Originally posted on 01/04/2013:

good article. I thought I'd share ...

NEW YORK—By the time this is over, NHL fans inclined to buy a ticket to a game will feel like they’re purchasing smut.

They’ll feel dirty afterwards, and slightly ashamed. They’ll want to take a shower. It’ll be like shaking hands with that uncle with the beady eyes and the inappropriate stories and the greasy hands.
Ick.

But how else could they possibly feel? The league and the players have this week taken their obvious lack of respect to the people who fund their enterprise to new heights.
This isn’t fiddling while Rome burns. This is urinating on the embers while pretending to lament the destruction.
Remember the sick feeling everyone in the pit of their stomach a few years ago when Ralph Wilson and Ted Rogers sat together at a press conference and chortled over what they believed was their ability to charge whatever prices they wanted to the suckers of Toronto to watch the Bills play?
This is the same feeling that is emerging this week as Gary Bettman and Donald Fehr take their sweet time putting the final strokes on a deal to split more than $3 billion.
The good news is that Toronto football fans showed Rogers and Wilson that they wouldn’t pay, and eventually tickets were slashed.

A victory for the customer.

Bettman and Fehr, of course, believe their customers are so hooked on the product they sell that they can get away with ANYTHING. No insult is too great that NHL fans won’t wipe the spittle off their faces and dutifully pull out their ************ to buy tickets, memorabilia, merchandise and overpriced food items.
The NHL and NHL Players’ Association, folks, despise their fans because they have no respect for their fans. This week has been just the latest evidence of that.
They distrust each other, but they despise the adoring fans.
Urgency? Concern for the game? No sign of either. Instead, whereas before we were inundated with rhetoric, now it’s all about tactics.

Making the other guy wait. Showing up late. Disguising proposals. Hiding changes. Legal feints. Accusations of skulduggery. Bait and switch. Using every dirty trick in the book to try to gain an edge on the other side.

At the same time, while they waste time, they’re also essentially telling their customers that they know they’ll buy whatever they have to sell and whenever they decide to sell it. They’ll take it and like it and may-I-have-another-sir.

Not once has either Bettman or Fehr said something like, “We ask our fans to bear with us. We’re trying. But it’s going to take time.”
In fact, they don’t even mention the fans at all any more. Both see this only about hockey players and hockey owners, about salaries and profits. Those who support the game aren’t even part of their cynical equation. It was that way seven years ago, and since they didn’t have to pay for that cold calculation then, they figure they won’t have to pay now.

After negotiating into the early hours of Thursday and then promising a meeting less than 12 hours later, the two sides didn’t meet at all outside of some “smaller group” chats.

Instead, the players went about organizing another membership vote on a possible disclaimer of interest filing after letting the last one lapse — got their bluff called on that one, it seems — and on court documents opposing an NHL motion filed last month.

The owners and players did have time for a spat over rules to punish teams that hide revenue. The NHLPA insisted the league tried to alter the rules without telling the players. The league says the players were told of these changes long ago.
The dispute was resolved, but it created more animosity, more distrust. It gave both sides just another reason to stop focusing on getting an agreement and instead work on devising new tactics to win the next skirmish.

The entire process has been appalling since September, and now it has become appalling in the extreme. Those who choose to pick sides justify the tactics of the side they favour in the name of getting even for some other perceived slight.

The players can act as they do because of the owners’ first offer in August. Or, the players repeatedly show up late for meetings, so the league is entitled to drag its heels when it pleases.
None of this should do anything but anger the fans, and there is anger out there. We just won’t find out until a season starts how that anger is — or isn’t — expressed.

One thing’s for sure. When all this ends, it will be hard to be a proud NHL fan anytime soon. It’ll be hard to feel anything but dirty.

http://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey...ing-an-nhl-fan