Category: NHL General

About a month ago, Team USA GM Don Waddell chose the roster for the US Olympic Hockey team for the Winter Olympics. Three goaltenders were chosen to represent the United States: Rick DiPietro of the New York Islanders, John Grahame of the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Robert Esche of the Philadelphia Flyers. To me, there was one glaring omission: Ryan Miller of the Buffalo Sabres.

One would be hard pressed to find a person in the United States that says hockey is their favorite sport. As a matter of fact, hockey probably resides on the totem somewhere in the neighborhood of the WNBA. Hockey isn’t nearly as popular as Golf and Tennis, especially women’s Tennis, so it obviously doesn’t come close to challenging American Sports’ Big Three of professional Football, Baseball, and Basketball.

Why is that though? Why is hockey so far outside the scope of the American Sports radar? It doesn’t make sense because hockey, the NHL, has many elements that should catapult it to a higher level of popularity. Hockey has more flashes of excitement than baseball. It has just as much physicality as football. It is often more violent than your average pay per view boxing event. And, it can be said that hockey has the most graceful, elegant, and best athletes.

So the NHL is back in the news, but for all the wrong reasons.  Just as the league was about to escape the minds of everyone for good, one of the NHL’s more prominent stars came out in the news on a tirade of remarks.  The Philadelphia Flyers’ Jeremy Roenick voiced his frustrations recently with both the players and the owners of the league saying how it’s critical that “they” get back on the ice as soon as possible.  Roenick ripped everyone imaginable who had any sort of relation with the current hockey mess.  However, Roenick didn’t know that he would soon be ripping members of the media.  For some reason Roenick felt as though his comments about the art of fans kissing his backside were taken way out of context.  Roenick’s comments weren’t necessarily taken out of context, but one thing for sure was- the importance of the NHL to America.

For just a short time take a break, and look at professional sports, namely professional hockey, in a more innocent and relaxed way without politics and television rating prerequisites.  Let go of focus on sports market stipulations and the ratios of supply and demand.  Instead focus on the required skills of each professional sport and what the fair salary average for each sport would then be.  In this we might all realize just how much more professional hockey players should be paid.  Or perhaps see how outrageous player salaries are in other professional sports or all professional sports.  The bottom line then is no matter what the salaries of professional sports players are, professional hockey players should be paid the most on the basis of skill.

By Chris Mackey

The NHL has cancelled the remainder of the season. Is it a good thing or bad thing? Right now, it’s bad. But in the end it’s good. A second prominent sport in America will have a salary cap, more than likely, and maybe that will cause the other two, baseball and basketball, to follow suit.

Reports out of Canada on Friday night have the NHL and NHLPA reaching an agreement in principle on a 45 million dollar cap.  See guys this wasn’t that hard all you had to do was meet in the middle and a deal was possible.

For the eight remaining hockey fans in the United States, this has been a tough week for us. We have been through as many deadlines as Robert Downey Jr. trips to rehab and finally a cancelltion, but as we head into the weekend there is speculation that the players and owners will be meeting this weekend in hopes of finding a resolution to this mess.

By Chris Mackey

So, the National Hockey League is going to declare in a press conference on Wednesday that this season is going to be officially cancelled. In other news… blah, blah, blah.
My question is this: Does anyone really care now that this enevitable action is finally coming to pass after it had been on the minds of hockey fans everywhere all season? I at least know this: I sure don’t.

At this point in time, I’m disgusted with the state of the NHL and NHLPA’s bargaining techniques. I decided to write a letter to the NHLPA outlining some suggestions to them while still trying to be respectful of their stance.

Uniforms used to be something that fans could distinguish their allies by, when colours separated teams in a game they both shared a passion for. The team sweater used to have a power that allowed the bearer to show off who their heart laid with.

Then the alternate/third jersey was born and the death of the hockey sweater began.