The most essential lesson to be learned from the NHL lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season that can be applied to the current MLB lockout that has delayed the start of the 2022 season is that when ownership does not care about playing games, the union essentially has no chance.

I wish that it were not so. I wish that the impressive unity within the MLBPA and almost irrational dedication of some of baseball’s most decorated senior players to create a system that would funnel more money to their younger brethren be rewarded by meaningful gains at the bargaining table for the entire workforce.

But that outcome would be contrary to the experiences of the last two NHL owners’ lockouts that I covered in 2004-05 and in 2012-13, the latter shutting rinks for three-plus months and turning the 82-game season into a 48-game exercise for which, you had better believe it, the players received 58.54 percent of their pay.

Whether baseball or hockey, owners use the same playbook. Commissioners cite the same talking points. Monday’s MLB PR blitz was standard operating procedure. Leagues have websites and dedicated television networks on which to spread propaganda. Players, as articulate and righteous as they may be, always start on the defensive when trying to explain their motives.

NHL owners and Gary Bettman shut down the league in 2004-05 in order to impose a hard cap on a sport that had few systemic systems that inhibited team spending. The NFL had a cap and so did the NBA. But not the NHL and not MLB. The NHL had campaigned for two years on cost certainty. Union leadership advised its members that players would have to be willing to stay out two full years in order to prevail.

But two years was one too many. The PA splintered, undone by enemies within. A hard cap was ultimately negotiated after Bettman and the Board issued terms of surrender. In 2012-13, the owners came back for much more, signaling its intent with an opening offer that demanded capitulation. The NHLPA essentially then negotiated against itself until an agreement that cut the players’ share of revenue from 57 percent to 50 percent was reached in mid-January.

The current baseball situation has more parallels to hockey’s 2012 lockout than 2004. Neither side here is pressing for revolutionary change in the system, though I interpret MLB’s intransigence on addressing the CBT thresholds in a meaningful way as a power play to impose a de facto hard cap on the sport…and one that would operate without a floor to compel minimum required payrolls.

There is nothing that says hard cap more loudly and more distinctly than MLB setting a flat CBT threshold for the first three years of what would be a five-year agreement. Baseball would not only have its effective cap memorialized for all time, but it would get a flat cap for three years, the kind of which the NHL has (because of COVID-related revenue decreases) and is strangling half the teams in the league.

I understand why adopting a cap system (that comes with escrow) is anathema to the MLBPA. But in agreeing to set thresholds without any link to revenue while also refusing to negotiate payroll floors, the players are paying the price at both ends while the owners are getting a win-win. I am surprised the MLBPA has not recognized this as the singular issue in this fight and instead spent so much early energy on the arbitration system.

If it looks like a cap, if it acts like a cap, if it quacks like a cap, it is a cap. And let me just say this, every dollar the players are able to direct to the young and rising stars in their midst will ultimately come out of veterans’ pockets. A rising tide will not lift all boats — or luxury liners — under an environment in which club budgets are etched in stone.

That goes for Hal Steinbrenner’s Yankees every bit as much as it does for Bob Nutting’s Pirates. That is the point for the league. That is the problem for the players.  

Delaying the start of the season has given MLB and the owners the critical issue of service time as another weapon to use as leverage. Now the owners can offer to trade retroactive service time — critical on the arbitration and free-agency clock — in exchange for their cherished 14-team playoff system.

I learned a long time ago, and perhaps even to my chagrin, that right and wrong and being fair have nothing to do with collective bargaining. It is all about power. When the league doesn’t think twice about locking the gates, when the owners don’t think twice about wiping out games, when the greedy get greedier, the players have no chance.