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NHL Lockout FINALLY Done

http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=412844

Are you telling me most of these issues couldn't have been hammered out in October, before the loss of hundreds of games?  

See, folks, this is the kind of thing that would happen if wrestling was unionized.  

Comments

  1. Scott,


    As a Canucks fan, don't you think trading Hodgson was a mistake?

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  2. Two amnesty buyouts at the end of the season? Let the Scott Gomez farewell tour begin! (The farewell tour will be in the AHL)

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  3. Right now with kesler out maybe for the year the hodgson trade looks really bad but they do need to get bigger sooooo.....

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  4. Hodgson for Grags was one of the most destructive trades in Canucks history. I love Gillis, but his strategy of reacting to why the Canucks lost in the playoffs year before is shortsighted and leads to a lot of dumb trades (Grabs for Ballard). Grabner and Hodgson were supposed to be the future of the franchise, and were essentially traded for nothing

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  5. It's funny because they lost in game 7 to the Bruins and Gillis automatically assumed "alright, it's gonna come down to the exact same thing next year, we gotta get bigger". Mind you, in their one regular season matchup last year, the canucks showed that if they stayed poised, they system COULD beat the Bruins, but Gillis thought they needed to toughen up for their automatic rematch with Boston...Boston ends up going out in the first round (just like the Canucks).

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  6. Hodgson's agent forced the issue, it wasn't really Gillis's choice from what I understand. Cody basically was complaining about not getting ice time behind the elite players, so they sent him somewhere that he could.

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  7. After reading the terms of the CBA, it doesn't appear to be far off from what the owners wanted from the start. Seems like the players made things more difficult than it had to be.

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  8. Someone will pick him up cheap. Commadore was picked up last season.

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  9. Now let's hope the Penguins can bring home another cup :)

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  10. No, this isn't the sort of thing that would happen if wrestling was unionized. Gary Bettman is simply the worst commissioner of all time. He wouldn't be able to commission a thumb wrestling match without there being a strike half-way through. The NHL has MANY problems and almost all of them are self-inflicted by the NHL.

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  11. Or they just caved in too quickly

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  12. I know nothing about the intricacies of hockey's management, but I'd be fine with a few months without wrestling if it meant that the performers had an insurance plan, or hell, were classified as EMPLOYEES by the WWE, rather than independent contractors.

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  13. Hockey lost me when my namesake, Matt Johnson, retired.

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  14. The only thing worse than life with unions is life without unions. . .

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  15. 100% agreed. Give the guys some time to rest and heal and in the long run their careers will be extended and their quality of life will be improved.

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  16. Alternatively, Gary Bettman is the worst.

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  17. As a diehard NBA fan I feel qualified to warn all you hockey lovers: This season won't be pretty. But the playoffs could still (potentially) be awesome!

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  18. I don't know much about hockey, but I think I can safely say, as long as the Miami Heat don't win the NHL championship, it couldn't be all that bad..

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  19. Looking forward to watching Cody Hodgson play for the Sabres. He has been good in the AHL even though he missed a month with an injury. Have fun watching Zach Kassian not use his body Scott.

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  20. Zach Kassian was highly touted in Buffalo. Problem is that he didn't use his frame when he got to the AHL and then NHL. Nobody playing in Lindy Ruff's system does. But, Kassian got gun shy after multiple suspensions in juniors for launching himself at players.

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  21. I think people are too hard on Bettman, and that's coming from a Canadian hockey fan. I don't blame him one bit for the cancelled season, the owners desperately needed to tie salaries to revenues (in the old free-market days the players were getting over 70% of the league's revenues), and that's something no players union will give into without a HUGE fight. Bob Goodenow was telling the players to be willing to sit out 2(!) full seasons to avoid it.
    Given the sport's profile in the US, hockey players were overpaid and shared none of the financial risk. In 8 years he has cut their share of the pie from (around) 74% to now a fixed 50%. It's like how baseball had so many labour conflicts in the 70s and 80s cause the system was out of whack (except this time the players were the ones with the problem). Once they found a middle ground they could live with, there's been labour peace ever since. I see hockey heading down the same path.
    Don't get me wrong, the man has made a lot of mistakes (the Florida Panthers, Phoenix Coyotes, Atlanta Thrashers, etc). but ultimately he serves the owners and I think he's served them well (especially the last 8 years). It just seems that when something goes wrong , it's Bettman's fault. But when things go right (record revenues, great tv ratings, an exciting product, Winter Classic, etc.) it's in spite of him apparently.
    Wow, I just defended Gary Bettman. I thought my Triple H-apologist ass had already hit rock bottom, but here we are...

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  22. The NHL: "We're just telling stories.:

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  23. They're not Hockey Players-They're Ice Entertainers

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  24. As a Pen fan, I'm kinda secretly hoping they have a flukey bad month or two and get a top 5 pick. This season is going to be meaningless anyway.

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  25. Sidney Crosby's new repackaged name is Stan Linnerworth.

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  26. I'm not going to defend Bettman, but it's worth pointing out that, like all sports commissioners, he's an employee of the owners and does their bidding.

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  27. NHL has the shittiest tv deal of any major sport. It's easier for me to watch fucking primer league soccer games. I'm a bball fan but I feel for hockey fans having just sat through the same shit last year with the NBA but to act like Bettman isn't a monster seems wrong imo. Over expansion, two lockouts in 8 years and no real tv deal. I think even canadians deserve better than that

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  28. God dammit I hate the Sabres... And I'm from Buffalo, but there's only so much you can take before you just say "Fuck it"...

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  29. "Are you telling me most of these issues couldn't have been hammered out in October, before the loss of hundreds of games?"


    Or better yet back in June? Or even sometime over the course of last season...


    Anyway, GO AVS GO!

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  30. I dunno man, I thought that the last NBA season was pretty damn good, to the point where I wish they would have stuck with a 66 game schedule.

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  31. Alas, this isn't the first time NHL fans have experienced a half-season. The 1994-1995 lockout was settled in January '95, and resulted in a 48 game season. Mainly it just meant that the playoffs started later.

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  32. You make a lot of good points (especially about the Winter Classic), though I wouldn't say the product is that exciting these days, scoring is nearly back down to pre-lockout levels. That's hardly Bettman's fault though, defense does win in every sport, and it's a coach's duty to exploit any rule he can to keep the other team from scoring, no matter how boring it is to watch. Only real way to properly open up the game is to expand the ice surface, and depending on the layout of the arenas the NHL uses that might not be possible.

    BUT... Bettman's job is not to serve the owners, it's to look out for the good of the league in general, and he hasn't done too well with that. The NHL's "crappy" (yet not bad at all) TV deal is fine, it really is a niche sport that is only popular in select markets, and NBC knows it, and paid proper market value for it. ESPN and Fox have a tendency to overpay for sports rights (something I'm willing to bet we'll see when the EPL and NASCAR contracts run out), and they overpaid for the NHL. But Bettman should have had the common sense to know that putting teams in bad hockey markets and allowing teams to sign players to 10 year+ contracts was a fucking dumb thing to do, and he let them do it anyway. He's not the devil people make him out to be, but he has sucked at his job. Sports commissioners need to have term limits like U.S. Presidents.

    BTW, Donald Fehr needs to take his share of the blame here too. The deal they're taking isn't that far off from the original deal the NHL proposed, but the term "negotiating in good faith" has never been part of his vocabulary. And the players also need to realize that they ain't the NFL, and that a lot of people that go to NHL games are families blowing near a week's paycheck to make their yearly trip to a game. You get PAID to play a fucking GAME, you make millions of dollars to do something that lots of kids (and many adults, at least around here) actually PAY to do, just for the fun of it. Quit fucking whining about how the minor pay cut might affect the options you can't have on your new Mercedes or whatever and realize how lucky you are.

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  33. I like the fact that all 14 non-playoff teams now have a chance at the #1 pick. That makes the draft lottery much more interesting.

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  34. The hockey fan in me is glad, but the Sharks fan in me is raging.


    Can't wait to see how much we fail.

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  35. Yeah but how soul crushing would it be as a fan to sit through a terrible season and only end up with like, the 9th pick or something.

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  36. If they can somehow keep the same set up(West-East teams play twice and interconference teams play 3-4 times and no back to back to backs), I'm for it.

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  37. I didn't like that some games were more or less impossible to win, but I agree that the 66 games was actually an ideal length. Maybe just starting the Friday after Thanksgiving instead? Or start on X-mas and wrap up closer to July?

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  38. Yeah, I somehow left that part out. Do a 66 game season, but start it and end it when they normally would. Not only would it give us the same drama that a shorter season would, but a smaller schedule would give guys more rest and improve the overall quality of play. The NHL should do the same thing, 82 games is way too many, it just gets both the players and fans burnt out.

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  39. Fine with me, see the comment above.

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  40. Whatever allows me to get back to going to games at the Shark Tank is fine by me. (I'm a Pens fan, but I love going to the Tank because the fans are fantastic there)

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  41. I'll consider it a successful season if Sid is healthy all year.

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  42. I might have misread it on TSN but I was under the impression only the first pick is up for grabs in the lottery--the only difference is instead of only the bottom 5 teams having a shot, now all 14 non-playoff teams can get it. If you finish last and don\t win the lottery, you still get the #2 pick.

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  43. Is there a law in Canada preventing the NHL from going with replacement players? I think I read that somewhere. Anyway, the baseball strike was finally ended because Selig threatened to put replacement players on the field and actually started spring training with them and the NFL actually used replacement players to break up their last strike (I think Jerry Rice broke with the union and set records catching passes from Steve Young instead of Joe Montana that year). If the NHL used replacement players, I don't think most people would actually know the difference since casual fans only know a few of the superstars anyway (Crosby, Malkin, Ovechkin and I think there's an NHL player named Satan). Even casual NFL fans would recognize the difference if the league used replacement players and Tim Tebow was suddenly the best QB in the league and the quality of play resembled mid-major college football. Whoever the best player on the Coyotes is can probably walk around the streets of Phoenix and not be recognized by anybody, so nobody in Phoenix would notice if the Coyotes suddenly swapped their real team for a bunch of career minor leaguers and has-beens.

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  44. This might be my favorite underrated line of all time here on the BoD.

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  45. So you have no problem with $100 PPV's to pay for said insurance?

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  46. No, Donald Fehr deserves no blame for this. You brought these points up last time and they were refuted.

    Just because they make a lot of money to do what they do doesn't mean that they don't deserve to be treated fairly and not be fucked over by their employers who got them in this mess to begin with.

    Also, not many adults can score 30 goals a year against world class goaltending and defense. The players deserve to be compensated for their extraordinary skills.

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  47. Well now that RG3's career is done and the Redskins are out of the playoffs, maybe the Caps can do something now.


    Oh wait, no they can't.

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  48. This is something I don't understand at all. Isn't it in the best interest of the wrestling promotions and the wrestlers for wrestlers to get a month or two off a year? They don't all have to go on break at the same time; breaks could be staggered so there's always wrestling.

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  49. I'm pretty sure that if the NFL used replacement players Tim Tebow would still suck, and would still be on the bench where he belongs.

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  50. Just so you know, you're a bit off on the Montana/Rice thing. Montana did cross the picket line, among other notable 49ers, including Roger Craig, Dwight Clark, and Russ Francis, but Rice did not. The Niners played 15 games, Montana played 14, and Rice played just 12, missing all 3 games during the strike. He caught an amazing 22 TD passes in those 12 games, the record broken by Randy Moss in 2007, playing all 16 games.

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