It probably didn’t help any when Columbus gave him a slap in the face trading Nash to Flyers division rival NY. AFTER we traded them a decent goalie prospect [which they needed badly].

Doesn’t anyone wonder why NBC, [whose majority share of stock is owned by Comcast -- owner of the Flyers] was legally able to make a deal for television rights for the entire NHL? Or how convenient it was that such a deal [which ensures NHL owners receive $200 million even if there's no season] right before the active CBA expired? It’s almost like Snider was paying-off the other teams to agree to the lockout.

[The Comcast-NBC merger along with the NBC-NHL deals were supposed to also ensure that Comcast made it's RSN programming CSN Philly [aka Flyers games] available to competing television programming providers. They not only didn’t do that, but insisted that DirecTV and DishNetwork BLACKOUT round 1 playoff games from NBC Sports Center and CNBC in Philadelphia during Flyers games – including away games].
By blacking out viewers in Philly who were unable to receive the game via CSN Philly because they didn’t subcribe to Comcast, Comcast-NBC artifically LOWERED potential viewers, thus lowering potential ratings, thus lowering possible ad revenue, a portion of which would have been considered HRR to be split with the players [and other NHL owners]. By lowering ratings/ad revenues thanks to blacking out potential viewers, they took away possible ad reveue that could have been considered HRR instead turning it into desperate Comcast subscribers, revenue from which is NOT considered HRR. Why are they allowed to continue doing this?

Comcast [owner of the Philaelphia Flyers] annual report from 2011 shows over $50 Billion [yup BILLION] in revenues. Yet they continue to sit here and fight over 10% of the entire league’s $3.3 Billion of revenue that they consider to be ‘HRR’ [EXCLUDES luxury suites AND the 40% of Comcast subscribers the FCC claims would leave Comcast if they made Flyers games available to other television providers]

Better yet, cities like Nashville are paying the NHL owners even MORE money. On top of the contracted $$ to ‘manage’ the arena, Nashville had to pay an additional $8 million to the predators to help them find alternate entertainment to keep the arena occupied. If you ask me, hosting a ‘lockout’ shouldn’t be considered a very good way to ‘manage’ an arena for the city and those cities paying out public funds to the owners locking out teams should ask for a refund on their ‘arena management’ fees they’re paying.

Obviously they’d want a new CBA and to talk over revenue sharing because Nashville -is- a smaller market, but not at the cost of a season when the Predators popularity in the area was just hitting another big swell. Huge loss of momentum for a small market team.

It’s not easy to be the owners that vote ‘No’ against the lockout and then get to sit in the room with everyone that voted ‘Yes’. I can see gather why it was unanimous to start the lockout.