Allow me to second that, my fellow Upstate resident!
BTW, one good thing about the lockout is that we don’t have to listen to those jokers on SportsCenter doing bad Marv Albert impressions of “Kick save and a beauty!” Gotta find the silver lining somewhere.
I agree with this assessment. The owners wanted protection from themselves.
The players made a huge concession early on, providing a workable plan and harsh salary cuts. The owners stood their ground.
The players finally accepted a salary cap, $6.5 million over the owners number. The owners stood their ground.
More than half of the league is playing overseas now, for a fraction of the money they were earning. The owners are making nothing. And D_Odds, who doesn’t like basketball at all, is going to follow pre-season baseball closer than ever before. Of course, as an Islander fan, I usually got a jump start on the baseball season over other hockey fans
I was reading a series which I enjoyed by Elizabeth Moon (The Deeds Of Paksenarrion) when I created my SD account. The name of one the characters was Duke Phelan, and I liked it, so I went with it. Also, I think Matlock was taken.
All I’ve heard from people is that they don’t care. There’s no big outcry going on here (at least not in Toronto, and Ottawa). Once the league starts up again there might be some resentment, but I think it’ll all go back to normal within one season.
Ah thanks.
Around here people are just sick of hearing about it.
It’s a shame - with our Flames doing so well last year…but what are you gonna do?
Die hard hockey fans are getting their fix in watching some of the other leagues (the Calgary Hitmen of the WHL) and even high school age teams.
I’ve started going to lacrosse games (go Roughnecks!)
In a way it sucks that there’s no NHL for the kids, but at the same time it’s really neat to see the kids turning up on the news - seeing as there’s less sports to talk about.
I’ve gotta say that ever since the NHL got so ridiculous with salaries - and therefore with the ticket prices, I’ve been a big fan of the minors.
I used to attend a whole lot of the ECHL games of the Wheeling Nailers, formerly the Wheeling Thunderbirds.
Good hockey, good price.
What do you mean by that bit up there? You think that just because you don’t enjoy a sport, it’s not major?
Bullshit. You won’t miss it one little bit. However, there are thousands, if not millions, of fans who are really upset over it. There’s no need to be a jerk about it.
Bullshit. The players just proposed a hard salary cap. The owners rejected it.
Why should they? The owners got themselves into this mess, and now they want the players to bear all of the financial burden of getting themselves out. What’s really telling is that the owners refuse to implement a revenue sharing plan.
Of course you do, because it’s never the fault of management and workers are supposed to be good and bend over when the management fucks up so that management doesn’t have to suffer at all.
Here’s the deal - the owners refuse to share salary and they want the players to accept a cap based on the poorest team’s revenue levels. Why the fuck should the players accept that, when the owners of the successful teams (New York, Toronto, Detroit, Montreal, Boston, etc.) don’t have to make any sacrifices by sharing their local revenue with the poorer teams?
I’ll be the first to concede that what you’re saying is true. The owners made their own situation untenable, but when they realized this they made the informed decision to go this route. The players knew it was coming, and the only thing they seemed capable of saying was no. The owners, by all accounts (except that of the players), offered the numbers that they could afford to offer. Could there have been some sort of profit sharing? Sure, there could have been. But given that there wasn’t any sort of offer on the table by the rich, profitable franchise owners, the other owners were backed into a corner.
I place the blame solely on the players because the owners could prove that they were losing money, and as owners they are entitled to a profit. Some owners engaged in foolish offer sheet wars that created ridiculous inflation in labor costs, costs that could not be borne by the system, but costs that were required to be borne in order to field a competitive team. It was bound to collapse sooner or later, but the players had stars in their eyes over the big ducats and couldn’t accept that those halcyon days were over, and were illusory even when they existed. The only way the owners could have gotten a grip on things without a cap would have been collusion, and we all know what the results of collusion are.
The players were unable to act in their own economic self-interest. It was suicide by union, they all went down with the ship rather than do the sensible thing, which now they’re going to have to do anyway.
There’s no need to be uptight about it. Really. I enjoyed watching my Penguins as much as any die hard hockey fan. But just as the 1994 baseball strike turned me off to that sport, this strike has soured me on hockey to the point where I don’t know whether I’ll ever be as hip to it as I once was. That statement was my last hurrah, in a way.
Hockey, simply put, is not on par with baseball, basketball, or football, for the simple reason that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a violent, hard-hitting game? Is it a gentleman’s game? Is it a scorefest, or a low-scoring strategy game? The NHL doesn’t even know what it wants to be. They make token gestures at stopping fighting but allow goons. They want more scoring but refuse to take draconian measures to eliminate clutching, grabbing, and slashing. They refuse to advertise the game as a low-scoring, strategy game, but they allow 1-1 ties rather than having shootouts to decide the winner. They won’t advertise fighting for fear of offending parents, but they depend on the fights to draw their core audience. I find it telling that they have a specific award for good sportsmanship, whereas in other sports it is assumed, or else they acknowledge the lack thereof and make no pretense towards being a kind, gentle sport.
They draw the lowest ratings of any of the big four sports on television. The ratings are so low, in fact, that there’s no competition for the rights to show the games. They will never get the big television money that the other sports will to defray their players’ big salary demands. They are, in almost every respect, a glorified minor league here in the United States. I understand that Canada takes things more seriously, but that only leads to more questions. For instance: how did Canada let their teams bleed away? With such a strong fan base they should have been able to make a go of things in perpetuity. Yet the teams left, one by one. That’s another telling fact.
The NHL is in big trouble. The owners decided that they needed to be saved from themselves, they decided that something was necessary to save the game. The players lacked the foresight to do the same, and now here we are. Back to square one, only it’s a year and a much, much reduced fan base later. They still don’t have a plan for how to fix the game after they get a grip on the economics. The game may be strong, but the NHL is dying.
Or revenue sharing. There’s absolutely zero revenue sharing of the local revenues by the teams. The players said they were willing to negotiate a hard salary cap that took local revenues into account - but the NHL didn’t want that. They wanted a plan that only took national revenues into account - even though the bulk of each team’s revenues are local.
Bullshit, this wasn’t about saving the game. If this was about saving the game, then the owners would have negotiated a revenue sharing plan between the owners and taken local revenues into account for the salary cap - which the players agreed they would negotiate on.
This was about the owners trying to break the union and squeeze them for all they were worth.
I understand your point, but the owners are the ones that put the ducats out in the first place. Over the last couple of seasons it was owners vs. owners as far as salaries go. The poor clubs hated the rich clubs, When it came to re-signing talented players that grew up in the club, the poor clubs went quitely into the night by trading the players or just not even fielding an offer.
In the end, they fucked themselves. They created the system and tried to fix it by hooking the salary cap to the lowest team salary as opposed to creating a realistic one. The players suggested a cap - a fair and reasonable cap - and it was rejected by the owners, who wanted to maximize their profits as much as they could.
It also increases profit when you put a decent product on the ice. Some owners wanted a profit without doing that. As a Pittsburgh fan you probably understand that. 
It doesn’t matter what kind of a cap you put on the league. The owners have to have a team that people want to watch. Look at Colorado, Toronto, and Detroit versus Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Boston. On one side you have owners that were willing to put a good product on the ice. On the other you have teams waiting for the CBA to expire. Guess which group made money.
If you want to make a profit, you have to be willing to work for it. The owners just want it handed to them.
There is only one man I feel sorry for. That is Wayne Gretzky. Over his entire career he has done everything he possibly can to grow the sport of hockey throughout the united states. In his news conference you could see how upset he was. He was being as classy as he always has been. He refused to place blame and talked exclusively about how this will hurt the game and how he was excited about hockey this season. He did say he would support Mr. Bettman 100% in whatever he came up with but he also said he understood the players position.
In one move, Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow have almost killed everything he’s tried to do over the last 20 or so years. Screw them.
I was an L.A. Kings season ticket holder. Keyword: was.
That plan (the 24% rollback) was not workable.
6.5 million per team, which ends up being around $200 million per season.
The NHL is not a major sport in any reasonable sense of the word. Let me put it this way: when the XFL folded due to low ratings, their ratings were higher than the NHL’s. Women’s soccer also had higher ratings than the NHL, and it folded as well.
There is no justification in the world for sharing local revenues. Why should ticket sales and local media contracts get cut up 30 ways before the franchise sees the money? The NFL certainly doesn’t share local revenue. (Cowboys network, local media contracts, and ticket sales are all “local”. Ticket sales are actually split between the two teams that play the game; I believe the ratio is 60-40 to the home team.) The only revenue sharing that makes sense is league-wide revenue.
Anybody who thinks 52, 49, or 46 million is a fair cap is out of their mind. The NFL shared revenue is 2.5 times that of the NHL, with 2.5 times the number of players per team, and the NFL cap is somewhere around 80-85 million. To think that the NHL could sustain anywhere near 50 million as a cap is to be living in a fantasy world. The original 30 million cap from last year’s offer was fairly reasonable. The owners offered up another 10 million on top of that, which was not only rejected by the players, but they demanded another 10 million on top of that.
The players are crazy. I don’t know what revenue they think the teams are hiding, but it’s certainly not coming from anywhere in the real world.
The owners aren’t making nothing, they’re losing money. They are losing less many during the lockout than if they opened their doors and let the games go on.
Cancel the next season, too.
Create an NHL that is fan-based.
Pay players a league high of $1 million a year, including bonuses. Pay players well, but not outrageously so. You can bet your bottom dollar that future prospects will by thrilled to play in the NHL for any salary beyond what the average joe makes.
Let the players who think this is way to little pay, find better work elsewhere. Of course, they won’t.
Move franchises from places that don’t care about hockey very much to places that are fanatical about hockey, like Saskatoon and Winnipeg. With considerably lower salaries, those smaller cities will be able to afford NHL teams.
If the next season is cancelled, then you can be sure some owners will be looking to relocate their franchises elsewhere.
We just got a plasma TV, and hockey is the only professional sport watched at the Pug house. We are not happy.
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I may be missing something, because I haven’t followed the lockout very closely, so perhaps someone can explain how this isn’t mostly (>51%) Bettman and the owner’s fault.
According to a radio report (ESPN, I believe), from what I understand, the salary cap was proposed at $49M. Bettman and owners said absolutely not, even though only 9 of 30 teams, even without a salary cap, were in the neighborhood of this number.
Seems to me, if 21 or more teams out of 30 could have lived with this number, Bettman and the owners were cutting off their noses to spite their collective face.
Again, I haven’t followed the lock out closely at all, and I’m sure there was more to the cancellation than this, but the cap seemed to be the major roadblock. Please, I’m not trying to stir shit. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I wonder what the total financial side effect this has (vendors, arena workers, etc.)?
There was a nice article on that topic today in the Boston Globe.
I see the minor professional leagues have been mentioned, but in addition, don’t neglect US college hockey. Go CC!
