+ 0 - 1 | § ¶How to Survive
In the wake of the season's cancellation, rumors are flying. Take your pick:
- Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux have met and are secretly working on a way to save the season.
- A group of rogue players - including Trevor Linden, Bill Guerin, Brendan Shanahan, and Steve Yzerman - have met and are secretly working on a way to save the season.
- The union itself has hammered out a $45 million cap deal and submitted to the league; the season is already saved and the league will work out the details over this weekend.
More likely is that irresponsible reporting has led to plenty of rumors, and the only effect of all these will be to engender new hope in all NHL fans just to see them dashed. Again. While I promise to be at least as excited as anyone the second a new deal gets signed - or at least as excited as anyone that's not financially involved - I hope you'll pardon my renewed cynicism as I continue to prepare for another several months without an NHL.
How can I prepare, you ask? How can any serious hockey fan go on with months of hockeyless desert behind them and months in front of them?
(more)+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Gone.
It's finally official. The NHL has become the first professional sports league in history to lose an entire season because of a labor dispute. The Stanley Cup will not be awarded for the first time since the flu epidemic of 1919.
After months of a staring contest, followed by a brief spate of actual negotiations, Bettman finally announced a deadline for the season. This galvanized a quick exchange of last-minute offers, all of which were fruitless. The exchange ended on a note very much symptomatic of the "negotiations" as a whole; the final letter delivered from Bob Goodenow to the league office concluded with the words, "You will get nothing more from us."
How typical. How predictable. Even with the league coming off its stance linking a cap to revenue, and even with the union accepting some form of a cap, both sides are still convinced they can posture their way into a beneficial agreement, all while killing the sport they're fighting over.
And that's the optimistic way of viewing these latest developments. Because either the union's offers were motivated by a sincere desire to make a deal, or they came from a darker motivation - posturing for the upcoming legal battle over declaring a legal impasse.
(more)+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Going, going... still going...
It was early January the first time I read a news article referring to the NHL season as "on the brink of cancellation". Any day now, the article intimated, the entire season will have to be cancelled.
Yesterday, over a month later, I read the same phrase. Despite universal agreement that something would happen in the last few weeks, nothing continues to happen, and at a breakneck pace. The unchanging status of the season - still "on the brink" of disappearing - reflects the unchanging progress in the negotiations. Despite a recent spate of meetings that raised hopes all over North America, there has been essentially no change in the stance of either team since before the lockout began.
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