OK. So if the NHL settles the lockout in the next month, they can still play a one game season and a two game playoffs. Who's in?
Seriously. Wednesday night, Mark Messier was at the Knick game, chatting up Paris Hilton.
When will the madness end?
The super Uni Watch has great column on goalie masks. I learned a ton. Like how goalie masks eventually influenced catchers' masks.

I love how no one is willing to cancel the NHL season. I swear. It's going to be May and you're going to hear things like this:

OK. So we can play a one day round-robin tournament, where teams play 16 three-minute periods, with the top four teams going into a second tournament, where they'll play a twenty minute game. The winner will then be determined by a foot race.

Seriously. How can anyone be that delusional? Does anyone with the NHL or the NHLPA think they can iron out a new Collective Bargaining Agreement and get the season rolling in a few days?
I guess this is why most negotiations start before the object of the negotiation expires. Not that I'm a lawyer or anything. Although I did play Corbin Bernsen's son for a 12-episode arc of LA LAW. I think I might have been suing him or something. Either that, or I was trying to get him to get me out of a coma. Those LA LAW days are kind of a haze to me. I hardly even remember my marriage to Susan Dey.

A reader sent me a link to Tim Panaccio's Sunday NHL column, which I missed this week (login info.). It's a pretty interesting one, where he talks about the refusal of the big market NHL owners to step up and admit the lockout is bad business. He also talks about the eight NHL owners whose votes allow NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman to control the negotiation process with the players. Bettman only needs eight of 30 votes to keep control of the negotiations. There are some interesting names pushing for the hard cap, even if it destroys the NHL. Among them:

Ted Leonis of the Caps. Leonis signed Jaromir Jagr to a seven year, $77 million deal in 2001. Although Jagr is now a Ranger, the Capitals are still paying between $4 and $4.5 million a year on the remaining four years of his contract (although not during the lockout).

Bill Wirtz of the Chicago Blackhawks. Last season the Blackhawks were 20-43-11-8. Before that, they were 30-33-13-6. Name a Blackhawk of note whose last name isn't Hull.

Peter Karmanos of the Carolina Hurricanes. The Hurricanes signed Detroit's Sergei Fedorov to a six-year, $38 million offer sheet with easily attainable incentives designed to discourage Detroit from re-signing him. Detroit re-signed him anyway. They won the Cup and it cost them $12 million in bonuses.

Jeremy Jacobs of the Bruins. The Bruins invented the contract scam that makes signing top draft picks almost impossible for small market teams: it's called the easily attainable incentive.

So these owners who are so hot for a salary cap are the same owners with little to no management skills (unless you think it's smart to pay millions for a guy to play on another team). In fact, you'll see many of their teams on this list of the 12 dumbest NHL contracts.
These are mostly just owners who want a cap because it's easier than learning about hockey. The cap represents a quick way for the owners to save themselves from themselves.

Sunday night, my friend and her husband and sister came over to watch the Super Bowl. My friend is a Manhattan born-and-bred social worker who hates both violence and sports. And she watches the Super Bowl every year.
That says a lot about a sporting event. When you can draw in people who hate the sport, you've really got something.
That something is what the NHL is losing.
That something is what Ken Dryden is talking about when he says hockey fans are learning that hockey is more of a habit than a love.
Whenever the season is officially canceled, and at this point it seems like it'll be canceled any day now, hockey is going to lose a lot of fans. Fans expect lockouts. Every major sport has locked out its players at some point. But the leagues and the players always worked it out, because they knew fans wouldn't wait forever. They knew fans would find another sport to watch.
Hockey doesn't get that. Hockey doesn't realize that when they shut things down, certain fans will never return to the NHL again. It won't be a conscious decision; they'll just find something else to do.
If the Stanley Cup was the type of event that drew non-hockey fans around the TV, I would think hockey had a chance of surviving a canceled season. But without that kind of cultural penetration (at least in the States), the canceled season is going to destroy the sport.
The owners might end up with their salary cap and cost-certainty, but they're going to have destroyed their revenue base. Sure the owners will pay less for their teams, but they'll also being playing those teams in half-empty arenas for quite a few years to come.