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In recent decades, significant advances have been made at both the grassroots and professional levels of women's ice hockey in North America. Yet, despite recent achievements, such as the establishment of ‘professional’ leagues, and compelling narratives of progress, athletes and league organisers still face significant challenges. The barriers women face, such as reduced access to resources and opportunity, lack of legitimacy, and league instability, and a continued reliance on relationships with men's sporting leagues, such as the National Hockey League, suggest that women's ice hockey is accommodated into the game in ways that reinforce and perpetuate systems of gender, reproducing a neoliberal notion of failure. Using Halberstam's (2011) notion of failure as the place from which reform and transformation can take place, we offer a critical reading of the (re)formation of the National Women's Hockey League and the developments in women's (semi)professional ice hockey in North America.

This paper aims to investigate, through the lens of the principal–agent problem, the relationship between payment of National Hockey League (NHL) salaries and player performance during the period of 2005-2011 and explore the inherent issues within the NHL player compensation and incentive structure.

The research adopts a pragmatic philosophy with deductive reasoning. This paper focuses on the NHL season 2005-2011 and undertake analysis of historical player contracts and performance data of 670 players across 29 clubs to undertake liner regression analysis.

This paper quantifies potential inefficiencies of NHL league contracts and defines the parameters of the principal–agent problem. It is identifies that player performance generally increases with salary, is higher in the first year of a contract and despite decreasing over the life of the contract, will usually peak again in the final year of the contract.

The research is based around figures from 2005-2011 and secondary statistical data. The study captures quantitative data but does not allow for an exploration of the qualitative perspective to the problem.

Entry-level or first contracts are good for all teams and players because they provide incentive to perform and a reduction of risk to the team should a player not perform to expectations. The same can be said for players at the other end of the spectrum. Although not typically used much, performance bonuses for players over the age of 35 allow clubs to “take a chance” on a player and the player can benefit by reaching attainable bonuses. These findings therefore provide contributions to the practicing managers and coaches of NHL teams who can consider the results to help shape their approach to management of players and the planning of teams and succession planning for talent.

The paper presents a comprehensive and current perspective of the principal–agent problem in NHL and extends the work of Purcell (2009) and Gannon (2009) in understanding player performance enhancement.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the effect of the National Hockey League (NHL) collective bargaining agreement (CBA) of 2005 between the NHL owners and the NHL Players Association, to determine whether competitive balance in the NHL increased after the CBA.

Competitive balance in the NHL was compared between 11 seasons before the NHL Lockout Season in 2004-2005 and 11 seasons after, with a new CBA and a new revenue sharing plan. Competitive balance was measured in multiple ways, within seasons, across multiple seasons, by the margin of victory in individual games, by the concentration of teams winning and playing in the NHL championship, in the correlation of winning percentage of a season with subsequent seasons, and the number of consecutive winning or losing seasons.

There was greater competitive balance after the Lockout Season and the new CBA than before on all of the measures of competitive balance. The NHL has found a management solution to the effective management of a common pool resource and avoided a tragedy of the commons.

While this research builds on previous work which examines the presence of competitive balance in the NHL, it encourages those engaged in labor policy to consider not only the merit of design when negotiating labor policy, but also to explore the impact of policy on organizational outcomes over time.

This paper combines perspectives and insights from multiple disciplines including economists’ ideas about competitive balance in a sports league, ecologists’ ideas about effective management of a common pool resource, and strategic management ideas about management solutions to a sustainability problem.

Year 2004 was influenced by the strike in the National Hockey League. The reason of this strike was the option of adoption of the wage ceiling for the NHL players. The paper stresses the attention to the problem how to account and measure the possibility of the players’ contracts with options in the new model. We are dealing with the following hypothesis: “Is possible to use the experiences of valuation of financial options not only to ROA (Real Options Analysis) but also for valuation of players’ contracts with option?” The modified Black‐Scholes Formula is one of the possible solutions how to measure the value of the option clause.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of order on the quality of outcomes when making sequential decisions and test the widely‐held belief that choosing earlier is preferable and results in better outcomes than choosing later.

Quantitative performance from the sequence of athletic decisions made by the teams of the National Hockey League (NHL) at the annual amateur entry draft is longitudinally analyzed using a participation threshold of 160 games.

Analysis indicates that earlier choice does result in outcomes that are significantly and substantially better but that this effect is muted beyond approximately the first 100 decisions, after which there is no discernable advantage.

The dichotomous performance measure excludes more qualitative or stratified assessments of performance and does not include context of the individual decision choices. The results may not generalize beyond the National Hockey League or other human resource situations.

The research suggests that sequential decision processes are suboptimal in the presence of large amounts of information and choice. Recommendations include reallocating the amount of confirmatory attention spent on highly‐ranked candidates.

The paper exposes limitations to the widely‐held belief that choosing earlier is preferable to choosing later.

The purchase drivers of merchandise sales rank in professional sport are examined at both a conceptual and an empirical level. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A database was constructed for all 30 clubs in the National Hockey League based on a conceptual model of relevant variables. Both public and private data sources were accessed, covering an extensive 12-season period (1999-2011), including the 2004-2005 lockout when the season was cancelled. Principal-components analysis was used to reduce the number of variables for regression analysis to distinguish relatedness and to gauge the influence of those variables on merchandise sales rank.

The results reveal that six club-based factors impact merchandise sales rank: Overall Fan Satisfaction, Media Exposure, On-Field Performance, Strength of a Club’s Brand, Local Market Dynamics, and Fan Capacity to Pay. These six categories of purchase drivers form a strong predictive model of merchandise sales rank in the National Hockey League.

The resulting model could be extended in future research by adding extra categories to the conceptual framework and by developing alternative or better measures of the variables the authors use. It could also be tested with other sales data as the dependent variable since the study was limited to ranking data on merchandise data for the National Hockey League clubs for each year. Future research could use the actual merchandise dollars for each club in a league to test the model. A further extension would be to model subparts of merchandise (such as jersey sales, impacts of brand changes, etc.). A similar area of future research would be to look at the role of individual athletes as opposed to clubs in driving merchandise sales rank or volume.

For managers in professional sport, the results suggest that there are steps that can be taken to improve merchandise sales rank (and, by extension, merchandise sales volume). Practitioners can develop and follow strategies in this regard. Results also suggest that practitioners should put the achievement of high Regional Television Ratings – the strongest influencing variable on merchandise sales rank – as a priority.

The results confirm that brand is important when attempting to increase merchandise sales rank. Club managers need to be cognizant of their brand and its impact on merchandising in all decisions.

The business of professional sport is evolving globally with new sources of revenue, including merchandising increasing in prominence. This research explores the drivers of merchandise sales rank in professional sport and provide direction on key antecedents. The study proposes and tests a conceptual model.

The purpose of this paper is to focus an empirical investigation on the financial ramifications of regulatory policies on American professional team sport leagues, while at once including the inseparable effects on the outcomes of contests. The authors conduct a comparative analysis of the impact of alternative regulatory mechanisms adopted by American professional team sport leagues, and their implications for the league performance.

The paper conducts a comparative analysis of ten years of financial and contest data from Major League Baseball (MLB) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using relative measures of payroll and profits for the two leagues, the authors test hypotheses on the impact of the market-based payroll taxes of the MLB with the strict payroll limits imposed by the NHL and their relationship to both financial and contest outcomes of the two leagues.

The comparison of MLB and NHL shows that market-based tax incentives are more consistent with the league financial objectives than strict, enforced mandates, suggesting that comparatively higher profits are associated with the MLB’s approach when compared to the strict bounds imposed by the NHL. Conversely, the comparison of player costs in the NHL and MLB reveal no distinguishable features based on the alternative regulatory methods.

This paper provides an initial, valuable assessment of different regulatory mechanisms on the on- and off-field (-ice) performance of MLB and NHL. Given that MLB has adopted market-based tax incentives to regulate payroll (the competitive balance tax), and the NHL has imposed strict payroll limits (hard salary cap), the authors at once consider MLB’s innovative revenue-sharing system alongside the NHL’s more conventional and restrained method of revenue redistribution, and their implications for performance.

This case explores the turnaround and corporate renewal of the Chicago Blackhawks professional hockey team, which transformed from one of the worst-run organizations in all of professional sports in 2007 to one that won the Stanley Cup (the National Hockey League championship trophy) in 2010. W. Rockwell “Rocky” Wirtz was faced with making critical decisions shortly after inheriting the team from his father, who was the individual most associated with the organization's decline. The team faced financial trouble and had narrowly avoided missing payroll; the previous customer relations strategy (which included refusing to televise home games or to conduct effective marketing) had resulted in significantly diminished brand value; and management and player personnel were devoid of effective leadership. At its nadir, the team was named “The Worst Franchise in Professional Sports” by ESPN in 2004. After assuming control, Rocky embarked on an ambitious corporate renewal strategy that included the following components: leadership: install a new management team with clear goals and creative ideas about how to turn around the organization; culture: reward players for accomplishing their goals and establish a performance-based culture; financial: seek new corporate sponsorships and increase ticket prices once the team established a winning record; and brand and marketing: send a clear message that the team was intent upon winning the championship and design a customer-focused marketing strategy.

After analyzing the case, students should be able to: recommend strategic, financial, and operational changes needed to turn around the organization, and identify key leadership qualities that enable execution of a turnaround plan.

Although literature exists that profiles the effects of technology on sport, there has been little exploration into the specific effects of media technologies. This case study contributes to the existing literature on the convergence of technology and sport by examining which of five key media technologies will have the greatest impact upon the televised ice hockey product. The results demonstrate the importance of forecasting media technology in sport.

Sports leagues and media providers are constantly seeking new ways of improving the consumption experience of viewers. Several new technologies have arrived in the industry, but many have not proved financially viable. Among these new technologies is tracking technology, used to augment television coverage and for coaching enhancement. This has had mixed results. In this paper I argue that the emergence of Moneyball management practices in sport have created the supervening necessity (Winston, 1998) required to drive demand for player tracking technology in ice hockey. This technology is able to collect the data necessary to implement statistical analyses comparable to those used in professional baseball to cover media enhancement, coaching enhancement and Moneyball management.