The Antitrust Attorney Blog
Author: Aaron Gott
The 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs are underway. For an antitrust lawyer and hockey fan, it is a fitting moment to take stock of professional hockey’s rich antitrust history.
Professional sports leagues create unusual market dynamics. Their products are produced jointly by competitors—teams that need each other to put on games, sell tickets, and negotiate broadcast deals—but those same competitors must hold themselves apart enough to compete for talent, fans, and championships. That tension between cooperation and competition is a recipe for antitrust scrutiny, and hockey has produced some instructive case law in the field. The lessons are not just for sports lawyers; the same dynamics increasingly play out in technology platforms, healthcare networks, and other ecosystems where rivals must coordinate to deliver a product.
Below is a tour of professional hockey’s antitrust story, from the reserve clause to the modern lockout, with stops along the way at relocation fights, the single-entity defense, and the league’s nine-figure expansion fees.
Player Mobility and the Reserve Clause
For most of the twentieth century, professional hockey players could not freely move between teams. The reserve clause, written into nearly every standard player contract, gave the team perpetual rights to renew the contract on its own terms. The practical effect was that NHL teams collectively suppressed labor competition: a player drafted by Toronto stayed in Toronto unless Toronto chose to trade him, and the league’s structure ensured no other employer could compete for his services.
That arrangement looked exactly like what it was—an agreement among competitors to control the labor market. When the World Hockey Association launched in 1972 and began signing NHL players, federal courts examined the reserve clause and found Sherman Act problems. The leading decision is Philadelphia World Hockey Club, Inc. v. Philadelphia Hockey Club, Inc., in which the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued a preliminary injunction against the NHL’s enforcement of the reserve clause and held that the league’s restrictive practices likely violated the antitrust laws.
Labor markets are markets, and agreements among horizontal competitors to suppress wages or restrict labor mobility receive scrutiny under the Sherman Act. The Justice Department and the FTC have in recent years returned to that principle in the form of no-poach and wage-fixing prosecutions across industries, from fast food to nursing to engineering. Hockey just got there first.
Rival Leagues and Group Boycotts: The NHL v. WHA
The reserve clause was only one piece of the NHL’s response to the WHA. The league also coordinated with arena operators to restrict the WHA’s access to facilities, leaned on broadcasters and equipment suppliers, and otherwise marshaled the resources of incumbents against an entrant.
That is classic group boycott territory. When dominant firms join forces to deny a rival the inputs it needs to compete—facilities, supplies, distribution—the conduct sits at the heart of Section 1 concern. The legal pressure on the NHL, combined with the WHA’s financial difficulties, ultimately produced a partial merger: four WHA teams (the Edmonton Oilers, Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, and Winnipeg Jets) joined the NHL in 1979, and the rival league dissolved.
The pattern repeats in technology, healthcare, finance, and transportation. Dominant platforms do not just compete with entrants; they shape the rules of competition, and they often do so collectively with other incumbents who depend on those rules. Hockey just happens to have litigated it earlier (and on skates!).
Drafts, Salary Caps, and the Non-Statutory Labor Exemption
Sports drafts and salary caps look like textbook Sherman Act problems. A draft is an agreement among competitors not to compete for entry-level talent. A salary cap is an agreement among competitors to fix the price of labor. In any other industry, both would be candidates for per se antitrust condemnation.
In professional sports, they usually survive because of the non-statutory labor exemption, a judicially crafted doctrine that immunizes certain restraints adopted through collective bargaining. The Court’s decision in Brown v. Pro Football, Inc. set out the contours: a restraint is exempt if it concerns a mandatory subject of bargaining, primarily affects the parties to the collective bargaining relationship, and is reached through bona fide arm’s-length bargaining.
Hockey has worn the exemption well. Drafts, entry-level contract restrictions, restricted free agency, and the salary cap all flow from collectively bargained agreements between the NHL and the National Hockey League Players’ Association. They have not been seriously vulnerable to antitrust challenge so long as the bargaining relationship holds.
The takeaway is not that drafts and salary caps are competitively benign. It is that how a restraint is adopted can matter as much as what the restraint does. That distinction has implications well beyond sports—particularly in industries where standard-setting bodies, joint ventures, and trade associations make rules that look a great deal like restraints on competition.
Territories, Relocation, and Market Allocation
NHL teams do not move freely. League rules grant existing teams territorial rights and condition relocation and expansion on supermajority votes of the other owners. The result is a system in which incumbents collectively decide who can enter their markets and on what terms.
Geographic market allocation among horizontal competitors is normally per se illegal under Section 1. Yet the NHL has largely avoided antitrust liability in this area. Part of the explanation is doctrinal: courts have moved away from the per se rule for sports league rules, applying the rule of reason instead in light of the joint-venture features of professional sports. Part of it is pragmatic. The NHL has historically resolved territorial disputes through indemnity payments rather than through litigation. When the Disney-owned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim entered the league in 1993, Disney was required to make a substantial payment to the Los Angeles Kings, whose territorial rights covered the Anaheim market.
The NFL has not been as fortunate. In Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission v. National Football League, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a treble-damages verdict against the NFL for blocking the Oakland Raiders’ relocation to Los Angeles. Applying the rule of reason, the court found that the NFL’s three-quarters approval requirement for franchise relocation was not justified by procompetitive benefits—particularly given that the league had invoked the rule to protect the L.A. Rams, who had themselves moved from Los Angeles to Anaheim.
More recently, the NHL itself flirted with similar trouble. The 2009 bankruptcy of the Phoenix Coyotes produced a high-profile dispute over Jim Balsillie’s bid to buy the team and move it to Hamilton, Ontario. The NHL invoked its relocation rules to block the move, and Balsillie pressed antitrust counterclaims accusing the league of conspiring to allocate the southern Ontario market to the Toronto Maple Leafs and Buffalo Sabres. The bankruptcy court ultimately rejected Balsillie’s bid on other grounds, and as a result the antitrust questions were not resolved. They will likely arise again in the next dispute spurred by the relocation rules.
When they do, courts will likely apply the rule of reason, but even with the special treatment of professional sports, an agreement among competitors to divide the market is dangerous territory.
Lockouts and Concerted Refusals to Deal
The NHL has locked its players out three times since 1994, costing the league a half-season in 1994–95, all of 2004–05, and another half-season in 2012–13. From the players’ side, a lockout looks like a concerted refusal to deal, or group boycott: the team employers, acting through the league, jointly impose terms after a bargaining impasse and jointly refuse to hire players except on those terms.
That theory has gotten some traction in football and basketball. In Brady v. NFL, NFL players responded to the 2011 lockout by decertifying their union and bringing antitrust claims. NBA players brought parallel claims during their 2011 lockout. The leagues raised the non-statutory labor exemption in defense, and the courts have generally accepted that defense as long as a bargaining relationship is ongoing—but the threat of antitrust exposure if that relationship breaks down has done meaningful work at the bargaining table.
Decertification is the players’ nuclear option. By disclaiming the union’s representational authority, players strip the league of its labor exemption and convert the lockout into a Section 1 problem. The threat has driven settlements in football and basketball, and it remains available in hockey. The NHLPA has not yet pulled the lever. But it has come close, and the doctrine will continue to shape what is and is not on the table when the next CBA expires.
A breakdown of competition often produces antitrust claims. In platform markets, so does a breakdown of cooperation. The lockout cases are a useful reminder that the line between the two can turn on the contract that ties the parties together.
The Single-Entity Defense After American Needle
Today, it is well-settled law that whenever sports teams interact through their league, they are a group of competitors capable of conspiring in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. But the argument that a professional sports league is a single entity incapable of conspiring with itself for purposes of Section 1 was made by the NFL, and it resulted in the classic antitrust case of American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League. In American Needle, the Supreme Court held that the NFL’s exclusive headwear licensing agreement with Reebok was concerted action subject to Section 1 scrutiny. The Court’s decision was unanimous and decisive: the teams remained separately owned, separately managed, and economically independent enough to be capable of conspiring, even when they acted through a league office.
American Needle did not abolish the single-entity defense, but it did make it unviable for most professional sports leagues. One league that might still find success in arguing it is a single entity comes to mind: the Professional Women’s Hockey League. All eight teams in the PWHL are owned by the league and, for economic purposes, are managed top-down. A single entity may not have to face a Section 1 claim, but it would not have that defense for a claim under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which deals with monopolization.
And while American Needle may have been a professional sports case, it is invoked in antitrust litigation all the time—often in the context of joint ventures, trade associations, and other cooperative bodies. Under American Needle, those organizations are not judged by their legal structure or the labels applied to them, but rather whether they deprive the market of “independent centers of decisionmaking.”
Expansion Fees and Pricing Access to the Market
When the NHL added the Vegas Golden Knights for the 2017–18 season and the Seattle Kraken for the 2021–22 season, each new team paid a substantial expansion fee—roughly $500 million in Vegas’s case and $650 million in Seattle’s. Those fees were divided among existing owners.
On one hand, an expansion fee is a reasonable price for the costs of integration into the league—shared revenue dilution, scheduling, and the like. On the other hand, it is incumbent competitors collectively pricing entry into their market. The same antitrust questions that haunt territorial restrictions apply with even more force when the price of entry is set by the sellers of access. While the NHL has not faced an antitrust challenge to its expansion fees, an entrant denied entry or required to pay an obviously supracompetitive fee for entry might have a colorable claim.
This is not just a hockey problem. Many regulated and self-regulated markets feature entry fees, certification charges, or membership dues set collectively by incumbents who are themselves competitors of would-be entrants. The economics are the same whether the gate is to an NHL franchise or to an electronic trading network.
Beyond the Rink
Professional hockey is not the most economically significant sports league in the United States, and its antitrust litigation history is shorter than baseball’s, football’s, or basketball’s. But the sport has produced clear, accessible illustrations of the major doctrines that govern joint ventures of competitors: the per se rule, the rule of reason, the labor exemption, the single-entity defense, and the antitrust treatment of standard-setting and rulemaking that have implications far beyond professional sports.
The antitrust questions hockey has had to answer are the questions that any market run by its own participants must answer. Who gets to compete? On what terms? At what price? Who sets the rules, and how? These are questions that apply equally to technology, healthcare, financial markets, and the platforms that increasingly mediate everyday commerce.