P.S. : How is Pronger doing ? I haven’t heard anything about him lately .

Wake up!!! Of course they don’t care about the fans or the game. Of course they only care about money. You’d do the same damn thing if you were in either one of their shoes. Don’t hand me your all high and mighty moral bullcrap either. The reason janitors and short order cooks get paid so little is that anybody could do that job. Your pay isn’t based on how physically demanding or intellectually taxing your job is. It’s about scarcity. How many people CAN do your job as well as you? That’s what your worth! No one can play like Ovie, or Crosby, or Parise, or ad nauseum. That’s why they’re worth millions jack hole!

None of “them” owe any of “us” ANYTHING. The NHL is entertainment; nothing more than Friends, Seinfeld, Big Bang Theory, or whatever other popular entertainment analogy you’d like to use. This is an entertainment brand, pure and simple. The producers (Bettman and owners) want to minimize their costs (revenue sharing). The actors (the hockey players) want to maximize their paycheck (derived from said revenue sharing).

Would The Godfather been as great a movie if Bob Saget was Don Corleone? Of course not! So no one is going to watch a bunch of scabs lace up and bang. And the players want a) to play hockey and b) to get paid for it. Solution: Find a league that has the biggest pluses and the smallest minuses. That’s free market. So until they come to an agreeable solution, the show is on hiatus. Period. If that upsets you, watch a different program. I hear ESPN is airing KHL hockey.

Who knows? If Bettman and the owners suck as bad as we all think they do, maybe the NHL goes tits up and a new league takes over as the premiere hockey league in the world. One thing you can be sure of, the best players in the world are going to be attracted to whoever is paying the most money for their services. And the wherever the best players go, so too does our fandom.

Conclusion: Neither side is sinner and neither side is saint. We’re all just a bunch of squirrels trying to get a nut in this world. Stop being jealous of everyone else’s nuts and take care of your own.

I wrote above:

The players are as wrong as the owners. To lump everything on the owners is to assume to players ARE like cattle or at the very least a mindless mob.

-The players agreed to sign cap circumventing deals knowing it went against the very purpose of the salary cap and league parity. If all the responsibility falls on the owners, then it paints a picture of the player basically acting like a sheep…being herded into the conference room, directed to sign the contract, and mindlessly agreeing.

-The players agreed each year to max out the salary cap. And this was after being advised each year by the commissioner that doing so would cause monetary issues for the smaller market teams which weren’t growing as fast as the league itself. So, once again the mindless mob inflated the cap by their own votes.

The players are adults not children. A guy like Craig Adams gradated from Harvard. Yet they act as if “the big bad owners are just trying to squeeze us little guys and deerrrrr we are just toooo innocent and stupid to do anything about it”…….That mantality is an insult to what human beings are capable of! And Fehr is perpetuating it!

The players are as wrong as the owners. To lump everything on the owners is to assume to players ARE like cattle or at the very least a mindless mob.

-The players agreed to sign cap circumventing deals knowing it went against the very purpose of the salary cap and league parity. If all the responsibility falls on the owners, then it paints a picture of the player basically acting like a sheep…being herded into the conference room, directed to sign the contract, and mindlessly agreeing.

-The players agreed each year to max out the salary cap. And this was after being advised each year by the commissioner that doing so would cause monetary issues for the smaller market teams which weren’t growing as fast as the league itself. So, once again the mindless mob inflated the cap by their own votes.

The players are adults not children. A guy like Craig Adams gradated from Harvard. Yet they act as if “the big bad owners are just trying to squeeze us little guys and deerrrrr we are just toooo innocent and stupid to do anything about it”…….That mantality is an insult to what human beings are capable of! And Fehr is perpetuating it!

So, once again, Fehr’s message is garbage! He has NO interest in the welfare of the game! He is a piece of garbage union blowhard!

And I WILL CONTINUE TO TALK IN CAPS KNOWING THAT IF IT WAKES ONE PERSON UP OUT THIS MINDLESS HYPNOSIS THAT MUCH OF THE MEDIA AND NHLPA WOULD LIKE TO PERPETUATE, then at least one more person sees this labor dispute for what it is.

A bunch of rich people whose pride is costing them more money in total than what they would give up by negotiating a deal.

Type in more caps, everyone loves it.

People need to let go of this whiney “ooohhhh the rich owners are just bullies”………..The players get paid MORE THAN 98% OF THE POPULATION FOR WORKING OUT AND PLAYING GAMES FOR A LIVING!

People don’t complain like this for the person who cleaning up your parents crap at the old folks home or the EMT working on the victim of random shooting.

I don’t feel bad for the player whose salary could potentially go from 450,000 to 375,000. They were part of the group that elected to max out the salary cap each year, and there was no push back from the players against the cap circumventing deals that were proposed. It always takes two and these players are as much to blame as every owner that is abusing free agency and spending what they can’t afford.

Even without work stoppages baseball is a joke! The majority of the same teams still outspend everyone and make the playoffs every year. Their revenue sharing did squat to alter the parity and popularity of the game. THE ONLY THING THAT MADE BASEBALL RELEVANT AGAIN WERE RUNS. AND THE MAJORITY OF IT IS STILL STEROID BASED. NOT BECAUSE DONALD FEHR PUT REVENUE SHARING AND LABOR PEACE IN PLACE!

Fehr is a piece of garbage union blowhard!

-the average NHL career isless than 4 years- a loss of a season means 25% of earnings forever

-after the last lost season 20% of the players did NOT come back to play -EVER.

So a $5M new deal goes down to$4.4

A $1M goes to $880,000