Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
NHL owners put a gun to their heads and warn, "We'll shoot!" Plus: "Monday Night Football's" incredibly dumb new feature. And: Barry Bonds for MVP Stat of the Day.
Sep 15, 2004 | It's NHL lockout day, and that sound you're about to hear will be that of a great but troubled sports league shooting itself in the head. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to a local suicide prevention group.
Funeral arrangements will be made as soon as the patient is dead. It's expected to linger for a while. Shooting, after all, is not the NHL's strong suit these days. But the prognosis is grim.
Sometime Wednesday, perhaps by the time you read this, the league's Board of Governors will emerge from a meeting with Seligian commissioner Gary Bettman in New York and announce with long faces that they have locked out the players. They'll call it a sad day, but they'll say they had no other choice.
Of course, they have plenty of other choices, including, oh, let me see here, let's just think a second ... oh! I know! Negotiating in good faith. Being willing to take even the tiniest step toward the players, who, in an attempt to help alleviate the league's financial problems -- which are, not to put too fine a point on it, entirely the product of decisions made by the owners -- have made proposal after proposal filled with concessions.
The most recent player offer included an across-the-board 5 percent pay cut, new salary limits for entry-level players, a luxury tax and revenue sharing.
The owners, who nine years ago negotiated the collective bargaining agreement that expired Tuesday night, and who twice since then have renewed it, and who decided to expand the league beyond supportability, and who have agreed to contract after contract that paid players salaries the owners say they couldn't afford, have had one one thing to say since "negotiations" began: No hard salary cap, no deal.
They call it good, hard-nosed business sense. Those of us who don't own an NHL team and aren't irrationally jealous of the paychecks of entertainers who can fill 20,000-seat arenas as many as 110 times a year have another word: intransigence.
It's pretty obvious that what the owners are trying to do is break the union so they can start over with whatever salary structure suits their needs. It worked in the NFL two decades ago and it might work here, though I doubt it.
If it does, though, we'll be sure to mention it in the NHL's obituary, currently written, on file, and awaiting only a few details to be filled in.
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One for the Junk Stat Hall of Fame [PERMALINK]
"Monday Night Football" has a new stat for this year, and it's one for the ages. It's called "Max Stats," and it measures the speed at which a pass is thrown, then extrapolates somehow to give you the equivalent speed for a baseball pitch.
For example, in the season-opening Colts-Patriots game, "Max Stats" decreed that on the Colts' last touchdown, Peyton Manning's pass to Brandon Stokely traveled at 56 mph, which would be the equivalent of an 83 mph pitch in baseball.
I can say without exaggeration that this is the dumbest, most useless stat I have ever seen. It is a junk stat among junk stats. It is Bunyanesque in its uselessness.
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