LeafsParadise.com

The National Football League isn't just profitable; it could replace the toilet tissue in the League headquarter's bathrooms with dollar bills and still have enough left over to give Roger Goodell his own Scrooge McDuck money bin. For example, only one team in the NFL discovered a way to lose money in the 2010 season: The Detroit Lions, thanks to winn ing just 23 percent of their games over five years and experiencing an 0-for-16 season. This despite the NFL's players taking 57 percent of the League's $9 billion in revenue annually. "We'd all like to have football's problems," an NHL executive told me recently. After the NFL's lockout drama, the players' share was reduced down to a 50/50 split (on average) in what was called an "all-revenue" model. The rich will get richer; and the collective brain-trusts of Enron and Solyndra couldn't find a way for an NFL team to lose money under this CBA's terms. But someone will. Someone always does. In a business with 30-plus franchises, there's going to be an owner who overspends or a team that fails to keep its gate up or a market that suddenly doesn't support the franchise the way the League hoped it could. The problem in the National Hockey League is that there are, at last count, around 18 teams that Forbes.com claims lost money in 2010-11. Many of these teams are successful on ice, but that success hasn't bled over to their economics. This has led to both sides of the CBA debate targeting revenue sharing as a panacea for these money-bleeding teams. As James Mirtle of the Globe & Mail passed along: The players' proposal involves giving up closer to $100-million, money the union wants to put into a $260-million revenue-sharing pot for struggling teams rather than benefit those that make a healthy profit. The NHL has offered to raise revenue sharing to $190-million from last season's $150-million, with the extra likely easy to come by given it's a small fraction — just 10 per cent — of the owners' savings in their deal. "We're not interested in helping the Toronto Maple Leafs make a bigger profit," one source on the players' side said this week. "We're interested in directly targeting the teams that are losing money and guaranteeing that they don't lose money in a new system. That's what we're prepared to do." The NHL is down with revenue sharing, too, but thinks that player costs are the real devil in the details. Its mantra leading up to the labor battle with the NHLPA: The system they put in place seven years ago works for the on-ice product, but "we got the economics wrong." Question is: Can they ever get them right, or are NHL teams destined to always be money losers?