Nightfall

I would love to see an uncensored sports channel. Then you can see all these things throughout every sport. I would subscribe to this in a heartbeat as well.

I do have to agree with your assessment. I think the 5 and being thrown out of the game was the right call. I do also think that maybe a 1-5 game suspension, but thats all. I think that Colin Campbell has done an excellent job with making sure the punishment fits the crime. Lets see what his decision is today.

I say its a good idea on non-olympic years to do this. Then you can give teams the chance to play in a different country and give others the opportunity to see an NHL game live. If you do this on non-olympic years, then you also give teams a chance to rest and get acclimated to the time change when they get back.

I agree. He just doesn't look confident. Goaltending is 75% mental and it looks like he needs a boost in that 75% category. Wow, nice power play by the Islanders. A 5 on 3 goal and then a 5 on 4 goal. Thats taking advantage of your opportunities.

NHL Center Ice has a free preview going on for the next week or so.

This is my complaint with the NHL. They are looking to make money off of every medium. Want to watch this stuff on TV? Its $160 for Center Ice. Want to watch this stuff on the computer? Its $160 for gamecenter live. Want to watch this stuff on your mobile device? Its $80 for the app. If you subscribe to NBA league pass, you get the computer streaming as part of the deal. I wish the NHL would at least do this.

IMHO, he is the best coach in the game. An excellent extension for an excellent coach.

Howard scoring 4 goals?

Fixed it for you.

2-0? You are dreaming.

Not Osgoods fault. It hit Salei and changed direction. Can't blame the goalie when he centers himself to the shot and yet it hits one of his own guys and goes a different direction and in. So far, I can't fault Osgood on a blown defensive assignment that results in a goal or a deflection goal. These are the goals that your team has to fight through.

I was on ESPN's website and found a good article on Gary Bettman. Now, before the Bettman insults start flying, I wanted to throw my thoughts on the table. I believe Bettman has done a good job with the NHL as a whole. The league is making money as a whole. The game has improved from the clutch and grab hockey that was prevalent in the late 90s and early 2000s. Its not all good though, as I also believe that the league has expanded too much and they should be contracting to 24 teams. Still, Bettman is a smart commissioner and deserves his post. Have a read of the article and let me know what you think. --- http://insider.espn.go.com/nhl/insider/news/story?id=5602951 --- The NHL commissioner is looking to define his league -- and his legacy GARY BETTMAN IS IN A GOOD MOOD. Two days earlier, an independent arbitrator upheld the league's rejection of the Devils' first attempt to sign Ilya Kovalchuk. The decision backed Bettman's belief that the 17-year, $102 million deal was just a blatant end run around the NHL's salary cap. It was the latest validation of Bettman's stature as the most dominating commissioner in pro sports. Even the August sun, pouring through a wall of windows into Bettman's Manhattan office, seems to shine for him. He's relaxed, even cheery, in pleasant contrast to his reputation as a pugnacious and humorless know-it-all who looks as if he were born in a dark suit. At the moment, he's even in shirtsleeves -- blue tie knotted at his throat, but shirtsleeves nonetheless. "Whatever you want, we're happy to help," he says. "In that case," I say, "I'd like a franchise." He grins: "Do you have an American Express card with a pretty big limit?" Soon enough we're digging into serious issues: the Kovalchuk deal, off-season drug testing and NHL participation in the Olympics -- all issues that will shape pro hockey in the coming years. Bettman handles even the most contentious subjects with aplomb. But something has him uneasy. Without warning, he blurts, "I assume when I'm being funny and cute, we're not going to intersperse it into the article." Any hint of a smile is gone. "Do it in context," he says, more order than request. Summer sun or not, Gary Bettman's office is suddenly as chilly as Calgary in January. KENESAW MOUNTAIN Landis saved baseball's soul by excommunicating the Black Sox. Pete Rozelle created an NFL juggernaut with a savvy merger and socialist distribution of TV revenue. But no major sport commissioner has had more far-reaching impact in his world than Bettman, who has influenced everything from the location of franchises to the size of goalie pads. The NHL is Gary's league; Sid and Ovi just play in it. In his 18-year reign, the NHL has gone from a league hemorrhaging $200 million a year to one that just produced record (estimated) profits of $180 million. On ice, the clutching and grabbing that numbed offenses last decade has given way to thrilling open-ice rushes. "He's the best thing that could've happened to the NHL, because he's always known what needed to be done," says Dave Checketts, managing owner of the Blues. Change, though, has come at a cost -- most traumatically, the 2004-05 season that Bettman sacrificed to win the hard salary cap he insisted was necessary for league survival. And still, payroll-cost certainty hasn't kept several owners from struggling. The Coyotes became a $170 million ward of the league, and other warm-weather clubs are barely above water, giving rise to the biggest wave of criticism about Bettman's reign -- his focus on southern expansion. This was probably why Bettman had second thoughts about his charge-a-franchise quip. He is a fierce protector of the brand. And god help the naysayer who suggests that even the toughest problems won't be solved. "He's the last guy you want to fight," Checketts says. "He doesn't give up, doesn't give in, doesn't bend. When he decides, it's over. He will win." His ruthlessness has Bettman both respected and despised. In Canada, fan and media vitriol is so nasty you'd think the man had torched every Tim Hortons from Halifax to Whitehorse. Players and GMs, fearing reprisals, refuse to talk publicly against him. Even Boston's Jeremy Jacobs, one of the NHL's most powerful owners, worries that an innocuous quote for this story about adjusting the collective bargaining agreement will get him fined. Don Meehan, one of hockey's shrewdest agents, can't get off the phone with me fast enough: "I'm not going there," he says at the first mention of the commissioner's name. Simple fear isn't all that makes players and agents go silent: Donald Fehr has told them to shut up too. The most powerful man in baseball for two decades as head of the MLB players' union, Fehr is a fierce negotiator who once won a $280 million payout when he proved that MLB owners were colluding. After retiring in 2009, he became an unpaid consultant to the chronically chaotic NHLPA; he's now the presumptive choice to be the union's next executive director, a hiring expected to be finalized by a vote later this fall. (Calls to Fehr, 62, went unreturned.) For the first time since former union boss Bob Goodenow lost his throwdown with Bettman six years ago, NHL players have someone who might just be able to muscle the commish. Over the next 18 months, Bettman will try to make himself stronger by shoring up struggling franchises, bolstering league finances, securing a more lucrative TV deal and, most important, sealing loopholes in the CBA. Bettman says the media overhyped the Kovalchuk contract battle, even though he spent the summer engaged in the talks. The NHL approved a slightly shorter and smaller deal on Sept. 4, but New Jersey was fined $3 million and lost two draft picks. More to the point, Bettman got the NHLPA to limit such deals going forward. The commissioner, never complacent, feels an extra urgency to secure labor peace. "I would prefer a constructive, strong relationship with a players' association that can work with us," he says, countering a pervasive feeling that he's trying to put the union out of business. "There's a lot of people saying we already did that," he says a bit too enthusiastically. Bettman seems to realize his overzealousness because he quickly adds, "That's not the goal." He saw the new union regime looming long before Fehr showed at the World Hockey Summit in Toronto in August. And he has been in charge too long to be scared. But it has been forever since Gary Bettman wasn't the undisputed smartest person in the room. He was small and felt like an outcast as an only child growing up in Queens, N.Y. His father, who owned a nut business, left home when Gary was 5; he died eight years later. "I don't think I'm overstating things," Bettman says haltingly. "I may have been the only kid in the '50s living in a single-parent household." He pauses. "It was different." What he lacked in size or social confidence Bettman made up for in smarts. And while that made him more of an outsider, it also gave him a means to control his world. Today, he eagerly argues the most controversial issues facing the NHL but gets prickly over innocent biographical questions -- like what he dreamed of growing up to be. "I'm 58 years old," Bettman snaps. "I'm not exactly in touch with what my feelings were 46 years ago. I'd need a couple of hours of therapy to start thinking about that stuff." For the record, he claims no memory of ever wanting to be anything other than a lawyer. He went to Cornell's school of industrial and labor relations, mostly for its prelaw curriculum, then got a law degree at New York University. Hired by a Manhattan law firm whose clients included the NBA, his talents were soon recognized by then-executive vice president David Stern, who hired him away in 1981. Bettman eventually rose from in-house lawyer to the league's No. 3 executive, charged with implementing its salary cap. The NHL came calling in 1992, making Bettman the first non-hockey lifer to run its ship. He wasn't born into the game, but Bettman seems genetically suited to command a sport. "Our mother had enormous brain power," says Jeffrey Pollack, Bettman's half-brother and 13 years his junior. "Gary is a kinetic intellectual force. Some of that came from her." Pollack says his own career was inspired by Bettman's: He founded Sports Business Daily before spending four years as commissioner of the World Series of Poker. Today, he heads the Professional Bull Riders league. Pollack knows how it feels to walk into a foreign culture as its boss. "Gary is a superior intellect, and some people take that as pugnacious," he says. "When I'm with him at an NHL arena and he gets booed, I cheer loudly. Gary laughs it off, but it's painful." The boos are one side effect of forcing many wrenching changes on the NHL. Six new teams -- Florida, Anaheim, Nashville, Atlanta, Minnesota and Columbus -- sprung to life during Bettman's first eight years on the job. Three others migrated south, pushing the NHL's center of gravity from its roots. But the current state of warm-weather teams has sparked some second-guessing, even within the NHL's Board of Governors (albeit anonymously). "I think selling ice to the Sun Belt, driving hockey into markets that didn't want it, may be Gary's one mistake," one owner says. The commissioner disagrees: "The idea that I hate Canada is obviously absurd. Calgary and Edmonton wouldn't have survived if not for the things I did to save those franchises. Having teams in big U.S. markets gave us a footprint competitive with what other leagues have. Those markets make us more attractive, long-term, to television and national sponsors." Another key to Bettman's recovery plan -- tamping down player salaries -- nearly killed the patient. Shuttering a major league for a year was an unprecedented gamble, one which won him a hard cap but also led to an untimely end to a valuable TV deal with ESPN. The NHL has since been shown on Versus, the young cable network owned by Comcast, which also owns the Flyers. That deal expires next summer and the league expects competitive negotiations, with ESPN among those at the table. How successful the league is at securing more money and exposure will largely answer the question of whether hockey has truly recovered from the lockout. Bettman says some evidence is already in. "Our cable ratings, nationally, in the first two rounds of the playoffs were the highest they've been since they started recording these things," he says. "On a network that isn't in as many homes." Those ratings reflect a more dramatic and clean game, mitigating gripes from traditionalists still rankled by postlockout innovations like tie-breaking shootouts. Bettman credits execs Colin Campbell, a former Rangers coach, and Brendan Shanahan, an ex-player, for authoring most of the rules changes. But that isn't to suggest he isn't heavily involved in every decision. HE PRACTICALLY BURSTS with delight. "Oh, I know the question that's coming!" Seven words into hearing a sentence, Bettman, like a game show contestant pounding the buzzer, jumps in. He's slightly off in anticipating the subject, but it's his overeager reaction that is most telling. He isn't just the smartest guy in most rooms; he can't resist making sure everyone is clear on that fact. When Bettman is excited, he springs up in his chair, military straight. "Go ahead!" he says. "It's the fighting question!" No actually, it's the head-shot question. Last season, the NHL confronted an epidemic of concussions by rewriting the rules to draw distinctions between east-west headshots and full-on noggin-poundings. So why can't a civilized-if-violent sport -- Bettman interrupts me to substitute "physical" for "violent" -- ban headshots entirely? "No, no, no!" he shouts. "It's not about hitting people in the head. We obviously don't want players hit in the head." Bettman then begins a disquisition about the tiptoe between letting players play and keeping them from killing each other. His reasoning is impressive. What gets him stoked, though, are illustrative examples. "So if I take my elbow and I hit you in the head," he says, leaning forward, words pouring faster, "or I take my stick and I hit you in the head or I take my fist and I hit you in the head & " The father of three and doting grandfather looks as if he'd like to drop the gloves right now, or at least unclasp his French cuffs. The biggest fight Bettman has won to date, the salary cap, still feels like a split decision. And it is largely what's drawn Fehr into the players' corner for the rematch. Sure, the cap saved franchises on both sides of the border, but it has also fueled a dizzying turnover in talent that frays the team-fan bond Bettman claims to prize. The Blackhawks won the Cup in June; by August the cap had forced them to jettison one third of their roster. "Since the lockout, guys have played for three, four, five teams," says Ian Pulver, an agent and former NHLPA executive. "The game is better and more exciting, and the players like that. But it's a lot different to be a player now. Everyone points to an increase in the average salary, but careers are cut short as younger players replace older, more expensive ones. Pack your bags, unpack, pack your bags." Bettman shrugs when he hears this critique. "The relationship with fans is about whether you're winning," he says. "Chicago decided what it was going to do this past season to try to win the Cup. I think they knew going in this wasn't a team they could sustain for the long haul." He brings the same lack of sentiment to the debate over whether to pause the 2014 season so players can participate in the Olympics in Sochi, Russia. "The players who represented their countries in Vancouver, they didn't get compensated, and they risked their careers," he says. "I think the total of their contracts exceeded $2 billion. And yet the IOC wouldn't even allow the NHL Network to cover my press conference!" His detached stance is entirely rational, but it also gives the commissioner another chip when collective bargaining comes around next year. Still, how will he tell Alex Ovechkin that he can't represent his homeland in his homeland, especially when Ted Leonsis, the Capitals owner, says he'll allow his star to play regardless? "Have you ever been to Sochi?" Bettman says with contempt. "Maybe you should go." So much for the charm offensive. Then again, Bettman isn't much interested in winning hearts, not when he believes his sport can do it for him. And, anyway, it is the looming battle with Fehr that will most likely determine his legacy. Bettman says, and has shown often, that he's not one to back down. But he claims not to be spoiling for anything other than a league that works for both sides. "I'm not a fan of the fight for the sake of the fight," the commissioner says, settling placidly back into his chair. Maybe the Kovalchuk wrangling, which ended with both the league and the union able to claim victory, was the beginning of something radical: hockey's combative commissioner figuring out how to wage peace. Or maybe that's just what he wants the other guys in the room to think.

I was hoping he would come back and play for the Griffins this season. Looks like he may retire. While I am selfish in hoping he returns, I know he deserves to retire on his terms. Its just sad because the Griffins could use his veteran leadership. http://detnews.com/article/20101007/SPORTS0103/10070448/1128/Red-Wings-veteran-Kirk-Maltby-leaning-toward-retirement

I think the first game at noon today is on Versus only.

I don't blame him for at least thinking about retiring. I knew that was a scenario. I think he resigned thinking that he would get an opportunity to play for the big club. Grand Rapids wouldn't be bad, but he had his heart set on the feat of breaking into the NHL. Now that it didn't work, maybe he lost his desire to compete. Who knows. I say that if he decides to retire, he has earned that right to do so. Especially after years of loyalty and 4 cups.

It just amazes me how people still question Ken Holland and the Wings management after a move like this. With the current record of post season appearances and 4 cups in the last 13 years, you would think people would put their trust in the management. Its easy to look upon decisions in hindsight and say "I told you so". I guess its even more difficult to trust in the management.

He doesn't need a bailout.

Directv is the same as every other TV provider out there. They all have contracts with channels and want the best deal for them. If the channel or network wants more money, then there is a holdout. Uverse pulled the plug on the Hallmark channel earlier this year for the same reasons.

Cheechoo had the same problem in San Jose without Joe centering his line all the time.

I have had Center Ice and Gamecenter live. Since they are almost priced the same here is my rundown of both services. Since you already live in MI and have all channels they will show locally, then you are all set on that end and have your Wings covered. I am a hockey nut as well, and I love watching the game. I enjoyed NHL Center Ice because you get HD streams on Directv. If I had Comcast, Dish Network, or Uverse, I probably wouldn't get the NHL Center Ice package because all the games are in standard definition. I feel the NHL Gamecenter Live is what you want if... 1. You travel and like watching the games on your computer while you are away. 2. You have a nice HDTV and don't have Directv. Almost all NHL Center Ice package games on Directv are in HD. One or two are in HD on Dish while none are available on Comcast or Uverse. The service works well. Yes, there are hiccups every now and again, but I feel it is worth it.

I would only recommend it if you live outside of MI. There are local blackouts on NHL Center Ice and Gamecenter. So if you want to watch the Wings, NHL Game Center may have it blacked out in MI.

Dedicated servers and shared servers have nothing to do with the conversation. Its all about the ISP. Who says I am thinking that they are only charging for bandwidth or that he is only doing it for free? I don't think anyone is that dumb, and since I never said that, you can stop drawing conclusions to try to make yourself look righteous. As for you doing business where I work on the ISP side, you are probably safe there unless you do business in MI and stream a ton of video. From your knowledge and experience, you obviously don't do that. Otherwise, you would have been down that road as I have with many customers. I would like to have a good natured conversation with you about this if you are interested. Lets take it to PM though. The conversation is way off topic.

I can point out a lot of providers who say "unlimited" bandwidth, but when push comes to shove, they will not allow you to push that much. Residential broadband providers and hosted solutions may say "unlimited" but when you start pushing a lot through the provider, you will find your account suspended or canceled. True unlimited bandwidth costs are astronomical. If you knew the industry and how shared hosting works, you would understand that. I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I know how the industry works and know companies that have lost hosting privileges because of excessive bandwidth when the provider false advertises, and you can find a lot of providers who say unlimited.

I am not arguing the intellectual property rights at all. I was merely correcting you in that the bandwidth costs are not a concern. If you want to change the subject in order to make a valid point so it makes you look right, then thats great. You can find someone else to debate with on that topic.

Good luck getting unlimited when you have thousands of users pushing that kind of bandwidth. I am also in the online industry, but I contract on the ISP side, and I am smart enough to know that those prices are not accurate. Providers like netelligent oversell their bandwidth all the time. They will not support thousands of users streaming video. If you think they will, then you are dreaming.