| The owners did fuck up, but now, like Bouchie said, the players are being unreasonable and not doing whats best for the league. They've gotta realize that the NHL does not bring in as much money as the NFL, NBA, and MLB, and the league cant exist if salaries keep pace with those leagues.
also, i dont think its the players as much as the agents, lawyers, and heads of the unions that are driving this. John Kruk wrote an article for ESPN.com recently comparing the NHL lockout to the MLB strike of 1994:
So the NHL has locked out its players ... again.
Lockout, strike -- it's all means the same thing. No games.
And much like when MLB went on strike in '94, it looks like the same problem: The head of the union vs. the owners.
When the head of the MLBPA, Donald Fehr, went on TV back then and said, "The players voted to strike," you would think he meant that all the players on all the major league teams cast a ballot and decided that this was the thing to do.
Wrong.
Donald Fehr knows what the players want ... at least he thinks he does.
I can't speak for everyone in the league back then, but I know I never voted. And it wasn't that I missed the deadline. I was never asked to vote. I went back to West Virginia when the strike started. Our player rep, Darren Daulton, updated me about once a month; and that was it.
And it wasn't like I was a rookie, either. I'd been in the league for nine years. Anyway, that was the extent of my participation in the strike -- the one that I supposedly voted for.
Much like the way things are shaping up in the NHL, it was just a battle between a few people.
You think that if the owners told the majority of major leaguers back then that they couldn't pay their $9 million salaries anymore -- that it would have to be $7 or $8 million -- they would have cared?
Hell, no.
But that was never considered. It was all about what Donald Fehr was going to do.
So when the NHL updates are on TV and you hear the accusations flying back and forth, remember that when someone speaks for "the players," he's probably just speaking for himself. |