No NHL season? No problem!
If you're not a hockey fan, chances are you haven't noticed that there actually hasn't been any hockey at all this season. This is because of an ongoing labor dispute between players and the owners of the league's franchises. It's meant the cancellation of well over 300 games and, if the two parties fail to resolve their issues, jeopardizes the whole season.
While this is a bummer for hockey fans (about the only upside is that Black Friday brought some nice discounts on NHL merchandise, such as jerseys), there are others that rely on the hockey season to earn their living, such as journalists that cover the sport. So, what do they do when there's no hockey to cover? They make their own. Kind of.
Bloomberg's BusinessWeek reports that Pat Hickey of The Montreal Gazette has been running the simulation feature on EA's NHL 13 for Xbox 360 and writing about the virtual season for his newspaper. Hickey writes about the simulated games, including quotes from players (which he makes up), and says it takes roughly 60 minutes to watch a game and 45 minutes for the write-up.
According to Bloomberg, The Montreal Gazette isn't alone in using NHL 13 to give fans their hockey fix. Several bars reportedly air the games on the big screen, and EA and ESPN are logging all the stats of the simulated games online. So far it seems Hickey is alone in his write-ups of the games and homemade quotes from players.
For those interested, EA's stats currently has the Calgary Flames as western conference leaders, while Hickey's own Montreal Canadiens (locally known as the Habs) top the eastern conference.
I think this is the 1st time in a while I've seen a spam bot with a relavent spam to the article.
Bettman = NHL commissioner
I know. I can't decide if I am supposed to ban him for spamming... Is it spam if it's on-topic?
join date is today, so I think it might be spam...
personally i down voted it because it looks spammy in appearance
but because of the relevance, i dont think its a spam bot, but a person behind it.
if anything, sanction the account until they can talk about why its locked.
but as for the message... id say let them keep it just because of the relevancy.
He's still got just the one post. This leads me to believe he's not a regular reader nor is he a spammer. Either way, I somehow doubt he'll stick around long enough to fight a spam ban. *holsters hammer* Carry on!
In the last 20 years there have been 4 lockouts in the NHL. The last one was 7 years ago when the entire season was cancelled. All of this has been spearheaded by the NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who is villainous figure here in Canada.
The main problem has to do with the salary cap. Many teams are making a lot of money, but most of the more recent expansion teams are hemorrhaging money badly. Fans have been clamouring for more teams here in Canada, where Ontario alone could support another 2 teams.
For one example, my local team (Vancouver Canucks) has sold out every game for more than 10 years (#3 out of all North American sports: http://www.thesportmarket.biz/charts/sellout%20streaks/ranktop.html). Even the cheapest tickets can be over $100 for some games, especially during the playoffs. And Vancouver isn't even in the top 5 richest teams. This is compared to a team like Phoenix that is lucky to sell half of their available tickets, many of them in the $10-$20 range.
So to support the poorer teams, Bettman forced through a salary cap to keep teams from just buying up all of the best players. So the league is trying to force a contract on players that will see the salary cap cut by ~25%, while the league overall is making more money than ever. The players feel that it is only fair that they share in the windfall and have proposed a larger amount of revenue sharing between teams (there is already some) to help out the poorer teams and continue to grow the sport.
so... let me try and understand this.
some teams dont make crap
some teams make sacks of cash
so the guy in charge decides to help everyone, cut the amount a team can spend on players by 25%
but the players want to share the wealth?
does that sum it up well enough?
No it doesn't sum it up well at all. What gm0n3y is saying is that if the NHL had allowed teams like Phoenix to move to a better market (i.e. Canada) instead of playing in a freaking desert, those teams might be a bit more profitable and many of the 'poorer' teams wouldn't be in as bad of a financial situation. Also the players association has recommended revenue sharing but the league wants none of that either. They want to load the whole thing on the players share of the revenue (which was cut 24% in 2004 during the LAST CBA negotiations). Not only that, they don't want to pay the players the full amount of their CURRENT CONTRACTS. Its absurd. Now the league/owners refuse to budge from that position.
what you said sounds like they want to share proffits with poorer teams, but the leauge wants to cut the ammount you can pay players, more or less exactly what i said
new angle is that they already cut their pay, and they are looking to cut current contracts.