Pskov Wings Fan

SO FREE SPEECH COST $250,000 NOW. Not so free! I'm a Kings fan from 1969, if Luc Robitaille got fined for saying something like that, I'd be boycotting all things NHL and AEG (who own the Kings). Oh, I forgot, because I'm out $1000 on preseason travel plans for Kings games that have been cancelled, I am done with NHL. I lost money on the previous lockouts as well. I'm supporting the AHL, ECHL. Maybe see if DirecTV can get me some of the KHL games.

Goodbye NHL!

This got nothing to do with free speech. NHL can be viewed as a private club, which is free to fine its members (teams) per its own by-laws.

Flipping it, to 43% players and 57% owners still seems like a good deal to me.  That's still a huge chunk to the players, but you have to remember the owners still have to pay coaches, scouts, doctors, vendors, trainers, administrators, insurance, marketing and maintenance.  Imagine if doctors at a hospital demanded 50% of all revenues?

The percentages have no meaning unless we know what all the clubs expenses are. Without this information now can anybody say what is a good deal or bad deal for either side.
And maybe 50% for doctors is fair. I have no clue.

But the clubs did sign players to certain contracts and now they want to basically renegotiate them. Players agreed to this once and now owners are coming back for me. Unless players  have the desire to keep giving back every few years they have to resist.

Lets take Datsyuk for example. 24% rollback would turn his $6.7M into about $5M.

There is a different between cattle and people, cattle can't leave the ranch.

Lack of flexibility, concession, and greed is what caused the strike.  The owners feel like they are entitled to more.  The players feel that they are entitled to more.

If you want to appear balanced you should not call coming NHL work stoppage "strike". Strike is an action by players. What NHL is moving to is a lockout.

And to be precise, players are not asking for more. They are asking that absolute amount of money spent on players compensation is not reduced and then allowing NHL to take greater share of the future revenue growth.

I think that projected NHL revenue growth in NHLPA proposal is too high (something like 7%). They should be able to drop it to be inline with overall inflation numbers (under 3%). It would remove another thing for owners to complain about and probably would not cost players whole lot.

As Fehr pointed out, what's in it for the players in any of these offers from the NHL?  The concessions the union is mainly asking for is a less insane reduction from the league.  They're not asking to get rid of the cap.  The league is so fixated on ratcheting down players salary that it seems like they haven't even discussed things like contract length.  And that's where I think the union can do some giving. Length of CBA. Length of player contracts.

Here are couple other things players can offer to the league.
- Make the cap number to equal actual salary (kill the front-loaded contracts)
- Remove players option for the 5% cap inflator

Its beyond me that someone would watch either of those press conferences and think that one side is doing everything in its power to make sure a season starts while the other is totally at fault in these negotiations.  I suppose you have to have your lips firmly planted on the ass of the NHLPA to really come to that conclusion.

I think that making sure that seasons starts is not the main goal of either side. The goal is to make sure that over the lifetime of the next CBA it would be most beneficial to that particular side. From that point of view each side is just following their agenda. Fans and people whose paychecks depend on NHL games (apart from players) are interested in not losing any games but they are not part of the process.

Hell no. Emmerton can wear #25 on a different team when we trade him away. 25 will ALWAYS be Darren McCarty.

I don't understand why everyone is blaming Bettman alone? Why this guy Don Fehr and his little brother are not to blame too? Is this because Bettman salary is two times greater than Fehr's.

NHL has been ready for negotiation long before New Year 2012, it's been said too many times. Fehr responded once saying talks will start sometime after All-Star break. Well he was right, talks started well after All-Star break.

It is clear that owners want to have more than 50% of revenues while players are not willing accept less than 50%. If positions cannot be reconciled it does not matter when you start negotiating.

I don't care that a player makes 4 million a year, but what bothers me is that they won't settle for 3.7 million. Which is still a huge amount to get paid for playing your favorite sport.

Players settling for less money would not result in lower prices for consumers but in more profits for owners. There is a difference here.

Those teams doing poorly in attendance, and as a result not doing well money wise, shouldn't be forced to spend to a cap floor.

Teams have to ice NHL level lineup. If a team can't do that maybe it should not exist.

Maybe players should just start their own league. Without best hockey players on the planet NHL is nothing. On the other hand if all the owners got replaced with whole new lot I doubt any hockey fan would notice.

Well, if enough people are using that word, that means it may have some actual truth behind it.

Number of people supporting particular idea is not a good way to evaluate validity of the said idea.

Having said that I am biased since I prefer skill over grit. Two Sharks skating into each other trying to hit Dats is my idea of a good hockey play. Him fighting Perry - I can live without.

Why sign him, when you can just wait until someone else does and pick him up on waivers?

Also the only reason Nabokov would have signed with Islanders is money. They would have had to pay him real salary.

At this point in his career, he really can't afford to not report.  If he was in his prime or a hot-shot up-and-comer, he could.  He already priced himself out of the market last summer and he's going to have to take even less this summer if all he has on his resume in the past season is a short, iffy stint in the KHL.  He can get some good playing time with the Islanders and get himself moved near the deadline or get a decent contract as a FA

Sure he can. It is only a job. He should be financially secure by now. If things does not go his way Nabokov can just retire and start a vineyard of something.