Although I agree with you that the cancellation is sad, I would rather there be no season than there be a 28-game season followed by full playoffs. At least this was there will be no asterisk next to the championship team in the books.

Additionally, I am fully on the side of management on this one. Although I beleive that NHL players are the most underpaid of the four major sports, given the insane salaries of the other three and the number/difficulty of games in the NHL season, I believe that every major sport needs a salary cap.

Hopefully the cap will be enacted, the NHL will recover, and baseball will be next. Hopefully...

I'm pretty solidly on the side of management in this one, too, although I still wish there had been a season this year. You do make a good point, but, selfishly, I'd just like to have seen some hockey.

Maybe I'll take in a DU game some time...

It doesn't make sense that the least popular of the 4 major sports would let this happen.

We in Columbus waited a long time to get a major league franchise, and now this. Ugh!

Well, no NHL, but have you seen this? From Blabbermouth:

Launch Radio Networks is reporting that QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE officially kicked off their 2005 world tour in Milan, Italy on Monday night (Feb. 14), and were joined onstage for eight songs by vocalist Mark Lanegan, according to NME.com. Although it was announced that Lanegan had left the group early last year, frontman Josh Homme said Lanegan is basically free to come and go as he pleases. "What would be a good phrase for what Mark has? He's got kind of carte blanche for QUEENS, and so I think the idea that he's able to come back, kind of at his own free will, whenever the hell he wants to, gets misunderstood by other people, but not really by Mark or I," he said.

The former SCREAMING TREES frontman joined the QUEENS on 2002's "Songs for the Deaf" album, singing several songs and becoming part of the group's touring lineup. Lanegan has also recorded a number of solo albums and has toured behind those as well.

Although the band played a secret show as the Clocks in Los Angeles earlier this month, the Milan gig was the first official QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE concert in a year.

The group kicks off a U.S. tour on March 15 in Austin, Texas, with its fourth album, "Lullabies To Paralyze", arriving in stores on March 22.

Shawn, you're a good man. A very good man, indeed.

And, Steven, do you have any good local college teams? I'm hoping that will make up for it somewhat.

First of all, if your jonesing for a hockey like game, go see an indoor lacrosse match. Denver has the Mamouth, and they rock. $35 gets you on the glass.

Second of all, I am completly opposed to salary caps. This is a business, and there is only a small number of people who can play the game at the level that these pros can. Scarcity means high pay. Let the free market determine what a player should receive. It would be better to have some franchises go bankrupt, to shake up the league, and bring down player salaries, than to impose an artificial limit.

Another way to prevent the smaller market teams from completly being left out in the cold is to implement the revenue sharing that the NBA does. This allows some of the revenue from the top teams to flow to the smaller market teams. This is not a distribute the wealth strategy, but just a way to pay the teams for their time on the road. No matter how much one team makes, those revenues would be gone, if all the smaller teams were no longer available to play the larger market teams.

Here is the best plan. BREAK THE UNION. Team owners should hire players from minor leagues to play, without a union. I will be interested to see how many players are willing to play for less money, once they see that their positions are being taken.

Shadow: Three words from you that can apply to so many situations: "BREAK THE UNION"

Words to live by, my friend. Words to live by...

Unfortunately, revenue sharing only works when you have revenue to share. The NBA and NFL have huge tV contracts. the NHL just signed what amounted to the "local cable access channel" plan with NBC. They get nada from the TV rights. And even the big teams are not rolling in money.

If they are not rolling in money, the team owners should start running their teams like businesses, and not pay players as much. If owners started thinking about pay vs. revenues, maybe these artificial caps wouldn't be neccesary.

Columbus is a college town, Ohio State sports (especially football) is kinda like religion, except except fans will riot if the team loses (or wins.)

Shadow:

"...the team owners should start running their teams like businesses..."

With a comment like this, I have to wonder whether you really understand the issues involved. The owners are running their teams like businesses. The business model for professional sports is different than for many industries. In many industries the goal of a given business is to put the competitors out of business. With sports, the goal is to keep your competitors in business.

The two main issues that the owners have are with payroll not being tied to revenue and payroll discrepancies between teams. I will start with the latter.

The biggest problems that professional sports face os when some teams can pay 2-3 (or more) times the total payroll of other teams. Last year the Penguins paid $23 million in payroll whereas the Red Wings paid $90 million. This wasn't due to stinginess on the part of the Penguins. They would love to have been able to py $90 million. They simply couldn't because the didn't have the revenue. Detroit is "Hockey Town, USA" while Pittsburgh is Steelers country. The Penguins simply can't draw enough fans with high enough ticket prices to compete. This results in the Red Wings consistently fielding great teams and the Penguins continually sucking. The situation is the same in baseball, just substitute the Yankees and the Indians. If this was a normal "business" then the Red Wings would put the Penguins out of business and then absorb their customers. This is professional sports, however, so it is actually in the best interests of the Red Wings to keep the Penguins around and increase their audience. The way that this is accomplished in football is through a salary cap. If all teams have the same amount of money to spend on payroll then the league becomes competitive, more people watch, the revenues go up across the board, and everyone benefits. Telling the Penguins to simply "run like a business" and "pay the players less" doesn't solve the problem - it magnifies it.

Once a salary cap is agreed to, the next problem is determining where to set the cap. Setting the cap at $90 million wouldn't solve the problem. It would just be a continuation of the status quo. What the owners want to do is tie the salary cap to revenues. The idea is that the payers, as a group, will always be guaranteed a consistent percentage of the revenue. When revenue is up the cap goes up and the players get more. When revenue goes down the cap goes down and the players get less. Which, incidentally, is the exact "thinking about pay vs. revenues" that you state that they should do. Your assertion that thinking in this manner would make artifial caps unnecessary is 100% backwards. It is exactly this kind of thinking (and, more importantly, reality) which makes a salary cap so important to the future health and growth of the sport.

A very good explanation, Jerry. The other problem with the "owners should just run their teams like businesses" is that there are always owners who will jack up the market price for everyone by signing a player to a ridiculous salary (cough - Tom Hicks/Alex Rodriguez - cough). If the owners ever *tried* to bring the market price back down, they'd be slapped with a labor lawsuit faster than you can say "antitrust."

I understand what you are saying about that teams are NOT trying to run their competitors out of business, which is why I brought up the revenue sharing concept used by the NBA. The response to this was that NHL teams are not rolling in money, but the next response was that they are. The Red Wings paying $90MM in salaries implies that there is money in the sport. Money that, as the example used, should be routed to the Penguins, for the games they play against the Red Wings. The Red Wings can't play without competitors.

As for the pay vs. revenues, I was not aware that the cap is flexible in regards to revenue the NHL makes. That seem equitable, but I still don't like them.

Also, I did say in my first post that maybe it is about time that a few franchises DO go bankrupt, instead of being proped up by artifical means. I am a big Pittsburgh fan, since I was born there, but if the team can't make a profit there, maybe it is time to close shop, or move somewhere they can make money.

I understand that this would have negative effects on the league for a while, but in the long run, the league would be healthier.

The last issue I have with salary caps are that it really just creates more profits for the team owners. Regardless of what the salary cap is, it will force down the slaries of top players, and increases the top line revenue for the team owners. Again, the Red Wings. They currently pay $90MM in salary. A cap comes in at $23MM. Where does that remaining $67MM go? Obviously, not in the players pockets. I am not against business owners, you can ask Z for confirmation of this, but an arbitrary rule that puts more money into an owners bank account is not acceptable in my book.