If you think there will be hockey this season, you are dreaming. This article in today's NY Post. I don't think this is another Gephardt for VP gaff.
http://www.nypost.com/sports/27666.htm
NHL SHOWS NO DECENCY
Email Archives
Print Reprint
July 21, 2004 -- ANALYSIS
THIS isn't about a hard cap, small markets, competitive balance or players making too much money. It isn't about any of that, at all. This is about big business exercising naked power. This is about greed. This is about common decency, or the absence thereof.
This is about the NHL figuratively putting hundreds of its own loyal employees on the street eight weeks before the expiration of the current CBA even as the league sits on a reserve fund of well over $300 million to support its monumentally wealthy owners through a lockout that seems certain to claim at least the entire 2004-05 season.
As we reported Sunday, the NHL yesterday informed its Manhattan- and Toronto-based staffs of its lockout layoff plans. The news was worse than anticipated. Call it the Tuesday Afternoon Massacre. Up to 70 percent of the league's personnel — essentially all those from the Director's level down on the corporate depth chart in departments across the board — were told during late-afternoon meetings that they'd be laid off upon the Sept. 16 expiration of the CBA. And it gets worse than that.
The Post has been told that targeted employees were given the choice of, a) remaining on the job for the next eight weeks without future severance pay but with the likelihood of being rehired at the conclusion of the lockout; or, b) leaving immediately with eight weeks severance while forfeiting the opportunity to return to their respective positions. Some choice. Thus, Gary Bettman's June 25 pledge that the league would not begin layoffs until expiration of the CBA hardly seems to stand the credibility test, even if it's not outright public perjury.
The league, which called a press conference to trumpet the Arthur Levitt audit that found NHL losses of $273 million during 2002-03 and runs a CBA-dedicated Web site (bet the Web master isn't locked out) would not comment on yesterday's news, though its at-least-temporarily-employed VP of PR disputed the details of the choices presented targeted employees. The NHL would not allow our colleague, Pat Reichart, access to its office yesterday. Indeed, the league is believed to have dispatched an employee to monitor Reichart as he sought to interview NHL staffers in the lobby of its Sixth Avenue building.
Again. This has nothing to do with what side, if either, you've chosen in this labor dispute. It's not about that at all. It's about abuse of trust and power, about your friends and neighbors being thrown under the bus.
This morning, Bob Goodenow and the PA will meet here with Bettman and the NHL. It will be the first discussion between the parties since early June. The question isn't whether progress will be made, because it won't. The question is, how on earth did the NHL executives responsible for yesterday's Massacre sleep last night