Boston Canucker wrote:I predict the season will start on Jan 1, 2013, with the Winter Classic. We won't lose a whole year again. But Bettman and his small market owners won't have a problem dumping the first part of the season...it'll be like 1995.
At risk of taking this thread off-track, I would say that Buttman's biggest backers are not necessarily the small market owners. The biggest ones are just cost-squeezing, labour-hating robber-baron types like the Jacobs family in Boston. That's a big reason why the league isn't buying the PA's idea of better revenue-sharing as a way to solve the league's alleged financial ills - the rich owners have no interest giving away their profits to the small market owners or the basket-case sunbelt teams when they can just solve it on the backs of the players.
I admit that I took the league's story during the lockout. It was easy to believe when teams in Edmonton, Ottawa and elsewhere couldn't compete with the rich teams for FAs and got their assets raped every summer and the threats of relocation. I still think a salary cap is a necessity to keep the competitive field somewhat level in the competition and retention of talent. But for the league to get the salary cap it wasted a season to get, and still claim they need to roll back salaries and lock down free agency for the sake of the league's viability, that takes serious chutzpah. Their position is unbelievable and I can imagine the chuckles coming out of the PA offices as they pore over the documents.
Linden was prophetic when he said that the owners will likely wait out the start of the season, when the most influential owners have to compete with football and baseball for spectator dollars anyway, and Fehr's bunch should just take that as a giiven assumption. I think the blinking will start in December when the owners will start really looking at the prospect of empty arenas and their fanbase looking elsewhere to spend their dollars and time. Hopefully the PA will stick to its guns even if it means shit-canning next season. How much more are they going to give before they end up in the same place they were before the PA was born?
Love the Sport. Love the Team.
Hate the League.