They would be playing if the man that tried to kill baseball wasn't the head of the union. Fuck Don Fehr. Asshole. This is exactly why Don Cherry hates Americans.

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Fehr does what the players tell him to. The owners are out to fuck them to the walls. That's why te don't want Fehr in the room. He won't let that happen. Lot more blame on Jacobs WR all for this than Fehr.

The crusty out of touch hockey owners around from the Dollar Bill era are extremely out of touch. That and Count Chocula is a dope which doesn't help. I mean they are having this lockout to correct things they couldn't correct after burning an entire season within the decade. How incompetent do you have to be to let that happen? None of that is Fehr's fault.

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Typical basketball fans, you never appreciate the impressive yet fundamentally-sound assist, all you care about is the slam-dunk. For shame.

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

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Dude you don't know what you're talking about.

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The players would be back on the ice right now if Donald Fehr would let them take a 25% paycut.

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The idea that Donald Fehr tried to kill baseball is laughable. Sorry. What was Jerry Reinsdorf doing by colluding to suppress the costs of labor? Saving baseball?

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Damn I didn't realize it was so simple. Why aren't you head of the NHLPA?

The difference between the NHL and MLB to me is that the owners by either attendance or their paltry TV deal do not make all that much money. From what I have observed in the last few years since the last lockout has been players wanting to be paid like other major sports like baseball. That simply is not feasible.

I am not saying the owners are right in every aspect especially trying to limit contract length to protect themselves from other owners circumventing the cap but they need to fix their model. Unlike the other sports when the claim is made I do think most NHL teams are losing less money by not playing.

So anyway my take is that if Fehr is trying to play the strategies he did in baseball in this specialized hockey model he is not right.

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Elections have consequences.

I don't think that's true. While the NHL league minimum* is high relative to baseball's--I think it was $525,000 last year--the maximum couldn't exceed 20% of the salary cap, roughly $12.8MM in theory but never reached in practice. There are a select few guys making eight figures: Brad Richards, Ilya Kovalchuk, Shea Weber if that contract ever ends up counting. Those are the league's absolute elite; #3 pitchers make $12 million as a matter of course.

A 50-50 revenue split is an agreeable compromise, but not with the owner-friendly redefinitions of what's eligible to be split.

*This doesn't take into account two-way contracts, of course; players take about a 90% pay cut for each day on assignment.

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This is my signature...

We're having a grown-up conversation, if you don't mind.

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I apologize on Ivan's behalf.

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Kid Cairo's Boers & Bernstein YouTube Channel

Kid Cairo: 2013 March Madness Tournament Winner!

"Cowabunga? Cowa fucking piece of dog shit! This game is diarrhea coming out of my dick!"

However this is a more grown up discussion than the one between the players and owners for the NHL right now.

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The "make whole" shit is what infuriates me the most. These owners are miserable shit buckets:

1. The owners approved all those deals knowing they were planning on weaseling out of paying the full value.

2. And of those deals the terms are longer than the term limits the owners are now taking a hard line stance on.

I'd like to rescind Cairo's apology on my behalf, and replace it with

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This is my signature...

Any chance this lockout could end up with the NHL losing 3-4 teams?

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I mentioned Shea Weber. Those are Jupiter-sized balls on whichever anonymous schmucks own the Predators. The Flyers tendered an absurd offer sheet that, being the plaything of an Comcast-backed eccentric billionaire, they could pay with ease, which cash-poor Nashville proceeded to match. Now they're among the hardliners trying to get out of the contract someone else wrote up and they seized. Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.

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Why stop there?

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This is my signature...

We should lose at least two teams, but we won't. The union, which has gotten its shit pushed in enough as it is for the last eight years, isn't going to be okay with eliminating forty to fifty positions. And while extant locations are failing miserably, the league still has the Quebec City, Seattle, and Hamilton aces up their sleeves. We could lose Phoenix, Miami, Anaheim, and Columbus and never miss them, but as long as there are Canadian billionaires forming a line to repatriate their game, there will not be contractions, which are ugly and expensive. Plus there are the matters of leases and buyouts and such, to say nothing of the public relations disaster of making teams straight-up disappear (and not just pack up for Winnipeg).

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What sport are we talking about again?

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2018
#ExtendLafleur
10 More Wins

I don't think that the average salary is the issue. This main thing here is trying to protect the average or less than owners from the big stupid fish. There is no large tv money to share so the owners evidently a majority of them anyway do not want these long Hossa type contracts to circumvent the cap. There is no way anyone expects him to play to 45 or whatever so the average of the contract gets them below the cap.

I don't even know what the make whole hold up is so can't comment there. I would think no matter how good you are given their model no hockey player should make more than $5M per year even Crosby. I do not absolve the owners from being stupid in any of this or their commissioner. Without a meaningful real fix though we will not see the NHL very long. Just my thoughts.

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Elections have consequences.

Cap circumvention is just a way to make sure that elite players make what the market bears and make it from the teams that can afford the costs. If you're going to ask rich teams to subsidize poor teams, then they deserve the benefit of being allowed to spend money as they see fit. It's not fair to make the Maple Leafs operate on a Nashville budget so that Nashville can afford to operate on a Nashville budget, as opposed to not operating at all, which they indeed wouldn't do but for the grace of Canadian/northeastern largesse.

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