Gary Bettman has made it official: The NHL season is cancelled. This is the very first instance of a “major” (to be charitable) sports league in North America calling off an entire season.
Where’s the hue and cry, the hand-wringing, the bitterness from the fans? Or, rather, what fans? The reason why the owners wanted cost certainty, aka a salary cap, is precisely because there aren’t any fans. The league expanded too much too fast, they gave extravagant salaries to people who play in a second-tier sport, and the arbitrators gave the players ridiculous awards in the off-season. The house was coming down, and everybody knew that except for the players.
Well, an entire season is down the tubes, a debacle from which the league may never recover. And the players still won’t accept a cap. There will never be another game unless they accede to that, and they have to know it by now. They had to know it back in October. And yet they refused to give in.
Now the players are threatening to organize their own league. Frankly, I hope they do get their own league started, because then they will understand why the owners weren’t playing this time.
I lay this debacle at the feet of the players. They had it in their hands to end this, but they saw the NFL, MLB, and NBA dollars and just couldn’t swallow their pride enough to realize that they are playing a niche sport, one that is now in its death throes.
Goodbye, NHL. We’ll miss you on occasion. But only when there’s no curling or field hockey on, or perhaps some jai alai.
The players did accept a cap at 49 million, and probably would’ve come down to 45 million. The owners are stuck at 42 million, but they did drop cost certainty.
I have some small amount of sympathy for the few dozen fans the NHL had left, but i shed no tears for the players or the owners. I hope they all lose everything they own in this debacle. Then maybe a lesson will be learned by other overpaid “athletes” and their agents.
Nah. When has anybody ever learned that lesson?
Dodgeball moves up a notch!
There’s no wailing and gnashing of teeth from the fans because we all pretty much gave up when the first ‘deadline’ for cancellation passed with no deal. Figured they’d keep bickering for another few weeks before Bettman got around to declaring it DOA. And look! That’s exactly what happened.
I disagree. The owners have to bear the responsibility. They were willing to pay the players and offer the high end contracts. Look at Jaromir Jagr, Alexei Yashin, and the entire New York Rangers. All of them were offered extraordinarily high contracts by teams/owners that had to have them. Heck, look at Martin Lapointe. He had one good year and became a $5 million bust for Boston.
Then the owners wanted the players to save them from themselves with a nearly unworkable salary cap and rejected any other plans or ideas. :dubious:
Nope. Sorry. The players aren’t exactly innocent, but the owners are the ones offering up the money and then crying about losing it. Can’t have it both ways. Can’t bemoan high contracts while paying them out.
Let’s just hope that the NHL gets serious about fixing everything that’s wrong. Lower the salaries via a cap or luxury tax. Drop some teams to consolidate the talent. Stop trying to increase scoring and make it basketball on ice. Stop expanding to markets that don’t even know what hockey is.
I agree with a lot of the points **Airman ** brought up. I consider myself to be a casual hockey fan, and would gladly sit down every so often to see a game between two good teams. Over the past few years, it has gotten almost impossible to find a game between two good teams. The NHL abandoned its Canadian/Northern U.S. base in search of greener pastures, and everything went to hell as soon as the novelty wore off (I mean, an NHL team in ATLANTA??? I love Atlanta, but Jesus!) Too many teams, combined with the boring nature of the thug-style play in vogue today, has made the NHL a non-entity to me. They need to bite the bullet, downsize the league, change the rules to allow for more scoring, and pray their traditional fans will forgive them.
And mark my words, NASCAR is going down the same path. They are taking away races from too many southern tracks and giving them to these new cookie-cutter 1.5 mile tracks in cities where fans will be staying away in droves in a few years. Well-timed, well-reasoned expansion can be a good thing. Expanding for a quick buck now and turning your back on your loyal fanbase is just stupid.
You do realize that the nation referred to in “National Hockey League” is Canada, right? They had a good thing going until they let us in, but we eventually took over and killed it.
The Canadians aren’t dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.
Yes-I knew that. What I meant was that Canadians (Canadiens?) seemed to be much more intense about the sport(it seems to be more popular there), so kids, if they wanted to see/be a fan of someone, Canuckland would be the place for it.
Once again, it proves my theory. Everything was better before there was money in it.
Sports, Music, Movies…I know that at times it was unfair to the players, musicians, and actors, but from a fan’s POV, you didn’t have to deal with the escalating costs, primadonnas, and utter shite for a product that we do now.
Forgot to add: the games can be attended for a mere fraction of the cost of a seat at an NHL game. I used to go to Canucks games, until it became cost prohibitive.
