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Letter to the editor

Make a deal or go away! Just shut up!

By GARY SHELTON
Published December 15, 2004

Melt the ice. Store the Cup. Put the Lightning in a bottle.

From the looks of it, there will be no title defense this year. From the sound of it, there will be no repeat, no hockey, no season.

Pull the plug. Turn out the lights. Lock the door.

Go ahead. Cancel the season.

Frankly, it's dead anyway.

The rhetoric has grown tiresome. The posturing is boring. I am weary of the dance. Say good night, Gary Bettman. Bid farewell, Bob Goodenow.

End the misery. Please.

If you guys want to ruin your sport, go ahead. Do it. Just be a little quieter about it, will you? I don't want to hear about how the owners rejected the players or the players rejected the owners during Tuesday's meeting. I don't want to help rich men try to divide a treasure.

Face off or go away. That's all.

Around here, we were looking forward to the hockey season. We wanted to see the Lightning's title defense. We wanted to hear John Tortorella snarl at the players and dare them to do it again. We wanted to see if another year would make Martin St. Louis faster, Vinny Lecavalier stronger, Brad Richards tougher. Instead, it is obvious the NHL intends to show us locked doors and rusted skates.

No, no one killed the season on Tuesday. But both sides seem content to let it die on its own.

See you next year, they seem to be saying.

Maybe the year after that.

How stupid, how arrogant, how delusional these lunkheads have become. A pox upon one house, a plague upon the other. Do not look for right and wrong in this negotiation. When millionaires squabble over nickels, both sides are wrong.

Considering all the ill will of all the previous sports stoppages, how can any league allow things to come back to this? Easy. The owners will not take responsibility for the financial mistakes of the past, and the players will not pay attention to tomorrow.

What could the NHL offer us now? Fifty games? Forty-five? How long until it feels like a glorified half-season? How long before fans stop feeling as if they have been left out during the negotiations. Which, of course, they have.

How shortsighted can you be? Look outside, and there is not exactly rioting in the streets over the lockout. Few people seem to care, almost no one seems to care much.

Remember when baseball shut down so long it claimed a World Series as a victim? People were outraged, shocked, appalled. Remember when the NFL was closed for so long it had only a nine-game season? People were enraged, aghast, disgusted. Everywhere you went, you could feel the anger of the displaced fan.

Then there is this lockout, which America will get around to noticing in, oh, February or so. You heard more protests when they canceled Greg the Bunny.

If you are an owner or a player, wouldn't that terrify you? Wouldn't you fear you might alienate the relatively few fans you have? Wouldn't you work endlessly to find some sort of compromise?

Evidently not.

Professional athletes tend to treat fans as Noise Machines. Scream your approval or they will flip you off or climb into the stands and start swinging. At the very least, they will talk about how unsophisticated you are.

Owners? Owners are worse. In the minds of owners, fans are ATMs with feet. When the seats are empty, they will whine about how the fans owe it to "their" team to show up because of some implied relationship. But when they want to lock the doors, hey, it's just fine.

Look, no one denies there are problems. Hockey has always been a better sport than a business. Players are making too much. Owners are losing too much. There are too many teams and too little revenue. The league expands faster than Home Depot, and it charges more for a ticket than Delta.

So who is right?

Well, nobody.

The owners are wrong. They locked the doors because they spent too much in the past, and they turned down the players' latest proposal - a 24 cents-on-the-dollar giveback, an offer you do not wish your boss to read about - because they knew they couldn't stop themselves from spending too much in the future. They have shut down the players to control their own spending, a particularly silly notion.

The players are wrong. They lack the vision to see the bigger picture, and they don't care enough about the long-term good of the sport. They do not play in the NFL or the NBA or Major League Baseball, leagues that are fat from television contracts. They are so dug in against the concept of a salary cap they are unwilling to negotiate a reasonable one.

Neither side has leverage. Neither side deserves sympathy.

It gets down to this question: Is there a salary cap that both owners and players can live with?

Certainly, there should be. When the NFL went to its salary cap, it not only assured financial stability, it actually forced many teams, including Tampa Bay, to spend more money. If I were the NHL players, I would talk about a cap if both the maximum and minimum were high enough.

On the other hand, if a cap is so good, why stop at salaries? I also want to see a cap on ticket prices. I want a cap on whining about empty seats until a team has reached the playoffs three seasons in a row.

I want a cap on the size of goaltending equipment. I want a cap on the number of stitches a guy who can barely skate can inflict in a season. I want a cap on clutching and grabbing. I want a cap on the number of garbage bins on the press box elevator at the Times Forum.

I want a cap on Bettman, and I want it to say "flunky."

As for the season, yeah, it would have been nice to see if one Tampa Bay team could stand its own success. But you can't have everything.

If you need a locksmith, guys, just let me know.

[Last modified December 15, 2004, 00:31:19]