A tentative agreement has been reached between the NHL and the players’ association.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr stood side by side in the early hours of Sunday morning to announce there was a framework in place for a new collective bargaining agreement.
Although the deal still requires language clarification, legal fine-tuning and ratification from both sides, a verbal agreement has been reached on the major points.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” Bettman said, “but it’s good to be at this point.”
Praise FSM.
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
*crosses fingers & toes*
kindness
So maybe a good 1/2 season then?
Baud
The only thing that’s important is which side won.
So which side won?
red dog
How this is any longer a major sport baffles me. Most of the great skills have been replaced by pure brawn, much to the normal fans delight. It is just MMA on ice now.
Scotty
Let’s Go Rangers!!!
J. Michael Neal
@red dog: Huh? The game has gone in exactly the other direction, at least as far as it can on the NHL size ice surface. Fighting is down. They call obstruction.
My first love is women’s hockey, so the NHL game isn’t my preference, but the MMA aspect of it is nothing like it was in either the 1970s or the late 1990s.
J. Michael Neal
The second half of the season starts on Friday. Gophers look to continue their unbeaten season.
JenJen
Happy happy joy joy!!
Joey Maloney
I’m sure I left that fuck around here somewhere…can I give you something else instead?
Phylllis
Never had much interest until the hubby started taking me to minor league games. I’ll be in Nashville at the end of the month & they have two home games while I’m there. Hoping this is all good to go by then; a pro game would be a treat.
SiubhanDuinne
Oh good. I can dust off all those old Maple Leafs jokes again and annoy my Toronto friends.
JenJen
A 48 game season means every game will be important. Should be exciting. Pro tip for everyone playing Fantasy NHL: DRAFT RUSSIANS. Never stopped playing and they’re in peak condition. Pa-vel Dat-syuk! Clap clap clap-clap-clap!!
Lori
@red dog: Wha??? Fighting is way down from when I first started going to games in the 80s. It’s just not part of the game the way it used to be. Skill players and goalies are the fan favorites, not fighters — Ovechkin, Crosby, etc.
And yay for at least half a season.
red dog
@J. Michael Neal: I am talking back in the 60s and 70s when it was great to play and watch…before TV except for the Stanley Cup.
Professor
This is the main reason why CAPITALISTS (job creators) don’t like UNIONS.
Mr Stagger Lee
I am hoping the best for the Sharks, but I wonder, will this strike bring the end of the Columbus Bluejackets? Trying to compete in a town where the Buckeyes are the King-Cocks, plus canceling the All-Star weekend cannot help that situation.
dedc79
@Scotty: amen
I still think Bettman should die a horrible horrible death.
Schlemizel
@J. Michael Neal:
#1 men host #2 Notre Dump on Tuesday. Heres hoping the Gophers treat them like they did BC when they rolled in as #1. A nice 8-1 thrashing of the green would sure be fun to watch.
Since the women have crushed every rated opponent they have faced they will have to take a night off (ala the mens team) in order to lose a game.
I’ll also second your earlier comment that the National Hooligan League is actually getting better. Its still not real hockey but its nothing like the days of Dave ‘the hammer’ Shultz (who couldn’t actually skate) or Jack Carlson. Still way too much garbage is allowed to go on but the skill level has gone up noticeably.
Petorado
There have been 10 lockouts since 1990. Lockouts, as opposed to player’s union strikes, are when owners form a monopoly where they they gain leverage by causing financial distress to players, cities, fans, and related small businesses in order to dictate the financial terms of their operations. What’s distressing is that players unions are often characterized as the villains in these situations. Equally distressing is that the owners hold all the cards in their hands by holding fans hostage with ticket prices, and cities hostage with the arena/ stadium deals where citizens that can’t even afford to go to the game pay for construction of the venues these sports play in. There’s something really broken with this model.
Thlayli
Don’t care. This lockout hit my breaking point. I’m done with the NHL.
Origuy
The downtown San Jose restaurant and bar owners will be happy. the place was a ghost town on weeknights without Sharks games.
YellowJournalism
@Baud: Dont know, but the fans lost.
Redshift
When the owners hire Frank Luntz to sell a counteroffer of “you take half as much in cuts as we originally proposed” as a fair “50/50 plan” in order to pain the players as villains, it made it pretty clear to me who is more evil in this dispute.
Thursday
@red dog: Weak excuse. Us old codgers will trot this out every now and again, but there is no comparison: the fact that it is now an international sport has brought players from a far greater pool to the NHL – plus the massive increase of interest in the United States means more athletes from there are joining in.
And whadd’yer mean “before television”?
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/hnic/index_trad.html
I am very much on the players side in this battle, but I won’t be paying for anything with an NHL or NHL team logo on it, that’s for damn sure. It was lovely to watch The Weasel twist in the wind, I gotta say; but this was such a stupid fight at such a stupid time for the sport.
Ah, well. Glad it’s back. Oh, and… uh… congratulations on the US World Junior win to the Americans here. Your kids played an excellent tournament. Damn it.
;)
geg6
@red dog:
This could only be said by someone who doesn’t watch hockey.
Yeah, Malkin, Ovechkin, and Crosby are nothing but thugs. No skills whatsoever. Jeebus fuck.
Myself, I’m overjoyed about this agreement. I’ve sorely missed the icemen. And I can finally say, it’s a great day for hockey! RIP Badger Bob.
geg6
@red dog:
This could only be said by someone who doesn’t watch hockey.
Yeah, Malkin, Ovechkin, and Crosby are nothing but thugs. No skills whatsoever. Jeebus fuck.
Myself, I’m overjoyed about this agreement. I’ve sorely missed the icemen. Word is we play the Flyers first game and, really, what could be better than that? And I can finally say, it’s a great day for hockey! RIP Badger Bob.
Yutsano
@dedc79:
This ad infinitum.
geg6
@red dog:
This could only be said by someone who doesn’t watch hockey.
Yeah, Malkin, Ovechkin, and Crosby are nothing but thugs. No skills whatsoever. Jeebus, MMA? WTF?
Myself, I’m overjoyed about this agreement. I’ve sorely missed the icemen. Word is we play the Flyers first game and, really, what could be better than that? And I can finally say, it’s a great day for hockey! RIP Badger Bob.
Wally Ballou
Not all hockey fans are racists, but an awful lot of racists (around here, at least) are hockey fans.
Sorry, just had to throw that out there.
Comrade Mary
@Wally Ballou: I don’t know where “around here” is, but I suspect that racists are choosing to follow a game that has relatively few black players, versus baseball, football and even Real Football.
Anyway, Le Guy, who is so Canadian that he is on a curling team, was grousing about the lockout last night. He likes the game well enough, but he’s had it with the media coverage and the histrionics. He was really hoping that we would pass the deadline and no games would happen at all this year because he’s sick of hearing about this twice an hour on the CBC.
Then when we were making breakfast this afternoon, word of the tentative settlement came on the radio. Bad words were said, I believe.
But if this means that the CBC will go back to broadcasting games on Saturday nights instead of digging deeper into the archives for any weakass hockey pr0n they can find, I’m OK with that.
JenJen
@geg6: Amen.
Thursday
@Wally Ballou: Sorry, throw it out where, exactly? And what does that have to do with the NHL getting its shit together to scrape up bits of a season?
Canada’s most redneck province had NINE black players between two teams at one point, and that was a decade back. That jackass who threw a banana on the ice at Subban got tracked down PDQ and publicly “outed”, leaving him crying an apology. The biggest hindrance in getting black players into the game is where they live – hockey has to be popular and nearby before a kid will want to play it. It’s pretty expensive, too, but gets pretty heavily subsidized up here, as you might expect.
This may come off as a bit of an excessive rant, but when you say “Not all hockey fans are racists…” that implies that a large number of them are, which gets me annoyed. For laughs, check out a live screen cap of any Vancouver home game: there’s a reason why I’m hoping prospect Prab Rai develops into an NHLer! 8)
Where abouts are you from?
Comrade Mary: Well, there might be a bit of a race problem in “real football” in some parts of Europe, still. Like the booster club for one team demanding they not sign any black players (or gay ones, for that matter). It’s never actually the players who will have a rough time accepting “different” folks – it’s some of the morons in the stands.
Thursday
@Redshift: And that so-called “opening offer” the NHL started with. That wasn’t a starting position in negotiations: that was pissing in the player’s faces and asking they why they weren’t thirsty.
Dick Move
I’ll go back to watching hockey when the players start their own league, and the NHL dies of disinterest.