Slim and None

by Howard Baldwin

  Throughout that first season Mario and I met for dinner from time to time with his agent, the very powerful, passionate and well-respected Tom Reich. Tom had a lot of gray in his hair and beard, but in his feelings he was all black and white. He either liked you for life . . . or didn’t like you at all. He always fought fiercely for his coveted client, and despite that ferocity, he and I are friends to this day. Tom would often say that Lemieux was a “God” to him and that he would fight to the death for him. That might seem a little extreme . . . but so is Tom.

  As soon as we arrived in town the media began speculating that we would quickly sell Mario or other stars to help defray the cost of purchasing the team. That began my frustration with the Pittsburgh media. It was during my tenure in Pittsburgh that I, a newspaper reader all my life, decided to stop reading newspapers. Why? Because in Pittsburgh, I learned the hard way that I wasn’t going to let any members of the media influence my moods or decision making. I decided, better just not to read anything and to do what I thought was right than to read something and overreact.

  We were working with Craig Patrick to re-sign a team that had won two Cups, and the public in Pittsburgh had already pre-judged me. Since I was from out of town, they figured I wasn’t committed to Pittsburgh and would sell off this player or that player for whatever I could get. However, it wasn’t my intention to sell anybody.

  There were players on our team who would have been superstars on other teams, guys like Kevin Stevens, who had just scored a hat trick in the first period of a playoff game against the Bruins; Joey Mullen, one of the top American players ever; Tom Barrasso, the All-Star goalie; Larry Murphy, who would be going into to the Hall of Fame; and Ron Francis, my favorite Whaler, who through the short-sightedness of the new Hartford owners became a Penguin in time to win the two Cups.

  We knew we couldn’t keep them all, so it was a challenge. We knew that among all those stars, we had two mega-stars in Mario and Jaromir Jagr. The dilemma was, how could we let either one go? If we let Mario go, we would have been horribly crucified. And if we let Jagr go and threw all our eggs in Mario’s basket, we weren’t even sure whether he’d be playing or not. His back was bothering him a lot and he was already missing games.

  We had to find a way to keep them both. Jagr was only 20 years old and his contract was still low, so the first challenge was to sign Mario. Although I had a close relationship with both Tom and Mario, negotiations were tough. But Mario was cooperative and was open to structuring his contract in a way that we could afford to pay him what he was worth.

  Mario’s contract was up and he was eligible for free agency. Salaries were exploding, and the Flyers had just signed Eric Lindros to a deal that gave him a $2.5 million signing bonus, two years at $2 million and another four at $2.5 million. How could I have Lemieux — who had achieved all that he had, and who had just won two Cups — not make more than Lindros, who had never played a game in the National Hockey League? Mario was the greatest player in the game at the time, and one of the very few who could put fans in the seats and drive TV ratings.

  So Tom knew he had the leverage in the negotiations, and we knew it too, but in October of 1992 we were able to get Mario’s contract done: $42 million over seven years.

  I felt Mario’s contract was reasonable because it was structured in such a way as to give us time to build up our revenues, which were way below the league average. The contract averaged $6 million per year over seven years, but it was weighted to the back end, so that the largest annual salaries came in the final three years. There were some deferrals of salary payments that would come due after the actual playing life of the contract.

  We needed time to build revenues because when we acquired the Penguins, their revenues ranked 19th out of the 22 teams in the league, despite the fact that they had just won the Cup. What was gratifying was that, in slightly more than a year, we had increased revenues enough that we were among the top nine teams in the NHL.

  Going back to my early lessons in Philadelphia and Hartford, we immediately re-scaled the house, enabling us to generate gross gates that would allow us to keep the team together on the ice. If a team can’t do that after winning two Cups, it can never do it. We did get some pushback from fans, which was to be expected, but the answer was obvious: if you want to keep a championship team, you have to pay more.

  We increased sponsorship. We were more aggressive on merchandising. We changed the logo. We were also among the first to put games on local pay-per-view. Our revenue stream immediately increased.

  We certainly did try to keep our team together as much as we could. We could take no credit for the first Stanley Cup, but we certainly were an active participant in the second one.

  It was frustrating in that the media assumed we were going to get rid of players and they criticized us in advance for it. We didn’t do it, but then when we signed the players, the media were critical and said we paid the players too much. We were damned if we did, damned if we didn’t.

  I can defend every Penguins contract we signed during that period. We signed Ron Francis to triple what he had been making and everyone said we overspent on him, but Ron was a treasury bond. He finished in the top five or six scorers every year. By 1998, my last year with the Penguins, Ron’s contract was about $1.9 million. The next year he went to Carolina for about $6 million. This proves the argument that players’ values are based on the contracts they are able to generate. A player is worth what a team will pay him. It didn’t make us wrong for not paying Ron that much, nor did it make Carolina wrong for signing him for that number. That’s what they thought he was worth and it was their right to determine that.

  Another contract we were really criticized for was the Kevin Stevens deal. In May of our second year in Pittsburgh, we were about three-quarters of the way to signing a new contract with Kevin. We were playing the Islanders in game seven of the second round of the playoffs when Kevin went into the corner, collided with Rich Pilon and was immediately knocked out. He couldn’t break his fall to the ice and broke an amazing number of bones in his face. He required delicate surgery involving metal plates to help reassemble his face. It was one of the worst injuries I’ve ever seen. How could we have said to Kevin Stevens — who gave his face for the team — that we weren’t going to pay him? A lot of people questioned whether Kevin could come back and play after that injury, but the very next season he came back and scored 41 goals and 87 points.

  Mario’s Battle

  The team that went for the third Cup was the best Penguins team of them all. I’ve always said that, and so has Scotty Bowman.

  That year we had five players (Lemieux, Jagr, Tocchet, Stevens and Mullen) with 30 goals and four (Lemieux, Stevens, Tocchet and Francis) with 100 points. We finished first overall with 119 points to win the Presidents’ Trophy for the first time in franchise history. Mario started the year with at least one goal in each of the first 12 games and by January was threatening to break both Wayne Gretzky’s goals and assists records for a single season.

  Then, on the morning of January 12, 1993, I got a call from Mario while he was on the way home from the doctor.

  “They found a lump and I have Hodgkin’s disease,” he said.

  I was just stunned. I wanted to be there for him and immediately flew from L.A. to Pittsburgh.

  Here’s what most people don’t know. Mario couldn’t start his lymphoma treatment right away because he had an infection in his lungs and the doctors couldn’t be sure that the infection wasn’t more cancer. So for two weeks we were all very nervously praying for the lungs to clear. Fortunately they did, and Mario began a series of 22 radiation treatments.

  It was a difficult, frightening time for Mario and his family, and also for everybody in the franchise, but the players managed to play a game above .500 and hang onto first place in the division for the six weeks that Mario took treatment.

  Mario got his last treatment
on a Monday, and two days later he was on the ice in Philadelphia. The Spectrum is not known for its friendly fans, but before the game they gave Mario a huge standing ovation. Unbelievably, after 52 days off the ice and weakened by radiation, Mario scored a goal and an assist. Unfortunately, we still lost that game.

  We lost again three nights later in New York but then didn’t lose another game for the rest of the regular season. We set the NHL record, which still stands, with 17 straight wins before ending the schedule with a tie. Mario was out of this world. When he came back he was 12 points behind Pat LaFontaine in the scoring race, and he ended up winning by just that, 12 points. Pro-rating his points-per-game and goals-per-game percentages, if he’d played the entire schedule he would have broken both of Gretzky’s records.

  We beat New Jersey in five games in the first round, but never got a chance to go for the third Cup because the Islanders took us out in game seven of the division final when David Volek scored in the sixth minute of overtime.

  I don’t think anyone in professional sport has ever come close to doing what Mario did in 1992–93. Being diagnosed with a disease that could have ended his career, and maybe his life, then coming back to play the way he did after 22 radiation treatments. It was superhuman.

  However, he may have come back too soon, because when we started the next season, we could see that things weren’t right with him. He had had his second back surgery in the summer, and missed the first 10 games of the season, recovering. After he came back, Howard Jr. came out to a game in Anaheim with me, and by this point it was always tenuous whether or not Mario was going to play. We were sitting up in a box when the players come out for the second period . . . and no Mario.

  I asked Howard Jr. to go down to see what was going on, and Mario was sitting in the back of the team bus, pretty emotionally distraught. Tom Reich soon came to me and said Mario was going to have to take a break, and I supported that idea. As a friend, I wanted to be very sensitive to Mario, as the past year had been an immensely trying one for him, both physically and emotionally. Mario never properly fully rested after the cancer treatments. Mario played only 22 games that year, 1993–94, but as a testament to his ability, he had 37 points in those games. He came back in February, and from that point on, I felt, he was always a reluctant participant in the sport. That was something that always ticked off Roger Marino when he became my partner a few years later.

  Mario got seven points in the first playoff round, but Washington, the team that could never beat us in the playoffs, eliminated us in six games. That was the spring that the Rangers finally won the Stanley Cup after 54 years, with Mark Messier publicly guaranteeing that the Rangers would win game six of the Eastern final, then scoring a hat trick to make sure it happened. That’s what superstars like Messier, and Gretzky, and Mario could do.

  The First NHL Lockout

  Most people in the sport will tell you that once their team gets eliminated in the playoffs, they are reluctant to watch any more hockey that season.

  However, I watched the 1994 Cup final between the Rangers and Vancouver because it was so electrifying for the league. Messier made that incredible prediction the previous round, then single-handedly carried the Rangers to the Cup.

  We had played the entire 1993–94 season without a new collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association. The CBA we signed to end the short players’ strike in April of 1992 was a two-year deal, but it dated back to the start of that season. That led to a lot of media speculation that the NHL would lock the players out before the 1993–94 season, but we played that season without any interruption and went into the summer hoping we could hammer out a new agreement.

  I was on the league’s negotiating committee and we had a lot of meetings over the summer, trying to work out a new deal. It was a difficult process involving a lot of discussions because there were a number of complicated issues involved. We actually agreed on one of the most fundamental points, though: that it was important to find a way to keep the smaller-market teams alive in an era of changing economics. The two sides came at it from vastly different points of view, of course.

  Essentially, in the negotiations, the NHL was proposing a payroll tax and a salary cap, along with some changes to free agency and salary arbitration. The players, meanwhile, were suggesting revenue sharing among the teams as an answer to economic issues.

  We were having meetings every other week to discuss the potential work stoppage, and I really did not enjoy them. The owners who were pro-lockout felt the only way to do it was to shut the game down and force the players’ hands.

  As I’ve said, I’ve been out of step on every strike and every lockout, and to this day I feel that this was the most ill-advised lockout this league has ever had. There are a number of reasons for this. With the Rangers having just won the Cup after five decades without it, there was a renewed public interest in hockey. We had just signed a new TV deal with the emerging Fox network, which appealed directly to the NHL demographics. As well, Major League Baseball players went on strike in August, which eventually cancelled the World Series, thereby putting us in a position of not having to compete with baseball for media attention. It moved us up to right after the NFL on the nightly sports news, so even our exhibition games were getting on ESPN and in the sports pages.

  Some owners thought that my objection was because we weren’t financed properly in Pittsburgh and couldn’t afford a work stoppage. They were partly right, but 60 per cent of the other teams were in the same situation.

  My point of view was, “Look, we’ve got momentum, and that’s the hardest thing in the world to get. We’ve captured the eye of the general sports public, not just hockey fans. We are on Fox, and to make it even better, there is no baseball.” And history has proven me right, because it took years for the game to regain the momentum we had before we locked the players out.

  Right after training camp we took a vote at the Waldorf in New York, and my vote was one of only four against initiating the lockout.

  I remember walking out of the Waldorf ballroom after the vote with Bruins owner and chairman of the Board of Governors, Jeremy Jacobs, and John McMullen of the New Jersey Devils, both of whom I had tremendous respect for and still do. John put his arm around me and said, “Howard, don’t worry about a thing. These players will miss a paycheck and they’ll be back right away.” I answered that we were all forgetting why we overpaid players: they’re competitive, and do not want to lose. They were going to want to beat us.

  At the meeting, one of the lawyers had passed around Marvin Miller’s book A Whole Different Ball Game, which describes what happens during collective bargaining. I didn’t read it until the entire process was all over, and then I wished I’d read it when they gave it to me, because it warns you not to think that a deal will get done until it is the 11th hour. Each side knows that their best deal isn’t going to be extended until the last possible minute, and that is exactly what happened.

  The longer the lockout went on, the more people started to object to it. This was the first lockout in the history of the NHL, so nobody knew what to expect and nobody was prepared for it. While some teams laid off staff, we continued to pay all our employees and didn’t lay off one person. My feeling was that it wasn’t their fault that there was a lockout.

  There were a lot of hawks amongst the governors: Jacobs, McMullen, Richard Gordon in Hartford, Abe Pollin in Washington. I couldn’t get mad at Abe Pollin — he was a wonderful man and was always good to me. I remember during one vote he was sitting next to me and he said, “Howard, I know you think I’m an asshole, but I’ve got to vote no.” I said, “Abe don’t worry about it. I don’t think you’re an asshole, I just think you’re wrong.”

  The lockout was crippling us and kept going right through Christmas. I was really apprehensive that it might not end and we could lose the whole season. It went right to January 11th, and I remember
walking around the Civic Arena concourse while the vote to end the lockout was being conducted by telephone, and saying a prayer to myself, because if we had lost the whole season we would have been in trouble financially, along with a number of other teams.

  The vote to end the lockout just squeaked by, and we executed our plan to launch a 48-game season. You couldn’t really do it with any fewer games than 48.

  We did manage to get a rookie salary cap in the settlement, and rookies had to sign two-way contracts, but there was no overall salary cap — and there wouldn’t be one for another decade. There are those who say we didn’t accomplish enough, and who are critical of teams like ours who couldn’t afford to lose the season financially and so voted to end the lockout. As far as I am concerned, history has proven that I was right with regards to my position on the first lockout. Momentum is really hard to generate in pro sports, and we had it going for us, only to see it dissipate. All you have to do is look at the franchise problems that occurred after this particular lockout, and you will understand why the lockout was so ill-advised. There was a significant number of changes in ownership after the 1994–95 lockout.

  When we finally got back on the ice in January of 1995, it was without Mario, who had decided to take the year off to rest emotionally and physically. But Jaromir Jagr helped compensate for Mario’s absence with his first of an eventual five NHL scoring titles. We won 12 of our first 13 games and tied the other one, before cooling off for the rest of the schedule and finishing second to Quebec in the Northeast Division. In the opening round of the playoffs, Washington went up on us three games to one, but for the second time in four years we rallied to beat them out in seven games. Then we lost in five games to the Devils, who went on to win their first Cup.

  The 1994–95 lockout was the first lengthy work stoppage for the NHL. It was a learning experience for everyone, including the players. The next work stoppage would be in 2004–05, when the NHL lost the entire season, including the Stanley Cup playoffs. Then there was the 2012–13 lockout, which also resulted in a 48-game schedule.