The Montreal Canadiens’ owner is said to be a moderate who may be better able to find common ground with players. (Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

No one should be terribly surprised that mediation in the NHL’s CBA dispute has failed (and if you are legally minded, you might want to see why it didn’t work by reading Eric Macramalla’s CBS.com blog post here). Winnipeg Free Press writer Mike McIntyre tweeted earlier in the week, “If mediation doesn’t work, will the NHL and NHLPA try meditation? Or medication?”

Well, Gary Bettman had an idea: Why not have the players and owners meet face-to-face without the negotiators or staff around?

On the surface, it sure sounded like a good idea. Below the surface, maybe it wasn’t so good.

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Josh Harding is determined to join the ranks of other NHL stars who made it back from serious diseases or ailments. (Bill Streicher/Icon SMI

By Stu Hackel

The measure of a man’s character comes when he has to summon it in the face of a crises. By that standard, Minnesota Wild goalie Josh Harding ranks among the top character athletes in all of sports.

The 28-year-old Harding disclosed on Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, an incurable disease that can cause problems with balance, fatigue and vision, three necessary elements to play any sport, no less goaltender — the toughest position in what may be the hardest sport of all. But he’ll endeavor to continue his career and remain in training for whenever the league returns. His desire to keep at it demonstrates all anyone needs to know about him.

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The Canadiens’ 36-year-old journeyman winger Mathieu Darche is hardly a millionaire, but the perennially struggling Maple Leafs have been ranked by Forbes magazine as the NHL’s most valuable franchise. (Nick Turchiaro/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

The owners and players are continuing their negotiations with the help of federal mediators, and we’re not going to hear anything about what is going on or even where it’s going on until the process is over, one way or another. There’s a gag order on both parties, thankfully, since every previous self-imposed attempt to keep things quiet has failed. Usually, the less heard about what’s going on, the better. We mentioned long ago that when you don’t hear anything about negotiations, that can be a sign that progress is being made, but when things aren’t going well, you’ll hear about it, either at formal press briefings or leaked to the media, and we’ve had lots of briefings and leaks until now.

If you want to know more about the mediation process, Eric Macramalla provides it here at TSN.ca.

UPDATE: Mediation concluded after two days with the sides remaining apart, unable to close the gap on their differences. Here’s TSN’s report.

By the way, if you think this is a battle strictly between billionaires and millionaires, you might want to read Pat Hickey’s story in The Montreal Gazette about Mathieu Darche, who for many years as a pro shuttling between the NHL and minor leagues made around $75,000 and only got his first one-way NHL contract for $500,000 per season when he was 33 years old. Darche, who turned 36 on Monday and is a free agent now, has never made a million a season. He told Hickey that there are 200 NHL players who, going into the lockout, had signed contracts for less than $1 million. It’s a good story and provides some valuable insight into a sizable portion of the player pool: the guys who don’t often show up in the headlines and, just like many of us, have to keep an eye on their spending habits.

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How many fans will return to watching NHL games and buying official merchandise after the lockout is always debatable, but it is clear that some have already left the building and other are calling for a boycott of opening night. (Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

I usually don’t publish emails that I receive, but this one from Tuesday about a fan’s reaction to the NHL’s ongoing lockout should be shared:

I just wonder how many fans will take a stand and not show up when and if this does get resolved.  Nothing would please me more as a disheartened fan than on opening night of whatever season is next the arenas are empty.  Sadly for me this lockout is personal in that my 13- and 15-year-old daughters were becoming die-hard Penguins and hockey in general fans.  It was great family time to get in front of the TV with Center Ice and cheer the Pens on in full jersey garb as we have the last two seasons.  They couldn’t wait for the start of this season.  We have lost that time together and a sports bond that I cherish to this day that I had with my father.  The NHL has lost them.  They have no desire to watch hockey anymore, they don’t understand the issues and could care less.  They just loved watching hockey with their dad.  They don’t like football or any other sport so that is something I will never get back once they sort this out.

Regards,
Curtis M.

Now, there’s nothing earthshaking here. It’s just one father’s story about how the lockout impacts his family. Maybe it struck me as worth sharing because I’m a father, too, and I know about the bond Curtis says he had with his father and the one he shared with his daughters.

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Send in the clowns: Federal mediators are joining the NHL lockout circus, but neither side has to listen to them. (Photo by Todd A. Swift/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

After getting drunk on the spirits of Operation Hat Trick in Atlantic City, we awaken to the long hangover that is the NHL lockout. That’ll sober you up real quick.

By now it should be clear to whoever is still paying attention to this ongoing farce that no one really knows what’s ahead and anyone who is offering a prediction is just guessing. All we can say with relative certainty is that the next time the players and owners get together — which looks like it will be Wednesday — they’ll be joined by members of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Will that matter? At this point, any suggestions to help break the stalemate would be useful, but most observers are doubtful they will matter. The mediators have not been asked to settle the dispute, only make recommendations — and neither side is obligated to follow them. If you subscribe to the belief that one side isn’t interested in agreeing to anything unless it gets its way (and you are free to choose your side here), mediators likely won’t change that.

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The spirited sell-out crowd at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall was treated to a worthy substitute for the recently cancelled NHL All-Star Game, with the proceeds going to Hurricane Sandy relief funds. (Tom Briglia/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

Once upon a time, some hockey executive — it might have been Phil Esposito — plastered a motivational phrase on the wall in his team’s dressing room that read, “Turn Every Negative Into A Positive.” Well, things can’t be much more negative for the NHL than this ongoing, ridiculous lockout and nothing’s been more negative during the last few months than the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Yet a group of locked-out players turned both things into a positive on Saturday night in Atlantic City.

To once again see Steven Stamkos slithering through defenses, Daniel Alfredsson making tape-to-tape passes through traffic, Martin Brodeur lofting the puck halfway down the ice, P.K. Subban dropping his shoulder and carrying the puck one-handed deep into the opponent’s zone, Simon Gagne breaking free from coverage, linemates Bobby Ryan and Corey Perry reading and reacting to each other’s moves, James Neal threatening to score every time he had the puck, and Kimmo Timonen making a perfect outlet pass felt like a reunion with an old friend.

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Not today. Once again a glimmer of hope was quickly snuffed out at a CBA session. (Jared Wickerham/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

Some will think of Day 67 of the NHL lockout as the darkest day of all. It may also be the most illuminating.

After hearing a new proposal from the players that contained some major concessions, the NHL’s negotiators rejected it — politely this time and following a couple of hours of examination, not dismissively in 10 minutes as they did the last time the union presented some ideas that could have been at least a starting point. Still, the owners did not deem this new offer worthy of further discussion. “So basically,” tweeted Luke DeCock of The Raleigh News-Observer, “the NHL doesn’t want to negotiate. It wants to dictate. Full stop.”

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Wake me when it’s over: CBA talks are turning out to be tortuous going with little movement. (Keith Srakocic/AP)

By Stu Hackel

If the CBA negotiations are a dance, let’s all do The Grind.

The long grind of the lockout, now in its third month, is replacing the long grind of the NHL regular season and there’s no end in sight. Oh, it could end if the NHLPA capitulated entirely or the owners offered inducements so the deal provided the players with at least some upside compared to the previous CBA. Neither seems to be happening at the moment and, unless additional compromises ensue, we’ll be left to witness this evolving train wreck in slow motion, day by day.

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Ed Snider (left) may have gotten himself into Commissioner Gary Bettman’s Le Chateau Bow-Wow after a story appeared over the weekend claiming that the powerful Flyers owner may be urging his peers to budge in CBA negotiations. (Alex Brandon/AP)

By Stu Hackel

Representatives of the owners and players are resuming their CBA talks after a 10-day lull during which nothing but bad feelings came to the surface. Take Red Wings defenseman Ian White’s poor judgment in calling Commissioner Gary Bettman “an idiot” while a reporter’s microphone was in front of him: The commissioner may be lots of things, but idiot isn’t one of them.

Few people, if any, feel badly for Bettman, although he’s the guy who gets most the heat, most recently over the weekend in the online magazine Grantland, where Bill Simmons artfully savaged the commissioner, even imagining him squirming during impeachment hearings (“‘So you allowed John Spano to buy the Islanders without any money because … why?’ That would be the best courtroom TV since the O.J. trial.”). Despite a few inaccuracies, it’s currently Grantland’s most-read story, maybe because it also includes his Week 12 NFL picks.

By comparison, the owners whose dirty work Bettman does receive very little abuse. “Question to you is would you do what he does for 8 million dollars a year?” Coyotes winger Paul Bissonette wondered on Twitter earlier today. Yes, it’s a hell of a way to make a living, but it’s a very good living.

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The Florida Panthers are regularly portrayed as an NHL basket case. (Elliott Schechter/NHLI via Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

What is this lockout about? That is something that the NHL’s team owners have never clearly articulated, but one thing we’ve been led to believe is that while a group of established clubs are generating huge revenues, many more are not and some are losing boatloads of money. One franchise that is frequently cited as drowning in red ink is the Florida Panthers, which Forbes Magazine pegged as having lost $7 million last year. During the last nine years, Florida supposedly took a $68 million bath, about $7.5 million annually.

But in a new post, Johnathan Willis of The Edmonton Journal’s Cult of Hockey blog writes about how he hunted down and examined publicly available documents of the Panthers’ parent company’s finances and they show a much different and more complicated picture. Sunrise Sports & Entertainment, which owns the team and controls its arena, actually showed a profit of $117.4 million between 1998 and 2012, including a stretch in which the Panthers missed the playoffs for 10 consecutive seasons.

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