For the three people left in the world who still care about hockey (including myself, and I suppose our fearless leader, so that leaves one--any takers? anyone?) Salon.com sports columnist King Kaufman's take on the NHL lockout is a good read, and explains the utter incompetence of the monkeys that run the NHL.
Basically, the owners backed themselves into a fiscal corner due to optimistic, if not outright delusional, revenue projections and the false economy of expansion fees. The house of cards began to collapse because a) better coaching, conditioning, and materials science (think about Patrick Roy's mammoth foam legs pads, compared to the leather-covered burlap sacks used in previous eras) decreased scoring significantly, and 1-1, 26-total-shots snoozefests in mid-February for some reason didn't increase the interest of the casual sports fan; b) despite that kind of on-ice excitement, the explosion of cable and satellite didn't bring a significant increase in television viewership, but did result in NASCAR races ("He's making a left turn, Jim.") and competitions of large northern European men carrying boulders outdrawing NHL games; c) with the exception of Denver and Dallas (i.e. two of the league's best teams) and to a lesser extent San Jose, the western/southern expansion teams have neither expanded the hockey fanbase nor captured the local sports fan's imagination.
So now the owners want a hard salary cap, because they've demonstrated they cannot understand basic economics, resulting in financially unhealthy franchises, and the league led them along the primrose path to Abaddon by failing to understand the hockey market, the sports market in general, the entertainment market in general, their fans, societal trends, or anything that was happening at any point between 1991 and 2004.
Unlike the last baseball strike, there has been no real fan backlash against the players that can be exploited by the owners and league, probably because the only people who miss hockey at all at this point are the most ardent fans, and Canadians, who the league doesn't really care about much anyway. Nonetheless, the league has been trying to foment fan revolt in the media by accusing the players union of being greedy, a tactic which would work better if the union hadn't just proposed a 24% across the board salary cut. Meanwhile, the NBA is looking a lot more interesting to the casual sports fan (player/fan stand fights notwithstanding), and SportsCenter is making jokes about a forgotten sport called hockey.
If the league ever decides to look up the meaning of the phrase "negtiating in good faith," maybe in time for the start of the 2006-2007 season, they'll probably notice that a third of the players are happy playing in Europe (where they don't have to deal with the Tie Domis and Derian Hatchers of the world), and the fans are spending their season ticket money at the multiplex, watching cheeseball elimination ceremonies and CSI reruns on their TiVo, and getting excited about the Miami Heat/Dallas Mavericks game on ESPN. Meanwhile their Steve Yzerman jerseys are getting stale and dusty in the closet, and they can't remember which team last won the Stanley Cup.
