bern did play bad and suddenly played better – without coach-changing. If they would have fired Törmänen and then after had the same results as Törmänen had now: Most „experts“ would be sure that this is because of the coach-changing. The same goes for Zug and for Davos. They suffered underachieving phases, didn’t change the coach and played much better after. Ambri is a different case. They had some sort of better results shortly after the coach-changing but again. Was it because of the coach-changing or was it because of the most logical reason: Once again, after an underachieving phase…and so on, don’t want to bore you.

In addition to my explanation I want to inform all readers that in North American pro-sports they did some scientific research about coach-changing effects and the results are just brutal. No effect in the longterm, a very small effect in the short-term. I highly doubt that results in Europe would be much different although I have to admit that I don’t know about such a study about European pro sports.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big believer of hiring the best possible coach and I recommend to do so in a very professional way with different researchs and methods. I actually recommend this to do with all staff-members you have to hire (players, coaches, medical-staff, backoffice-staff, scouts and so on) but in most cases I’m not a believer in coach-firing.

Zurich, 9 December 2012 / Thomas Roost