newjerseynewsroom.com

BY GINA G. SCALA

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

While the National Hockey League and the players’ association battle over how to share revenue, the clear losers are the fans who, in the long run, will end up eating the cost of whatever it takes to save the season from being iced.

The two sides met again Wednesday, one day after Dennis Fehr, executive director of the players’ union told the Toronto Star if the lockout went on much longer the players would be less happy playing with a salary cap.

“If this goes on for an extended period of time, I don’t know what they (the players) are going to do. But I think it’s safe to say, they would be exploring all options,” Fehr said Tuesday, according to the Toronto Star.

Funny, how the salary cap becomes a non-issue if the lockout is resolved quickly.

“Where the players are, they want to make a deal,” Fehr said in the same interview. “Even though the owners’ proposal went as far away from the players as they could, the players did not respond in kind. They made a proposal which moved in the owners’ direction. If there can be an agreement in a relatively short term which puts the pieces back together and gets the season going, I think the players can live with that.”

In the meantime, the lockout is three and a half weeks old, and the league has already lost about a quarter of a billion dollars, Bill Daly, league deputy commissioner, told the Orange County Register.

“What I can say is obviously we lost about $90 million with losing the preseason," Daly said. "I would say with the cancellation of the first two weeks of the regular season, we're probably in jeopardy of losing about another $140 million.

"…The players are sharing on some basis in that. Some substantial basis. Whether that's 57 percent, or whether that's 50 percent or whether that's 47 percent. It's some basis and it's a significant basis.”

NHL players are on strike for the fourth time since 1992. The league, players and its fans lost the entire 2004-05 season. It marked the first time since 1919 that the Stanley Cup playoffs and finals were cancelled, resulting in no team being awarded the coveted Lord Stanley’s Cup.

“I’ve been through once of these before, so how everything is going is exactly how I expected it to be going,” Devils defenseman Bryce Salvador said. “I’m just more disappointed that it’s taken the same course that it did last time. It seems like ownership is following a script and they’ve got a date and I just hope this time it’s not the whole season.”

For a lot of people and for a lot of different reasons sports are cathartic; Sept. 11, 2001 is proof for any lingering doubters. And diehard sports fans, whether football, baseball or hockey, are almost always going to return to their sport of choice.

I say almost because we live in an unstable economy where the unemployment rate lingered near eight percent for more than 44 months. A fact, it seems, lost on both sides. And unlike a lot of NHL players, who are jumping across the pond to play hockey and make decent money, that isn’t an option for the 23 million Americans who are unemployed or under employed.