If the NHL players and owners would get together and find a solution to this lockout they could make a huge splash if they played it right and get some much needed good pub for their league.

By coming to terms now, they'd grab the headlines during a very dead sports landscape. They could then put together a mini season (play everyone in your conference home and away) and then head straight into the playoffs. Also it would be a very good idea to lower ticket prices on the abbreviated season (let's say $20 all around) and get as many fannies into the seats as possible.

It's really horrible that the only real stumbling block appears to be a salary cap. The NFL has a hard cap and thrives. The NBA has a soft cap and they're doing okay. The NHLers want to live like MLB but they don't have the same popularity. A $42 million cap would mean that each player would average in the neighbordhood of $1.7-2 million each, which is a very good mean average salary. With most rooks and lower tiered players getting the minimum salary, this would still leave plenty on the books for the stars. The problem is that the stars want $10 million per season when the sport simply cannot afford that. I know that the owners are very much to blame for this lockout as well as the players, but I am having a harder time feeling for them.

Basically they'd better either get it done or blow the whole thing up and start over in a year or two.

Well, I at one point was very fed up with the players, now I am fed up with both, if you want to get a deal done, you stay till it's done, the owners wanna break the union, And they won't budge, cause alot of teams are not losing money by not playing.
I think the union also wants to find a way to save face when they eventually have to accept the cap, Either way don't expect hockey this year, I give it should be back by feb 2006.

this is ALL on the players.

They dont realize their sport as is barley matters in the US and that at its best it is the THIRD most popular sport.

The players greed is killing the NHL, and in case they didnt notice, this season is lost and probably next yr too, and NO ONE GIVES A SHIT!!!

conceed and get the fuck back on the ice guys, or its OVER for your league

Do you want a cap lowlight79? I think from what I heard it sounds like it would help.

i dont know 95% of the NHL, but even I can see they need to dump some teams ASAP....Florida does not need more than one hockey team, and San Jose California should not have hockey either....expansion did them in worse than baseball

I agree with that but do you see that happening?

Probably what's going to happen

yes i do, to stop the nolan's, hick's iltch's of the world, thought I could easily blame wang for give yashin 90 million . But I have always been hockey first, I bleed islander orange. I think the cap will level the field, no longer will great franchise's like edmonton be a minor league for the nhl. I believe you need a cap to save canadian hockey. Moving winnepeg to arizona, and quebec to colorado were horrid moves, though the avs have thrived. I blame bettman too, he is not a hockey guy, he put a team in atlanta(which draws flies), moved the whale to carolina, which was bad too, do we need 2 teams in florida?. the only good moves that have paid off were columbus, nashville and minnesota, who should have never lost the stars.
It also goes back to goodnow's leadership, there have been 3 work stoppages under this guy, he has gotten the union what they wanted, he helped ruin the game too.

Bullfuckingshit.

If your boss agreed to pay you 5 times what you are making right now, would you take it?
How would you feel if 2 years later he came back and said "You know, I can't really afford to pay you that...heh heh heh...."
Salary caps are nothing more than a bunch of owners saying that they cannot possibly control themselves from spending more money. It's collusion.
Gary Bettman is a fucking idiot for expanding the league at the speed he did into the markets that they chose. All the NHL wanted was the expansion fee money to use for promoting those teams, assuming the arenas in Columbus and Miami would just fill right up.
How could the owners possibly begin to pay their players $10 million a year with the revenue streams that they had? They couldn't!
The owners and league thought that they could be MLB or the NBA and were dead fucking wrong, and now they're blaming the players for being greedy for taking the contracts that they so openly offered them? Give me a break.

Yeah, there's probably at least six too many teams in the NHL right now. The problem is that instead of living off of the money that they recieved from TV rights, etc. the NHL lived off of expansion fees and kept adding teams. The product is so watered down because of the extra teams and the teams have become quite generic. Off the top of my head, they don't need teams in: Nashville, San Jose, Miami, Columbus and Atlanta.

Of course there's no way that the players would ever agree to both a cap and contraction, even though in the long run it would be what is best for the sport.

the cap has to be there as a self-protection against the owners, hockey players don't get it though, no really cares that there is no hockey, and that is truly the saddest part of it.

i like the nhl just the way it is....


off

the

air


(more airtime on espn for college hoops)

ZZZZZ ZZZZZZ

that's the exact feeling i get when the nhl is on the air......

30 game season for 28 game playoff? That would be an insult.

Scrap this season, she's dead.

I would much rather watch the Red Wings crush the Maple Leafs or the Avalanche then watch what was on ESPN last... Thursday, I believe. What was that?

A prime time Division III basketball game. Yeah... go DeVry! Beat up the University of Phoenix - Chicago campus!

maybe in the other major sports but liek i said, 90% od America doesnt give a shit about the NHL.....if the players want to make this unlimited money and have their salaries reach MLB or NBA heights the nhl will NEVER prosper, not in this day and age....

At some point the nhl players have to realize the demand for their product just isnt there to support the kind of money they want to make....and the players wont budge an inch on the cap and they are fucking themselves.

see what happens, you bring up college basketball in a nhl thread, and the whole board goes to shit.

I don't know about where you live, but the NHL was rarely (and I mean rarely) on TV here.

Why do players have to be the ones that make concessions on salary? They were OFFERED that money. It's not the business of the employee to make sure that he can be paid what he was OFFERED by his owner. It's the responsibility of the owner/company to make sure they have adequate revenue before they start giving out huge, guaranteed contracts.
The players aren't fucking themselves. Most of them are playing right now, albeit for less, but they could all do quite well in Europe. Many are making well over $1 million over there this season. The owners are the ones not making any money right now.