Met with Paul Kelly this past week and was again struck by the impression that he is the right man at the right time to lead the NHL Players' Association.
Kelly replaced Ted Saskin, who replaced Bob Goodenow at the head of what was a fractured, divided organization coming out of the 2004-05 NHL lockout. To the NHLPA's ever-lasting credit, it took a long, hard look at a list of possible replacements and didn't feel compelled to draw a warm body from the ranks of the hockey establishment before finally settling on Kelly, who has been at the helm for going on a year now.
In that time, the former Boston prosecutor has done a commendable job of emphasizing process above all else, a commitment to doing things the right way that the NHLPA badly needed.
For example, a number of general managers have been muttering about their unhappiness with the NHLPA for not unilaterally extending the current collective bargaining agreement last spring, on the grounds that it would have made signing veteran players easier because teams could then could defer bonus payments into next year's cap, as they've done throughout the current agreement.
Most people think that's what will eventually happen; that the players have made out far better than expected in the current agreement and have no appetite to go to war with the owners only four years after losing an entire year out of their careers to a work stoppage.
But rather than just assuming that's how his membership felt, Kelly wanted to know the answer for sure. As a result, he is currently on his fall tour of NHL teams which brought him to Calgary last Tuesday, the eighth city that he's visited thus far. At every stop on the tour, Kelly and Glenn Healy, the NHLPA's new director of player affairs, are surveying players about their CBA intentions through a secret ballot. They then seal the results and file them away at NHLPA, until such time as all 30 teams are surveyed. They themselves don't know how the membership is leaning - and that's deliberately done, so as not to prejudice their own presentations, pro and con, about extending – or terminating the CBA.
The fall tour will wrap up on Dec. 17. By the time they report the results to the executive committee and vet them through some of their financial people, the earliest they would communicate their desires will be mid-January. Officially, they have until May to let the league know their intentions.
Perhaps more importantly, Kelly and Healy are also addressing safety issues on their tour - an increasingly fractious topic at all levels of the NHL, given the number of players who were sidelined in the first month of the season as a result of concussions.
Healy, a rising star in the association after leaving his TSN broadcasting role, is taking a significant lead role in this discussion, especially as it relates to equipment. Healy suggested that of the 65 concussions suffered in the league last year, 39 were the result of shoulder pad-to-head contact. As a result, the NHLPA is working with the equipment manufacturers to eliminate the hard shell on the shoulder pad, which – while it has done a good job of protecting shoulders – has contributed to the frequency of head injuries. Modifications to the elbow pads have made them safer; Healy believes it wouldn't take much to adjust the manufacture of the shoulder pad to accomplish the same thing. They are also looking at innovations in helmet design.
Kelly also believes that a small percentage of players are responsible for a disproportionate share of the truly dirty plays that occur every year in the league; and that his association will support the NHL disciplinary process, if they determine to throw the book at repeat offenders.
This, too, is something of a departure. In the past, it always seemed as if the NHLPA was busier trying to protect the interests of the perpetrator of a questionable incident, as opposed to the injured party. In his presentation, Healy is showing players a video, not of don'ts, but of dos – in other words, ways they can play the body without necessarily pile-driving an opponent, between the numbers, from behind, six feet away from the boards.
