NHL 2012-2013: Tentative deal early Sunday January 6

Great post FSeven just can't quote very well on the nexus tablet grrrr.

Pretty much agree with it 100%.

I think the worst part about this situation now with the NHL is that the owners/betman are morons. They already cost hockey one year for a CBA that didn't exactly work like they thought it would. I haven't been following the exact numbers but I'm pretty sure they don't like the floor they set to high and insane contract lengths. Not to mention they probably would love to peg the revenue sharing % back again.

The first two should of been no brainers the first time around but now instead they are concessions the players will be unhappy to concede.

Will post more later when I'm on a PC.

Where do you think Green Bay would be without aggressive revenue sharing and the salary cap?

A large market allows a team to be successful financially regardless of on ice (field) performance in most situations. Good management allows a team to win.

I really don't care about the plight of poor teams or the greediness of rich teams. I'm their market and I care about watching some damn hockey. Get it sorted. Don't screw up the product.

-I like the salary cap but I like a large one so no one team outspends everyone else
-I like the salary floor but it should be far more reasonable
-I like revenue sharing but not to the point where poor teams make more money than if they were successful on the ice
-I don't believe contracts should be limited in any way, as stupid as thelong term ones are

Jayhawker wrote:

Where do you think Green Bay would be without aggressive revenue sharing and the salary cap?

Money matters just not as much as the owners push it.

TV split fairly is logical. A team can't play themselves and besides the humongous TV markets if the hot watchable team is say Oklahoma city or say Miami it makes sense that their TV is flat consistent revenue instead spikes high when their hot and dangerously low when their not. Lets keep the gate receipts the variable cause boy will they ever spike up and down in a low market.

If you want an example of absolute free market sports leagues you have to look no further them the Spanish soccer league. Real Madrid and Barcelona do their own TV deals and its really starting to show now in lopsidedness.

The current iteration of the packers would be 100% fine in a cap free NFL. They have a large stadium that sells out. Split the TV evenly and they would have adequate revenue from those two sources alone to be competitive. Caveat here is Ted Thompson is the gm. In that world not only competitive but super bowl favorites. In an alternate reality where they have some plug for a gm and a owner sticking his fingers in then no.

BTW the NFL is a really poor place to make this argument from your side. The money floating around evenly alone from TV makes every team a competitor that has a good head office. Its also a single game elimination playoff which adds to the upsets.

Jayhawker wrote:

Where do you think Green Bay would be without aggressive revenue sharing and the salary cap?

The Packers are publicly owned. They're a bit of an enigma and entirely removed from conversation involving owners who choose squeezing our every dime of profit as opposed to reinvesting in their team. While it's true that player costs (salary, etc.) has risen and outpaced revenue, is a salary cap really the best idea the world can come up with?

jowner wrote:

BTW the NFL is a really poor place to make this argument from your side. The money floating around evenly alone from TV makes every team a competitor that has a good head office. Its also a single game elimination playoff which adds to the upsets.

I shouldn't have introduced the NFL into the discussion as it's a financial freak that MLB and the NHL will never be able to come close to.

As for hockey, the Rangers won the President's Trophy and the Stanley Cup in 93-94. The next year was the lockout, the Rangers had essentially the entire team coming back. Hockey never happened. A possible repeat never happened. 95-96 rolls around the the Rangers are a different team. I felt a great opportunity was lost.

I'm getting deja vu all over again. Granted the Rangers haven't won the cup since 94 but the current team is the best Rangers team since the 93-94 team and if a lockout happens, I'm likely to become extremely unstable.

If there's a lock out, how do you think LA fans are going to feel? I don't know that they lost anyone key to their setup over the offseason, and they looked absolutely phenomenal last year.

AnimeJ wrote:

If there's a lock out, how do you think LA fans are going to feel?

Exactly. Won't someone think of the Kings fans? That's the real tragedy of the situation.

Spoiler:

I keed with joo!

AnimeJ wrote:

If there's a lock out, how do you think LA fans are going to feel?

Like Rangers fans in 94-95.

Or Lightning after the 05 playoffs. Poor Lightning fan.

Dudes.. I am still ecstatic we won the STANLEY CUP!!!!

Seeing the owners and players being nonchalant about this makes me feel like I should be. It is okay. I have others things I could do instead of watch the Kings.

The only thing I am sad about is that I promised my 7 year old daughter we would go the the Kings game on her birthday in November. That could not happen.

PS -- If you don't know Jonathon Quick had back surgery over the summer.

FSeven wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

Where do you think Green Bay would be without aggressive revenue sharing and the salary cap?

The Packers are publicly owned. They're a bit of an enigma and entirely removed from conversation involving owners who choose squeezing our every dime of profit as opposed to reinvesting in their team. While it's true that player costs (salary, etc.) has risen and outpaced revenue, is a salary cap really the best idea the world can come up with?

jowner wrote:

BTW the NFL is a really poor place to make this argument from your side. The money floating around evenly alone from TV makes every team a competitor that has a good head office. Its also a single game elimination playoff which adds to the upsets.

I shouldn't have introduced the NFL into the discussion as it's a financial freak that MLB and the NHL will never be able to come close to.

As for hockey, the Rangers won the President's Trophy and the Stanley Cup in 93-94. The next year was the lockout, the Rangers had essentially the entire team coming back. Hockey never happened. A possible repeat never happened. 95-96 rolls around the the Rangers are a different team. I felt a great opportunity was lost.

I'm getting deja vu all over again. Granted the Rangers haven't won the cup since 94 but the current team is the best Rangers team since the 93-94 team and if a lockout happens, I'm likely to become extremely unstable.

Cleveland and Cincinnati are probably not there.

FSeven wrote:

As for hockey, the Rangers won the President's Trophy and the Stanley Cup in 93-94. The next year was the lockout, the Rangers had essentially the entire team coming back. Hockey never happened. A possible repeat never happened. 95-96 rolls around the the Rangers are a different team. I felt a great opportunity was lost.

Huh? There was a season in 94-95. New Jersey won the Cup. The Rangers had a very good opportunity to repeat. They had the same team and a longer offseason to deal with injuries.

goman wrote:

Dudes.. I am still ecstatic we won the STANLEY CUP!!!!

THIS!

I bet we have regular season games by January 2, but probably not as early as November.

Im assuming this thread hasn't been bumped in 2 weeks because were all still in denial that this is actually f*cking happening again.

Considering it came to this point im not very optimistic at all. The players went and got Fehr because he had very good results in the MLB and Bettman and the owners might be stupid enough to cut off their ear to spite their faces.

I'll always be back as a fan assuming as a Canadian i'm living in Canada. Otherwise they must be suicidal if they think normal fans are going to come back. They might have a monopoly on hockey in North America but they are in the entertainment business which is highly competitive. Its so asinine to expand into weak hockey markets to build the brand and turn around and kick those new fans in the face with lockouts.

*head smash desk*

The whole thing is truly pathetic. Not much else to say really.

So bloody frustrating; I pay for cable the whole year just to watch hockey as the stupid CenterIce online thing makes you wait 24 hours to watch your local games. I literally have not turned on the television since the season ended, the Wild youth movement is finally here and some exciting hockey should be here to watch, and instead I've paid for a year of cable with the various extra tiers necessary to get HD on all the various channels the Wild play on, potentially for nothing. Hard enough to justify the cost, this just makes things worse. Thank you NHL+NHLPA; I don't care one whit which of you gets another 10% of the $3.3B pie when I'm living on $35-40k.

That jersey I was gonna buy this year as the Wild's youth finally got here, my lovely Wild green Granlund jersey, not bought, and will not be bought regardless of whether hockey starts up again this season or not; there's my couple hundred bucks for the cable bill saved. Love how no hockey can be played, no player promotions done, but they're still happy to sell me a jersey for a team that is no longer in operation. I ain't buying. That's the one good thing the lockout has done, reminded me that it's NOT my team, and I don't need to support it financially; I can live without that jersey just fine.

Gaald wrote:

The whole thing is truly pathetic. Not much else to say really.

Yup. I went from being apathetic since I believed I wouldn't even be in the country. Now I found out that I will be back for Christmas and I am so angry I can barely contain my rage. I'll calm down and, unfortunately, it'll just return to apathy.

The only thing that makes me happy is that Alex Burrows was resigned. I was getting so sick of my favourite players leaving through free-agency.

What's really aggravating about this for me is that it's unrestricted owner greed. I know that they're looking to make a buck; the players, as near as I can tell are cool with giving up a chunk of future earnings, so long as they're keeping a baseline of what they got last season. Freakin ridiculous.

Sadly, I think the owners know that hardcore hockey fans will come back, just as they did in 2005. So, they're not feeling any pressure to get this settled in the near-term. I think they'd like to avoid losing the HBO 24/7 series and the Winter Classic because that's when the sport is most visible to casual fans who spend most of the early part of the season watching college football, the NFL and the World Series anyway. Of course, that gives the players leverage once we get to mid-November, so they might not budge until then either.

Not much room for optimism this morning.

F*cking Bettman.. don't think much more needs to be said.

*sigh*

The best part of all this is we'll likely see the same song and dance in 5-6 years when another new CBA is needed. Now that the owners have players salaries linked as a percentage of their revenues they have every incentive to whittle down the percentage whenever they can do so. The owners can afford to miss games - their income and wealth are pretty well diversified and the early part of the season isn't a huge moneymaker for most of the league. The players on the other hand have no leverage in negotiations -pretty much everything financially is tied to a short hockey career.

Mind you I'm of the opinion that the structure of professional sports in North America is broken. One and a half seasons of the NHL have been cancelled due to labour disputes in the last 20 years. Over in Europe things look pretty sunny to me, at least in the big four soccer leagues: Soccer in Spain only had a couple of weeks worth of games delayed due to a strike over wage guarantees in the event of club bankruptcy. Italy's had a couple strikes, one that delayed 9 weeks of the season over a legal ruling over the removal of foreign player limits and another recently delayed the season by a couple of weeks when the league tried to impose non-guaranteed contracts. Germany and England haven't had any strikes as far as I can tell.

It's not as if the structure is all that opressive overseas either - no entry draft, no restrictions on free agency, no salary floors or caps. There's a powerhouse issue because of the unequal revenue distribution but of as a fan of soccer in general I personally don't care (and in hockey as a fan of a rich team I also don't care all that much either).

I'll get off my soapbox now.

B Dog wrote:

Sadly, I think the owners know that hardcore hockey fans will come back, just as they did in 2005. So, they're not feeling any pressure to get this settled in the near-term. I think they'd like to avoid losing the HBO 24/7 series and the Winter Classic because that's when the sport is most visible to casual fans who spend most of the early part of the season watching college football, the NFL and the World Series anyway. Of course, that gives the players leverage once we get to mid-November, so they might not budge until then either.

If the lockout lasts through mid-November or so I bet they'll open up the season with the outdoor game. Training camp opens in December sometime and then they kick things off with their marquee event.

Between the NBA, this and the NFL using replacement refs I'm pretty down on the american sports model. I've always been fairly critical of it to begin with especially compared to the European soccer leagues.

B Dog wrote:

Sadly, I think the owners know that hardcore NHL fans will come back, just as they did in 2005.

FTFY.

I've been a fan of hockey since I was about 7 years old and mostly my allegiance has been with the NHL. I am still a fan of hockey but I am no longer a fan of the NHL.

I'm looking forward to attending some Robert Morris University and Wheeling Nailer games, plus the Frozen Four is in Pittsburgh this year. Some of the best hockey I've ever seen has been at the Frozen Four.

Outlandish wrote:

That jersey I was gonna buy this year as the Wild's youth finally got here, my lovely Wild green Granlund jersey, not bought, and will not be bought regardless of whether hockey starts up again this season or not; there's my couple hundred bucks for the cable bill saved. Love how no hockey can be played, no player promotions done, but they're still happy to sell me a jersey for a team that is no longer in operation. I ain't buying. That's the one good thing the lockout has done, reminded me that it's NOT my team, and I don't need to support it financially; I can live without that jersey just fine.

Pretty much. It's business to the organizations, so it's business to me too. The last cent I spent on the NHL was my Canucks jersey two or three years ago (Burrows, so nice to know it will still be current in 2013), since after $30 t-shirts (bought a new one each season), $65-and-climbing tickets (wife and I went to a couple games a year), and finally the $200 jersey for a Stanley Cup implosion, I didn't feel like I was getting much of an ROI.

Not that a team necessarily owes its fans anything for the money they spend—but it sure feels that way. So we vowed not to spend any more money on the Canucks until we got a return. And that decision was even made way before the CBA shenanigans!

The good news is that we just got the Speed channel, and I've discovered Grand-Am and ALMS, in addition to starting to follow F1 and WRC this year, plus CRC I've been watching for a while now. So with some of those series going until November, and some beginning again in January, I might not even miss hockey!

Way to grow the brand, Bettman.

El_Duder wrote:

the Frozen Four is in Pittsburgh this year. Some of the best hockey I've ever seen has been at the Frozen Four.

Have fun watching the Gophers win. This is a pretty big year for college hockey since it's the last before realignment destroys everything.

iaintgotnopants wrote:
El_Duder wrote:

the Frozen Four is in Pittsburgh this year. Some of the best hockey I've ever seen has been at the Frozen Four.

Have fun watching the Gophers win. This is a pretty big year for college hockey since it's the last before realignment destroys everything.

I likely will, they won the first time I was at the Frozen Four. While RMU is the only local college team for me to support, part of me wishes I had headed to Minnesota for college.

From here. I need to crosspost this to the manly tears of manliness thread.

golfpro827 wrote:

So I found what I think is Gary Betteman's email and sent him an email regarding what I think of the lockout.

Here is the email I sent him and I wanted to share for all to see.

Mr. Bettman,

My name is Robert XXXX and I'm a season ticket holder for what should be the 7th year for the Carolina Hurricanes. I know this email will not get a response, may even be sent back or may not even be read. Heck, I'm not even sure if this is an actual email address for you. But I don't care. This email is for me to vent about what this lockout is like from a fan's perspective.

I love hockey. More so than any other sport out there. I was born and raised in Raleigh and in an area where ACC Basketball dominates everything, being a hardcore hockey fan first and foremost growing up as a kid was pretty rare.

The ECHL had a team for years here in Raleigh, the Raleigh IceCaps. My dad and I would spend countless nights at the biggest piece of crap arena you can ever imagine here in Raleigh and would love watching our IceCaps battle whomever their opponent for the night was. The memories I have from this are countless. I have about 15 pucks that I caught, three sticks from players (one is even personally autographed), old programs and even a pennant that I mistakenly spilled NewGrape on as a kid. But that purple stained IceCaps pennant takes me back to those Friday night spent in an arena that was so awful for hockey, that during playoff games in the late spring, the ice would begin to steam and melt and huge fans had to be brought on the ice to prevent it. But we didn't care. It made us us.

These nights in Dorton arena are what pushed me to be a hockey fan. The first year the IceCaps were here, my parents bought me Stanley Cup Hockey for the Super Nintendo. I played this nonstop and quickly learned the rules and strategies of the game. This instantly lead me to following the NHL.

A few years later, a moment that literally changed my life occurred. Peter Karmanos was moving his Hartford Whalers to Raleigh. You have to be kidding me?!? An NHL team here in Raleigh?!? I was in heaven.

The first NHL game I ever went to was in Greensboro and the Canes were playing the Boston Bruins. I don't remember too much about the game except I won a hardest slap shot contest and this won my dad and I tickets to see the Islanders play later that year in Greensboro. I even got to see Gretzky play for the Rangers in Greensboro.

Hockey for me here in Raleigh has been amazing. The 2002 finals was one of the best experiences of my life and when the lockout of 04-05 came, I didn't quite feel the sting. I was a college student in nearby Greenville and the free football games and social life of being a college student took me away from the game for a bit. But when I returned to Raleigh in mid-2005, I immediately turned back to the game I love. Good timing as I'm sure you know what happened here in Raleigh that season.

When the Canes made their run in 2006, I spent almost all of it with my dad. Dad had been diagnosed with Cancer when I was in college and by the time I moved back to Raleigh, it had gotten a lot worse. He was given 6 months to live.

A few days before game 7, my dad told me he was going to do whatever he could do to get us tickets. We found a deal where if you bought season tickets for the next season, you were eligible to purchase a ticket to game 7. Done. Dad and I were there. I really looked at this as him “going out with a bang” for lack of a better term. It literally was a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, much less my dying father.

Before the magic of game 7 even happened at the then named RBC Center, it was a busy day for Dad and I. I started a new job that very day and it was very hard to pay attention to training. After all, I had game 7 tickets to the Stanley Cup Finals and it would be with my dad. The same guy who brought me to IceCaps games as a kid, bought me Stanley Cup Hockey and the guy who is responsible for my obsession with the sport. Beyond all that, this could be very well be the very last hockey game we ever attend together.

Dad was busy too. One of the many things a cancer patient does, I learned quickly, was take many trips to the doctor and have many tests done. Dad was having on those tests done that day and everything we had tried was not working. He was literally dying. We were hoping for a miracle.

I finished what is without a doubt the longest day of my life at work and rushed home ready to put on my Canes jersey and hopefully watch my boys take out the Oilers and hoist the Cup. Right before we leave for the game, my parents sit me down; they had news from the doctor. Despite everything we had been told and thought, the treatments worked. Dad was going to make it. He was no longer dying. He was no longer terminal.

Sharing the moment of Justin Williams scoring into an empty net, Rod Brind'Amour almost not even allowing you to finish your speech before he grabbed the cup and the thousands of other memories that night with dad - and knowing there would be more to come is without a doubt the moment of my life. June 19, 2006. That was a good day.

From that moment on, the NHL, the Hurricanes, hockey and everything associated with it has meant the world to me. Dad and I were able to enjoy 3 more seasons together as season ticket holders before he passed away from Cancer in August of 2009. Those 3 years with him, that all started on June 19, 2006, are the best years I ever had with him. He didn't have a lot of energy as the cancer took over his body and what little he did, he used to go to Canes game with me.

This is what the sport means to me. It's more than a simple release from a day, a way to spend a night with friends or the countless other reasons someone enjoys a sport; this sport gave me three more years with my father.

When I think about the lockout currently going on, I literally cry. My tears have nothing to do with money. In all honesty, the lockout is saving me money. But I cry thinking about missing one of those three years with my dad and I pray no one else is going to miss that same bond with their loved one this season.

I know the lockout is more than about money. I don't claim to really understand what it is about, to be honest. But I'm 100% confident that I know what the sport is about. It's about a bond that only that sport could have provided my father and I. Please settle this dispute so no one else is deprived of those moments I was lucky enough to have.

Robert XXXXX

Great letter but sadly it will fall on deaf ears. Bettman makes $8 mil a year and is an employee of the team owners (as is every commissioner of every professional league) and he will do his owners' bidding.

Yeah, sorry Robert XXXXX, but it is actually all just about money. And busting unions. But mainly the money.