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jr400

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Forum: NHL Signingsil y a 11 heures
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<div class="quote"><div class="quote_t">Quoting: <b>LuckyMoneyPuck</b></div><div>if you actually knew anything about the NHL you'd know what a beer league it was in 1963.
Lets not pretend it wasn't a beer league. It got organized to make money.
</div></div>

The difference between a beer league and a professional league is the beer league gets its revenue from the players, who pay the league for the chance to play. A professional league gets it from fans, and uses it to pay players whom they believe the fans will want to pay the team to see.

The NHL was never a beer league. You could say that until the 1967 expansion it was a regional league concentrated in eastern Canada and the northeastern US, but by then it already had most of the best hockey players in the world, though there were a few exceptions. We didn’t know how good the top players in the USSR were until they played a team of NHL all-stars in 1972, or how good Swedish hockey was until Borje Salming came to the NHL in 1973, but the NHL was the world’s top hockey league. I was told by the son of a 1930s NHL player that at that time, many of the world’s top players played in Canada’s senior amateur leagues – teams like the Whitby Dunlops and Trail Smoke Eaters – that competed for the Allan Cup, because in those leagues it was easier to balance hockey with a full-time day job that would earn them more money, but by the 1960s, NHL salaries had risen to the point of being able to entice most of the best players to play there.

I think the main reason there’s more money in the game today (relatively speaking) than in the 1960s is a combination of cultural and economic factors. The population was significantly lower than it is today, and those people didn’t have as much disposable income to spend on entertainment as they do now. This is true of all forms of entertainment – they weren’t the big businesses they are now. Owners had more leverage over the players, and they didn’t seem to value them as much, feeling that they could easily be replaced. The NHL players union had a corrupt leader (Alan Eagleson) who was in cahoots with the team owners, which wasn’t known until some years later, but this also helped to hold down salaries.

Anyway, I didn’t quite get the connection between the NHL being a beer league in 1963 and teams today not caring about their fans, but my point is you can’t assume that the relatively low player salaries at that time means that it wasn’t a major professional league. Those low salaries were just a sign of the times.
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