ditor's note: We thought you might like to get the other side of the lockout, the one affecting teams and players. Here's Mike Sielski from the Bucks County (Philadelphia surburg) Courier Times:
In all likelihood, there will be no 2004-05 NHL season, and truth be told, there shouldn't be. Both sides, the NHL's owners and players, deserve this lockout. They deserve the months of embarrassment because they comprise a league without an identity, without a long-term vision, with only a shortsightedness that always short-circuits any attempt to move into the mainstream.
When there's a way to blunder, the NHL usually finds it - its blind expansion southward and westward, its annual changing of the sport's rules, its indecision whether to shed or embrace hockey's cartoonish connection with fighting. Now we have this lockout, certain to last a long, long time, as the latest example of the league's ineptitude.
Continued...
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