NHL Season Offically Cancelled.

[Sharkie]

ESPN Reports that NHL Commisoner Gary Betteman will announce the cancellation of the season tomorrow or wenesday.


The NHL would become the first major professional league in North America to cancel an entire season because of a labor dispute. This would mark the first time the Stanley Cup was not awarded since a flu epidemic canceled the finals in 1919

Full Story (http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/news/story?id=1991361)

[axisoftime]

Well,i hope they think its worth it!I dont really understand what multi-millionaire players have to complain about-got to be mo money-maybe they should work regular boring jobs and struggle like most of us.Even though its not hockey,who was that b-ball player who held out from signing a huge multi-million contract saying'Hey,I gotta feed my family'.Or the player who called a giant-like 30 million dollar contract-'insulting'!LOL

[Zungas]

Disgraceful

[BuZzArD 8012]

That's pitiful all these great players make all this good money but complain for more while all of us try to make a leaving for what we have.

[Jellie]

yea its a shame allrite good job i dont like ice hockey though

[BuZzArD 8012]

Just saying all around players in a diffrent sport. Example Latrell Sprewell from the Timber Wolves in basketball said I need more money to feed my kids. When this guy is making millions of dollars and he is still saying I can't feed my kids because I don't make enough money.

[Jellie]

yea but hes living the life, for example hes probably got a yacht a jet 20cars chefs/maids, jewels wives/girlfriends/kids/mistresses, thats probably why he needs more money

[Summers]

I dont know majority of the money goes to other places besides the players. That's a bummer I guess no Rangers or Kings this year for me :(.

[Disco]

This sucks....at least Chicago has a minor team... the Wolves which I've been to this season.

New Yorkers must be feeling very deprived. No Rangers... no Islanders and no Jersey Devils.

[TVHOG]

It seems to me that the NHL as well as the NBA and MLB should take a note from the NFL. Its been a while since the NFL has had a strike, so they must be doing something right. Salary cap anyone? I could care less if the NHL cancelled their season, but thats just me.

[TATEone]

The NHL didnt really have a lot of popularity to start with, so I can only imagine what this will do to their image.

[truemeathead]

Exactly nobody really even cares except for some mullets in Hobokan. I'm lucky I'm not a hockey fan because I'd be really pissed.

[Sharkie]

Originally posted by TVHOG
It seems to me that the NHL as well as the NBA and MLB should take a note from the NFL. Its been a while since the NFL has had a strike, so they must be doing something right. Salary cap anyone? I could care less if the NHL cancelled their season, but thats just me. They agreed to a salary cap today. but it's too late to save the season.

[Graemo]

Gary Bettman is just too afraid of the thought of actually cancelling an entire season of professional sport, so they keep post-poning the formal announcement.

[Sharkie]

Welp, it's offically offical now. It's done.

[Unbreakable Lex]

Don't blame the players, its the owners that are doing this.

Jagr knew of this last season when he said he was playing in Europe this year.

Its really not a surprise. I just think the owners are really screwing over the players. Its sad.

[Zungas]

They might as well come back in another five years and hope people don't remember the past too much. Install the shootout for permanent use.

[Graemo]

Originally posted by Unbreakable Lex
Don't blame the players, its the owners that are doing this.

Jagr knew of this last season when he said he was playing in Europe this year.

Its really not a surprise. I just think the owners are really screwing over the players. Its sad.


How can the players be getting 'screwed' by the owners if they make millions of dollars a year? The salary cap was to be in place so that some players (not all) would be making less millions of dollars, and so that all 30 teams would have a more equal chance at building a healthy, successful franchise.

Boo hoo for the players.

[the_daily_planeteer]

The Avi says it all <---------------------

Let's see, the owners put on a whole season and Lose money.... owners are screwing the players?
It is simple supply and demand. If the owners could make enough money to pay the salaries, this would not be an issue.

Look at Detroit... the aren't broke because the owner takes money from the crappy tigers and puts it into his "I want a cup" fund.

How much are the players makin now?

[axisoftime]

If a bunch of millionaires want to take an extended vacation and come back and make more money-well,why not.Id do it!
And the Tigers have been investing alot more into the team having just signed a player to a 40 million dollar contract-another 30 mill for Pudge Rodriquez,and signed the top reliever on the free agent market.And Mike Ilitch the owner of the Wings and Tigers is a much bigger baseball fan then hockey!

[Rafael122]

All I can say is, who cares? Aside from the 5 people who watch hockey on television, the NHL was never really popular to begin with. Good riddance I say.

[TVHOG]

I hate to say this, but the owners will probably win. When the players figure out that they might actually have to get a real job like the rest of us, some of them will probably cave.

[i luv tom welling]

From the Globe and Mail:


Saturday, February 19, 2005 Updated at 12:44 AM EST

Canadian Press


The NHL season may be brought back to life after all. Believe it or not, labour talks will resume Saturday in New York.

"Late Thursday night the NHL requested a meeting with NHLPA representatives in New York," the NHL Players' Association said in a statement Friday night. "Today the NHLPA accepted the invitation and a meeting has been scheduled for Saturday."

New Jersey Devils CEO and GM Lou Lamoriello was relieved to hear the news.

"I've said all along that the most important thing is coming to an agreement," Lamoriello said Friday night from his New Jersey office. "Even after the season was cancelled it was just so important to get together as soon as possible.

"And I commend both of them for agreeing to do it. And now, get it done."

The NHLPA strongly denied a Hockey News report Friday night that a deal was already in place in principle that includes a $45-million (U.S.) salary cap.

"The report is absolutely false," an NHLPA spokesman said late Friday night.

Wayne Gretzky, the managing partner of the Phoenix Coyotes, and Mario Lemieux, the Pittsburgh Penguins player/owner, have worked behind the scenes to bring the two sides back together but it wasn't clear late Friday night if they would actually join the official discussions on Saturday.

Either way, the two sides are back together when it looked bleak at best.

"I can only hope that both sides realize they owe to the game to allow common sense to prevail," veteran agent Don Meehan of Newport Sports said Friday night from his Mississauga office.

At this point, nothing would surprise anyone given the ups and downs of this five-month lockout.

"If they're talking, that's great," Lightning star Brad Richards said Friday from Tampa. "It's been such a roller-coaster ride, I don't even know what to say. You just never know, anything is possible."

There have been rumblings of reviving talks ever since commissioner Gary Bettman cancelled the season Wednesday with players, owners and GMs burning up the phone lines and wondering how it had come to this.

"I think both sides took a step back the next day and realized 'we were that close,"' Calgary Flames superstar Jarome Iginla said Friday night from Edmonton. "And I think both sides realized that for the big hit hockey would take, maybe we needed to take another crack at it."

Talks ended Tuesday night after the NHLPA rejected the league's final offer of a $42.5-million salary cap. The NHLPA's last offer featured a salary cap of $49 million, leaving the two sides $6.5 million apart in their salary cap offers.

"I'm not surprised they're meeting again because once the philosophical obstacles were eliminated it appeared that the majority of owners and players wanted an agreement," agent J.P. Barry of IMG said Friday night from Calgary. "I think you're witnessing the wills of the majority in action. Hopefully a fair compromise is still achievable at this stage."

Privately, some players, GMs and owners all agreed $45 million was the magic number to get a deal done. But neither side picked up the phone in the last 12 hours leading up to the cancellation.

"I was really upset with the way it ended," said Iginla. "It's hard to believe that after all the back and forth, linkage, no linkage, all that stuff, that only a few million kept both sides apart.

"And I understand that a few million is a lot of money but in the grand scheme of things, in a $2.1-billion business and getting everyone past their principals, I would love for this to get done."

Plans have been in place for teams to play a 28-game regular season starting March 1 and there's still time for that to happen if both sides can reach a deal this weekend.

But there's no guarantee of a deal getting done.

"To get (talks) started again and still not do it, that would be a travesty," Iginla said, adding with a laugh, "I'm a young man but this is taking its toll."
Print this article E-mail this article Comment to the Editor

[M.D.]

lets hope someone caves.

[Sharkie]

Done and dead:


NEW YORK -- Straining the limits of credulity -- even for the bizarro world of the National Hockey League lockout -- the two sides managed late Saturday afternoon to cancel the 2004-05 season for a second time in four days.

"It's 100 percent certain coming out of today's meeting that nothing will develop that could possibly impact the cancellation of this season," NHL Players' Association senior director Ted Saskin said after the two sides met for 6½ hours in a Manhattan hotel and still inexplicably found a wide philosophical gap remained between themselves and NHL owners.


Don't hold your breath waiting for a third-time-is-a-charm attempt at saving what cannot be saved. As the saying goes, stick a fork in it. It's done.


The National Labor Relations Board, likely to be called on in the coming months to wade through the wreckage of these negotiations as the NHL attempts to declare an impasse and introduce replacement players, should levy fines against both sides for desecrating the corpse that was this season.


Even with the two most influential hockey figures of this generation, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky, at the table for the first time, the two sides could not get it right.


In the aftermath of Saturday's meeting, both sides took great care to praise the two hockey gods for their input and presence. Not much future in trampling on the holy. Yet it is clear the lack of understanding between the two sides rendered even the two finest playmakers of all time impotent to forge a deal. Perhaps had the two greats chosen to make their presence felt earlier in this five-months-and-counting ordeal things might have been different. But they didn't, and now the season is forfeit.


Lemieux and Gretzky, both widely rumored to be working the phones after Bettman canceled the season the first time on Wednesday, were invited to these rekindled talks by NHLPA president Trevor Linden. And it was Linden who was approached by the NHL's top negotiator, Bill Daly, about trying to resurrect the 2004-05 season Thursday night, setting the stage for what the hockey world rightly expected would be a Miracle Off Ice.


But given the slack-jawed look of the union's top people late Saturday afternoon, it appears there was a gross misinterpretation of what might happen in New York, at least on the players' side. Instead of arriving to find the league ready to negotiate a compromise somewhere between the league's final offer of a $42.5-million salary cap and the players' final offer of a $49-million salary cap with a luxury tax component, the players found the league simply ready to explain more fully its final offer.


"It became apparent as we got into the meeting that the parties were much further apart than everybody thought we were on Tuesday," NHLPA senior director Ted Saskin said. "There's far more than just a number that separates us."


"I think there was a misconception that the two sides were close," added Linden. "I think it frankly came from the side of ownership and certainly general managers and some players and fans and media. But I think it was crystal clear from our standpoint that we weren't [close] and that was evident today."


What seems crystal clear is that the players over-played their hand.


Yes, a group of owners hoped a deal could be done at around $45 million. But if the players took Daly's call to Linden as a sign that there was a shifting of Bettman's power base, then they miscalculated.


Although Bettman didn't help matters by intimating during his press conference Wednesday that the league might have considered a mid-40s cap, Daly's call to Linden had as much to do with apparent fissures within the union's membership as any change in attitudes among ownership. So the league reached out to the players thinking they were ready to either bring in a new proposal or look more closely at the owners' final offer. The players thought the opposite.


How typical.


There was no proposal and when the players began to peel back the layers of the owners' offer, the less they liked the view.


"The bottom line is that our understanding was that this meeting was for them to come forward with a new proposal. But it never got to that point," Daly told the Canadian Press.


The players further exacerbated the situation by putting out a release Friday evening which implied the league had come to them looking to re-open talks. Media leaks soon followed that there was a deal, either done or on the verge of being so. Given that a number of owners were upset that Bettman had upped the league's final offer on Tuesday evening, from $40 million to $42.5 million, the early reports of a further giveaway reduced what little wiggle room the owners might have had.


"All the leaks in the press about a deal being done at $45 million. I don't know where they came from but they didn't come from us," Daly said.


Although Linden and the rest of the players' association insist they remain unified, Linden himself acknowledged calls from players who didn't want the players to attend Saturday's meeting.


"I've received several phone calls [from players] that urged us not to come. And there are certainly a lot of players that weren't happy with the position we took last week and in an effort to get some sort of a deal we felt it was necessary," Linden said.


Regardless, there exists in this dispute a clear crisis of leadership.


Neither NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow nor Bettman attended Saturday's meeting. It is a damning indictment of at least one of these men that even with negotiations in extra time and with Lemieux and Gretzky at the table, the one thing that both sides agreed on was that more could be achieved with them on the sidelines.


When word leaked out about Saturday's meeting, there was almost unanimous agreement throughout the hockey world that the two sides would not risk the public humiliation of failing to strike a deal twice in one week unless both sides were assured there was a framework.


Perhaps it was a case of willful blindness, hockey people looking at all the evidence and saying, surely they won't blow this again. Instead the only blindness was on the parts of the two sides.


If there is a lesson to be learned from the shambles of the post-cancellation cancellation it is that the two sides still know little about each other. But they'd better learn quickly if they hope to save 2005-06.

[I]Scott Burnside is a freelance writer based in Atlanta and is a frequent contributor to ESPN.com.

[nakofan64]

They're both to blame for this but I'd give fault to the players more so. If they can't accept a necessary salary cap by next season, I wouldn't mind the idea of replacement players who would play with a salary cap in place.