Time Can’t Move Fast Enough

Two weeks.

We’re two weeks away from the start of NHL training camp.  Summer is damn near over, children both young and old alike are headed back to school and then there’s others who have shown that they’re really not grown up at all.

Ugh…

You know what this makes me feel like?

I’ve even got the same dress and everything. It’s amazing really.

What’s not helping matters there with all the secrecy of the NHLPA and their motives in booting the now former boss Paul Kelly are statements like these from Atlanta Thrashers superstar Ilya Kovalchuk, courtesy of Dmitry Chesnokov of Yahoo’s Puck Daddy via Twitter translated from Russia’s SovSport (God Bless the Internet!):

Kovalchuk calls the current CBA “dumb;” says “players lost on all counts.”

And this beauty:

Kovalchuk says that during the lockout there was a split among players who started looking for a new boss behind Goodenow’s back.

Sounds like it’s going to be a party in the near future doesn’t it?

It’s hard to believe that there’s a group of guys dumber than the NHL Owners and Board of Governors with Gary Bettman on their leash, but it appears that the NHLPA wants to vie for the crown.  What the firing of the very likable and pacifying Paul Kelly spells out is doom in the future and Kovalchuk’s comment about how the CBA works against the players and that they “lost out on all counts” is mind-boggling, especially since the owners, who indeed thought they won have seen their own supposed victory fall down around their ankles.

The players can see what’s coming on the horizon though.  They see that the gravy train has ended and that the salary cap is going to fall next year and with it the cap floor.  They know already that the owners will be looking for assistance for their own bad management (AGAIN) and the players know that they’ll be made into the villains in all this by the shyster owners.

With all that said, everyone is feeling queasy about what this means for the future.  While this year will go fine and without a hitch (provided no one gets hurt during the Olympics), this will cloud things up immensely for the following seasons so long as the NHLPA hires a hardliner that they’re supposedly looking for (so says Kevin Allen of USA Today on Twitter).  While the owners have made it nearly impossible to like anything that they do given how Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes has acted towards his own team and market to the Board of Governors attitude and actions towards Jim Balsillie, the players association fires right back with a dumpster full of stupid of their own feeling like they’re getting the short end of the stick.

Unreal.  Both sides of this idiotic operation continue to feel like they’re the big men on campus when it has somehow not dawned on them that they’re not even the big fish in the major league sports pond.  The owners locking the players out for a full season was bad enough and should’ve continued to make both sides suffer for their malfeasance towards each other and the fans yet in a couple years time we’re likely to see the same storyline unfold all over again.

I’d lecture using old clichés about how those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,  but why bother.  If the players want to play hardball with the owners who are likely going to look to correct the “mistakes” they made in the last round of collective bargaining… Have fun.  You’ll all be playing in Sweden and Russia again to help bide the time while your newly elected union head butts heads with the most stubborn bunch of backwards curmudgeons this side of the nursing home.

Go ahead and get locked out for a year or two and see who’s left to care when you come back.  The fans have better things to do than wait for potentially equally moronic sides to come to an asinine agreement over who gets to have more money.  This time there won’t be quirky rule changes to be made to help win people over instantly.  This time distractions won’t work.

This time, fans will have something better to do with their time and money.  Just test it out and see if it’s a bluff.

I dare you.

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