NHL Lockout Bits: No Games Canceled, Nobody Talking

The NHL lockout has now marched into Day 3, but ... hey, no games canceled yet! No doubt you are cheered by this development.

The bizarre and rather silly outcome of the CBA's purely ceremonial expiration on Sept. 15 -- with training camps not scheduled to open until a week later anyway -- is that this deadline was always as hollow as the players suggested it was: Nothing really happened on Saturday night. No games were lost and no pressure escalated. Some players made plans to go to Europe, but even many of their Euro contracts don't begin until after NHL training camps are officially postponed.

The result? Three days into the lockout and still no meaningful movement, no serious negotiation. This time does not exist, because the NHL and NHLPA's pissing contest dictates that these innings aren't meaningful. Officially, in negotiating leverage terms, there is nothing to play for this week, so both sides will waste these days like they wasted much of the summer. The art of navel gazing.

Ah well. The transit connection for the new arena Brooklyn is open. (And the Isles are taking part in an LIRR-to-Barclays presser.) So if the Oct. 2 preseason game somehow survives...

If you like pain, here are some interesting takes on the CBA issues, some serious, some sardonic:

First, at Oilers Nation, a great distillation of why the owners are so disparate, so they'd rather solve their differences by reining in the players:

Thus for the majority of the league, increases in operating costs added onto the escalation in player salaries have indeed eaten up pretty much all of the revenue growth that they have generated. Once again, this is an issue of distribution. The handful of teams that were making healthy profits before the lockout, have been making obscene profits under this CBA.

That's probably not surprising to anyone who has been self-loathing following the issues closely, but that post has pretty charts and careful descriptions of how the rich teams have gotten richer, while the poor teams have fallen further behind. Ironically, the NHLPA's wealthiest players essentially took pay cuts for the salary cap, but the NHL's wealthiest teams only took deeper profits.

• Elsewhere, a podcast about the economics of sports (including stadium/arena building).
  
• But that's too serious. So try Down Goes Brown for the lighter side: Down Goes Brown: Take the quiz: How well do you really know the CBA negotiations?
• Or, try Taiwan for the...I don't know what side [link now fixed].
• And if you're just looking for some drama, Francois Allaire's exit interview as goalie coach for the Maple Leafs was excellent. UPDATE: Burke responds. Unhappily.
  
• If it's hockey you seek (sorry), Nail Yakupov isn't headed back to Sarnia. He's headed to Russia.
• And finally, amid all the foolishness, a pretty uplifting story about the Predators former assistant coach Brent Peterson, who has found some success with an innovative procedure to fight his Parkinson's.

Go hockey. Somewhere.