Devs82-83

Thanks for a very thought provoking post Derek - it was thought provoking and interesting - good stuff As for anyone hoping that the NHL wil ever return to pristine white boards - forget it. This ain't no phase...this be here to stay. No explanation hopefully needed.

Yeah, I'm sure that some believe I'm hedging a bit here. Let me say one final thing and then I'll move on from this topic Actually 2 things. #1-Don with your admission I will never look at you the same way again. #2-I truly HATE women's sports. HATE - not dislike. Thank you.

It's all good, no worries. I enjoy the banter. This is really a very interesting board with a group of absolute crazy people. Like myself.

Eh, I knew that Charlie...I meant from now on. But thanks for the update. Carry on.

Ahh Darwin, your theories are all wrong. No NHL Champion = No Cup. Cup on vacation. Cup taking a break. Cup out to lunch. Cup not here right now. No ladies on no Cup. No amatuers on No Cup. Only NJ Devils on the Cup. From now on. Wouldn't that be nice? Psalm 51.

Maddog is a very astute person. As for me personally, I do not wish to have the Holy Grail with names etched into the side of the cup like; Mary Smith, alongside those of such personalities like, Brian Rafalski for instance. Sorry but I don't watch womens sports and NOBODY cares about women's sports. Please, don't dispute he above staement, it is an indefensible fight you'll be waging with me. Attendance, TV numbers, corporate sponsorship...outside of the LPGA (which not many men care about either) women's sports is continuosly force fed down the collective throats of people like you and me - and we're all told that there is a big "women's sports movement" across America...when nothing could be further from the truth. Even women themselves for the most part, do NOT care at all about women's sports. As an example ladies on this site; if Gary Bettman announced next week (heaven forbid) the WNHL...how many would actually care to watch it? Okay, maybe one or two of you. Case closed. Give the Cup the year off and see you next October. Lets not be silly now.

Only too happy to oblige you and everyone else Don. You wouldn't believe the stress that ensued in my mind when I got to the board today and noticed that there was possible confusion concerning my initial posting on this thread. I actually put off all lunch plans. The next thing you know, people will be wondering if I think my main man hero Hootie Johnson should be forced to allow a women to become a member at AUGUSTA National for crying out loud. Websters: PRIVATE: Of our concerning a particular person or group. Not open or controlled by the public. For an individual person (a private room) Not holding public office (a provate citizen) Secret (a private matter)

Oh I'm sorry, I believe there may be only slight confusion as to my intentions and or feelings. Please, allow me to clear up any misconceptions whatsoever. NO! The Stanley Cup should not EVER be awarded to ANY women's team ANYWHERE. Do I make thyself clear? Here si some more clarity if you will...Lord Stanley should ONLY be awarded to the National Hockey League's Champion. Please, forgive me for any confusion that the quote: "DON'T DO THIS", may have caused. Indeed. Carry on.

http://www.canada.com/sports/hockey/labour...be-7c20409e0242 Reaction from around the media Ray Ratto, San Francisco Chronicle: The hard-line owners to whom Bettman answers didn't want victory, or even surrender. They wanted no prisoners and a small thing like the integrity of the sport and its albeit small role in public life wasn't going to stand in the way of that goal. Adrian Wojnarowskit, Bergen Record: The players should've come down a little bit more and gone back to work. Once they agreed on the salary cap -- which you knew they would inevitably do -- the union could've made a deal. It works in the NFL. It works in the NBA. And it was inevitable in the NHL, where the disparity between big and small markets is so stark. This was never about making a deal, but declaring victory. This wasn't about saving the sport, but saving face. Steve Wilstein, The Associated Press: This was a day that absolutely could have been avoided if there had been an ounce of trust among the players toward the owners and their supposedly bloody red accounting books. It was a day that could have been avoided if the players didn't believe the owners were out to bust the union, not just win a better deal. It was a day that could have been avoided if both sides had more love for the game than they had for their money. Ah, but we all know it's just a business, cold as a corpse. Filip Bondy, New York Daily News: You should remember their apathy, the next time you're ready to dial 11 numbers to buy a ticket, if there is ever an NHL again. Remember it, too, before you dial 11 numbers to order that sports cable channel. These two guys wouldn't make that minimal effort to save a sport, for the sake of its fans, even for the sake of $2 billion in revenues. They were too prideful to sit down, push the telephone buttons with their index fingers, start a last, meaningful conversation. They let their letters and faxes silence the horns, the music. Steve Simmons, Toronto Sun: A sad fight between two sides so arrogant, so ignorant, so myopic, so inflexible that neither could figure out an equitable manner in which to divide $2 billion US. Instead, they have engaged in a bout of liar's dice, gambling with the very future of their league and their game. Never mind making a deal. These two sides couldn't even figure out how to tell their stories without contradiction. They look at the same pictures but see different images. Stephen A. Smith, Philadelphia Inquirer: They won't play using scabs and picket-line crossers, like the National Football League did in 1987. Bettman would need to have sense to pull this off, of course, plus a resume that garners public support in his favour in the off-chance he'd elect to do so. But fixing this whole fiasco, which started with a lockout on Sept. 15 before a season was eradicated hours ago, has a snowball's chance of happening now. There are no winners here. Only losers, draped in stupidity. Rich Hoffman, Philadelphia Daily News: A prolonged lockout was necessary. Again, everybody knew that. But come yesterday, come the deadline, any sane person knew that a deal had to be made -- that the damage from a cancelled season would be enormous, and that both sides would lose big-time if they couldn't preserve some semblance of a season and the playoffs. But here we are -- staring into an abyss, seeing nothing because of the darkness. Dan Bickley, Arizona Republic: Wayne Gretzky dressed for a funeral. He chose his clothes wisely. Problem is, the NHL has been dead for some time. They simply pulled the plug Wednesday. "Reality was, I couldn't solve this," Gretzky said, and that's a shame, seeing how he's the one that started all of this. From the moment Gretzky landed in Hollywood, he triggered a set of assumptions that would come to haunt the NHL. The league expanded recklessly, moving southeast and southwest with great fervour, ripping franchises out of Canada along the way. They assumed the United States would love hockey the way Americans loved the sizzle of a golden boy with a movie star wife. Like gold diggers heading for the great unknown, the NHL was blinded by greed and illusion, and here in 2005, they have completely trampled the game. Mike Prisuta, Pittsburgh Tribune Review: Goodenow and the players are equally accountable. But after listening to both sides of Bettman's mouth, is it any wonder Goodenow's players don't trust their employers? Jeff Gordon, St. Louis Post Dispatch: This will be remembered as one of the strangest, most mutually destructive labor battles in the history of professional sports. The owners and players spent years preparing for this showdown. Both sides knew a prolonged shutdown was inevitable. Both sides built up their war chests. Both sides recited their bargaining rhetoric, like a mantra, and braced for battle. Not only were the owners and players prepared for the war, they invited the war. With Bettman and Goodenow barking the orders, constructive negotiations were never going to take place. Joe Henderson, Tampa Tribune: This should not be how a hockey player ends a career like the one Dave Andreychuk had. Yet there he was, in shorts and a collared sports shirt, outside the clubhouse at Hunter's Green, where he had just stepped off the golf course after shooting 3-under. "Round of my life," he said. But he wasn't celebrating. After finishing his round, he had ducked inside the clubhouse for a couple of minutes to watch Gary Bettman take the final hammer swing on the stake that ended the National Hockey League season -- and, in essence, Andreychuk's career. Bettman owes his job to players like Andreychuk, professional men who skated hard every night because that's what the game and its fans deserve. Men like this have earned the right to know their final moment as a player came with a hockey stick in hand, not a five-iron. Tom Jones, St. Petersburg Times: On opening night, the Stanley Cup would have rested at centre-ice, amid the cheers of the packed St. Pete Times Forum. Fans bedecked in Lightning jerseys would sit proudly beneath the championship banner, while their hockey team defended the most famous trophy in sports. This was to have been a special season for the Lightning and its fans. Instead, it has become among the darkest days in the history of the sport. Christine Brennan, USA Today: Major league hockey was doomed by many problems, not the least of which is that it's a regional sport trying to make it on a national level during a time when money isn't growing on trees and the sports calendar is too full of other things Americans care more about, like televised poker. Mike Lopresti, USA Today: Meantime, because of a computer glitch, we were inadvertently sent some e-mail reactions that were bound for Bettman or the NHL Players' Association. Perhaps you'd like to read a few: ... Dear Gary, Let me get this straight. Your players' union caved on the idea of a salary cap? If my guys ever did that, I'd kiss the catchers' shin guards and carry out Donald Fehr's trash for a month. Bud Selig, commissioner of baseball.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...BNStory/Sports/ The National Hockey League received many favourable notices Tuesday -- and rightly so -- for permitting its coaches and executives to participate in the 2005 world hockey championships, even as the lockout continues. At a time when its popularity is at an all-time low, the NHL can do itself even more good by keeping the smart decisions coming. Next week, when commissioner Gary Bettman convenes a board of governors meeting in New York to plot the next step in the ongoing labour dispute with the players, he should make the NHL's Olympic participation the first item on the agenda. Ever since the stirring spectacle that was the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, the NHL has inexplicably hedged about its plans for showing up in Turin for the 2006 Winter Games. Part of the league's reluctance was seen as a bald, negotiating ploy in the ongoing labour dispute (since NHLPA members generally wanted to compete in the Olympics, the league was prepared to trade that off for concessions elsewhere). Mostly, though, the NHL was unwilling to declare a 15-day break in the middle of 2005-06 schedule to accommodate Olympic participation, on the grounds that it wouldn't make good business sense to interrupt a season if there was a long work stoppage preceding the Games of Turin. Advertisements Budget 2004ad1 Here's a bulletin for the league: Right now, the NHL's image needs a significant boost with its primary stakeholders, namely, the paying public. One of the most effective ways of extending an olive branch to all those alienated fans who watched the season go down the drain twice last week would be to grant NHL players permission to go to Turin in 2006. Just about anyone with a rooting interest in the game (as opposed to the business) of hockey would love nothing more than seeing best-on-best competition in the Olympics once again. Realistically, there are no good, logical, compelling reasons why the NHL shouldn't be at the Olympics every four years anyway. The NBA is always there. The Olympics provide a platform for the best that the NHL can offer -- wonderfully engaging games between half-a-dozen countries, all capable of icing teams with a chance to win a gold medal. The 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics provided some of the best hockey entertainment of the past five years, memorable moments for the winners (Canada) and for some of the runners-up (the U.S., Belarus) as well. The alternative is for the NHL to remain mum about its Olympic plans and leave the national federations, including Hockey Canada, in limbo, forced to mull over a handful of Olympic alternatives, some involving NHL players, some not. Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson returns from the International Ice Hockey Federation congress in Switzerland Thursday and one of his first orders of business will be to see if Wayne Gretzky wants to be GM of the 2005 world championship team. The larger issue -- of whether Gretzky wants to be in charge for Turin -- will remain up in the air until the NHL decides what happens next.

PLEASE DON'T DO THIS http://www.freep.com/sports/hockey/line23e_20050223.htm February 23, 2005 Canada's governor general has a solution for the Stanley Cup sitting around gathering dust. Since the locked-out NHL isn't contesting it this spring, Adrienne Clarkson thinks the Canadian and United States women's teams should play for the Cup this year. "It's not like we're saying to some little minor league, 'Why don't you win the Stanley Cup,' " said Clarkson, interviewed on CBC. "We're talking about excellence in hockey. I think Canadians care about that." Canada and the U.S. have met in the women's gold-medal game in the past two Olympics. The U.S. won at Nagano in 1998, and Team Canada won at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. "In Salt Lake City we all realized women's hockey was important," Clarkson said. "It was women at their very, very best -- and I would love to see that rewarded." Clarkson, also interviewed by the Toronto Globe and Mail, noted that the Cup originally was donated by one of her predecessors as governor-general, Lord Stanley, so she considered it her duty to guard its tradition. It has been awarded every year since 1919, when an epidemic of the Spanish flu canceled the finals. "I wouldn't want to see it miss another year," she said. "I think the Stanley Cup is so important to Canadians. It's our game and the Stanley Cup symbolizes that." Clarkson said she hasn't made any official moves to follow through on her idea and added it's up to public sentiment: "It is so beyond 'just a little trophy.' We have to see what Canadians want to do with it." The governor-general isn't the first one to suggest the NHL be relieved of stewardship of the Cup. Free Stanley, an Edmonton-based group, wants it restored to its original challenge-cup status. That group's legal position was denied by the Ontario attorney general, who said the NHL has control of the Stanley Cup.

http://www.freep.com/sports/hockey/rhinos12e_20050212.htm The goalie stops nearly every puck shot high on the glove side. He can also sell you a car. WHY WE'RE ADOPTING THE RHINOS This is Hockeytown, where Red Wings walk on hard water. But not this season, with the NHL lockout at Day 150. Still, we need our hockey fix. That's why the Free Press has adopted the American Transmissions Rhinos, 15 guys who play on one of the hundreds of recreational hockey league teams in metro Detroit. For the next six weeks, reporter Shawn Windsor and photographer Rashaun Rucker will follow the Plymouth-based Rhinos as they seek the title in their eight-team league. You'll see stats, standings, injury updates and player profiles. Hey, we remember how to cover hockey! WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) is joining the fun, too, so watch for reports on the news. The first line defenseman, the ageless wonder, plants himself like a white pine, using his size 14 skates to block pucks. He has used his off-ice legal skills to help some teammates divorce. Another defenseman can crank a bullet slap shot, but when the games are done, and the boys head out for beers, he keeps them in line. He's a sheriff's deputy. Joe Louis Arena has been too empty for more than four months now, and it's hard to imagine the Detroit Red Wings flying down the ice until at least next season -- in fact, NHL officials say this weekend is the last chance to salvage the season. But hockey flourishes in places where the lights are softer and contracts are not an issue. Hundreds of recreation league teams fill dozens of ice rinks daily in southeastern Michigan. They are sponsored by repair shops, bars, restaurants and auto dealerships. They play in hour-long slots that stretch past midnight, blade to ice, stick to puck, some slowly, some swiftly, all for the indescribable pleasure of gliding on frozen water. The American Transmissions Rhinos are just such a team. (The Rhinos no longer have a formal sponsor because their founder retired, but they still play with jerseys bearing the company logo.) Most of the players have been together for at least 15 years. Their average age is well past 40. One kid is 20. The youngsters are in their 30s, the old-timers in their 50s. The team plays on Sunday nights in Plymouth, in a B league, which is among the highest levels of rec hockey. Off the ice, they are teachers and engineers and salesmen and lawyers and students. Unlike professionals, the only autographs they sign are at the bottom of a check that pays for ice time. Everyone plays. Everyone has beer duty. Everyone talks trash. No one is allowed to bicker. Sunday night, they play the 21st game of the season against their rival, Malarkey's, a team named after a Westland bar. The opponent is younger, rougher, and responsible for the gap in Rhinos forward Kirk Goleniak's smile. The last time the teams met, Goleniak took a stick to the mouth and lost a tooth. His wife wasn't amused. "It wasn't intentional," Goleniak said with a grin, and without much conviction. The Rhinos, with 12 wins, 7 losses and a tie, have two games left in the regular season. They want to have fun. And they want to win. The playoffs for their eight-team league begin in 15 days Say cheese Wednesday, at the request of the Free Press, the team held its first-ever media day. The Rhinos posed as a team to begin their journey into fame, or infamy, as many of them joked. Most were still in shock that they'd been chosen as cover boys in this winter of hockey discontent. After the group photo, each player posed before the net on the south end of the Arctic Pond in Plymouth where the league commissioner, John Wilson, had set aside 20 minutes of ice time for the photo shoot. Rhinos associate captain Phil Sexton had sent an e-mail earlier in the week strong-arming players into attending. "Bring both uniforms and make sure you comb your hair," he wrote. The team spilled into locker room No. 3 an hour before the picture session began. Goalie Chris Thomas, the car salesman, arrived even earlier, lugging an enormous bag. It was the first time he'd arrived on time all season. The Rhinos are a savvy, wily bunch. They rely on position, anticipation and geometry to combat the relative youth of most opponents. They have a couple of speedsters themselves, notably forwards Goleniak (the toothless wonder) and Derrick Allen, but are mostly a collection of slow-twitch muscle. They also win because of Thomas, who is cat-quick in the net. The team just never knows when he will show up. "We have started with no one in the net," Sexton said, as he sat in the back of the locker room, changing into his uniform. Quickly, the boys piled on Thomas. Sometimes, they explained, the goalie might get there as the puck drops. But because he has missed warm-ups, he lets in an easy goal. Usually, they admit, he recovers. Amazingly, the team finds this funny. Goalies are notoriously eccentric. After bombarding Thomas, the pack turned its attention across the locker room, where the team's oldest player, the divorce lawyer, Jerry Soborowski, was talking about why he plays hockey. "You can hit people with a stick," he deadpanned. "Tell 'em about the weasel, Jerry," they hollered. It turns out the lawyer had to pay for his son's weasel to have surgery. He's still hearing about it. The lawyer has been known to help teammates with wills and power of attorneys and the occasional divorce. Eventually, banter turned from weasels to beer, and discussion of beer duty. Every week, a Rhino must supply beer for the post-game celebration in the locker room, win or lose. A few request pop. One requires Gatorade. Left winger Jeff Wozniak, an elementary school teacher in Dearborn, once found himself so sick he couldn't play. It was his beer duty that night. He managed to unfurl himself from the fetal position on the couch and drive to the rink from Grosse Ile to deliver the beverages and promptly return home. When the photographer was ready, the boys rumbled out onto the ice, grinning, attracting curious rink employees and onlookers who had come to watch another team play. They crouched hockey-card style, imagining Gordie Howe, and 20 minutes later funneled back into the locker room, where, what else, a few dozen beers awaited. Many reasons to play Even at its basic level, hockey is an improvisational dance, a flurry of spins and leaps and starts and stops and great whooshes down the ice. Those who master it possess sublime balance, but also an intuitive sense of angles. The skates can be freeing. Not quite wings perhaps, but an escape from the limits of the human gait. Hockey is also exercise, camaraderie, teamwork and sweat. Thousands of recreational players, from 6 to 60 and beyond, hit the rinks in metro Detroit in search of it all. The Rhinos are no different. Goleniak plays to extend the weekend, and possibly his youth. Wozniak plays for the speed, and for the feeling "you get when you're skating with the stick in your hands." Sexton plays for the thrill of the win. Captain Terry Knapp plays to escape. Still, life can get in the way. Knapp won't be there for Sunday's game against Malarkey's because he's headed to Las Vegas for a friend's 50th birthday. Goleniak will be in Lake Placid, N.Y., coaching his 12-year-old son's travel team. Everyone else is expected to arrive at the Arctic Edge in Canton, adrenaline popping, ready to hit the ice in the eternal quest for physical grace. And fun. The game begins at 10 p.m. Admission is free.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/sports/h...24anderson.html? By DAVE ANDERSON Published: February 24, 2005 WHEN the National Hockey League eventually gets around to having a season, it will need a new North Star for its betrayed fans to be guided by, a new North Star to provide a true-north direction after its sad southerly slide to cancellation. But until a labor treaty exists, that new North Star, a 17-year-old phenom center named Sidney Crosby, will remain hidden under the N.H.L.'s clouds of uncertainty. Crosby, who has been hailed by Wayne Gretzky as "the best talent to come along since Mario Lemieux," has produced 52 goals and 77 assists in 52 games for the Rimouski Oceanic of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League this season. With 129 points for Rimouski, a fishing town on the St. Lawrence River, he was 37 points ahead of the league's second-leading scorer. "Sidney has everything - good speed, good vision, good head; you never know what he'll do with the puck," Yannick Dumais, the hockey operations assistant at Rimouski, said in a telephone interview. "He's getting bigger too, with big legs. He's 5-11 and 195 now. At the same age, Sidney is better than Vincent Lecavalier and Brad Richards were when they were here." Lecavalier, the No. 1 choice in the 1998 draft, and Richards not only helped the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup last year, but Richards was also voted the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs. Crosby, who spent his formative years in Nova Scotia and is now taking high school correspondence courses in Rimouski, does not shy away from Gretzky's having touted him as the best since Lemieux - the two previous North Stars in hockey's firmament. Often asked about it, he has said, "I'm flattered, but at the same time I have a long way to go." In any other year, Crosby would expect to be knighted as the No. 1 choice when the N.H.L. holds its draft of teenage talent after the Stanley Cup playoffs in June. But without a signed collective bargaining agreement with its players union, the N.H.L. cannot hold a draft. Without a collective bargaining agreement, there is no contractual language to govern a draft of Crosby and hundreds of other teenage players in North America and Europe. "It's an unprecedented situation," Crosby's agent, Pat Brisson, said Tuesday by phone from his office in California. "Sidney wishes, like everybody else, it was a normal year when he would go to the draft, but this is not a normal year." And whenever the draft does occur, it may not be a normal draft. Instead of a weighted lottery for the No. 1 choice among the five teams with the fewest points that season, the absence of a 2004-5 season may create a weighted lottery among all 30 teams. "That would be nice," Brisson said. "Sidney would have a chance to go to one of the better clubs." Wherever Crosby goes, he will be under the microscope that Gretzky's praise focused on him. Like it or not, Crosby is to the N.H.L. now what LeBron James was to the N.B.A. two years ago - a teenager with the potential to define the league, to eventually lead his team to the championship and to dominate the game the way Lemieux did with the Pittsburgh Penguins and the way Gretzky did earlier with the Edmonton Oilers. Lemieux, remember, was only 18 when he was the No. 1 draft choice in 1984. Gretzky was only 18 in his first N.H.L. season, 1979-80, with the Oilers. He was traded to Edmonton, after he had signed with the Indianapolis Racers of the World Hockey Association, during the 1978-79 season. Not that every touted teenager fulfills expectations. At 18, Eric Lindros was the No. 1 choice in the 1991 draft. But rather than report to the Quebec Nordiques, he forced a trade in which the Philadelphia Flyers acquired his negotiation rights. For all of Lindros's goals, the Flyers could not win the Cup, and haunted by several concussions, he was traded to the Rangers, who could not even get into the playoffs with him. Two decades ago, Gretzky, with his genius as a scorer and a stick handler, put the N.H.L. on a higher public pedestal than it had ever known. Lemieux, with his smoother-than-ice style, kept it there until Hodgkin's disease and back problems disrupted his career. In recent years, Lemieux's former teammate Jaromir Jagr, now with the Rangers, skated to four scoring titles. But he never had Lemieux's or Gretzky's charisma. Of all the other N.H.L. players now, Jarome Iginla has the charisma, but it is difficult for him to project the league's image out there in Calgary, Alberta, unless the Flames were to win several Stanley Cups, as Gretzky's Oilers did in Edmonton. More than ever, the N.H.L. needs a new North Star to be guided by, to provide a true-north direction. But for now, that new North Star is skating under the clouds of uncertainty above a small fishing town on the St. Lawrence River.

Roger that...aok, gotcha, I see, will do, uh-huh, oh yeah, alright,...back to the Matrix now.

Okay fine. But you'll leave up two threads of the same topic? Splain.

What the hell is going on here? I only post here with this thread for fear of starting ANOTHER one that will end up getting canceled or moved. This thread is one of two that mentions the coach being suspended - and both remain on th board. Yet I ask a question about a DEVILS sweater...and its removed. Huh?

What's the deal with these "form fitting" uniforms idea? Please! I'm having awful flashbacks to those dreadful uniform pants that the Flyers and Hartford Whalers wore one year. Leave the uniforms alone for crying out loud!

I'm really kind of surprised that the Devils themselves don't sell them at the CAA. Then again, Lou doesn't want fans to be wearing anything but what his team dresses in I guess? Lou rules.

Unreal, eh? In an era of mass produced throwbacks of all kinds...this one doesn't get any respect. Oh that's right, it's a Devils jersey. Nuff said?

where one may purchase the old red and green threads? Mitchell & Ness? No. In fact, I cannot find this sweater in either home white, or road red anywhere. Any help would be much appreciated.

I believe that baseball's strike hurt them more than hockey. Baseball has a slew of fair weather casual fans who make several trips out to the ballpark each year - and I know for a fact that these sort of fans took longer to get back into the game once they resumed playing. Hockey on the other hand is different. There is almost nothng that can be described as a casual hockey fan. For that reason I believe that hockey won't have the same enduring problem of getting their fans back into the sport - basically because most if not all NHL and or hockey fans are die-hard creatures. Lets face it - if they came back tomorrow and its Devils-Flyers at 7 PM on Fox Sports with Mike Emmrick at the microphone...anyone here gonna miss the game? I didn't think so. Case closed.

By RICHARD SANDOMIR Published: February 22, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/sports/hockey/22tv.html The National Hockey League has more things to fret about than television contracts - like its very future after canceling the season - but league officials could not have enjoyed hearing what their cable partner, ESPN, said last week. Mark Shapiro, an executive vice president of ESPN, threw off his gloves and criticized the N.H.L.'s rules, lack of scoring, resistance to letting players wear microphones and resistance to allowing arenas to be equipped with the overhead SkyCam. "Everybody, like us, should be less focused on when they're coming back, but more on why nobody seems to care," Shapiro said. This might be a case of piling on a sports corpse, but the bungling league and the misguided players union deserved it. It's rare that a sports television executive excoriates a property once esteemed by his network, let alone questions if the network agreed to pay too much. ESPN will pay nothing this year because of the cancellation, but Shapiro said that some people thought the deal to pay $60 million this season to put games on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC was too rich. Even more ominous for the N.H.L. is that ESPN may not exercise its option to renew its deal for 2005-6, even if there is a season. With all its leverage, ESPN could let the option lapse and negotiate a discount deal like NBC's, which offers no guaranteed cash and only promises of sharing revenues, once there are some. The collapse in the value of the N.H.L.'s TV rights has been a fascinating yarn that has no real companion in major league sports. In 1994, the league had to feel blessed. Two networks wanted to carry its games for five seasons. Fox, having swiped N.F.L. rights from CBS, outbid CBS by $5 million for a five-year, $155 million deal. Combined with ESPN's money, the league was pocketing an average $45 million annually through 1999. Fox promoted the N.H.L. as no other broadcaster had, for good reason: the league was on the upswing. The Rangers had just won the Stanley Cup, and a strong New York franchise had always been good for a league and its TV partners. As Reggie Jackson had, Mark Messier symbolized performance under pressure. Fox introduced the costly glowing puck, which, if nothing else, brought attention to the publicity-needy league. But Fox's first season was delayed by the 1994-5 lockout, which caused the cancellation of the All-Star Game, and not once did the network carry the maximum number of games in the Stanley Cup finals. By Year 4, Fox's ratings had fallen by a third, and although it might have wanted to keep hockey, the need was receding. By then, it had N.F.L. and baseball rights, and could easily determine that carrying hockey on its regional cable outlets was smarter than a national deal. Disney craved uniting all rights under ABC and ESPN, and made an audacious five-year offer of $600 million in 1998. Fox howled that the ABC portion was grossly overvalued at $250 million (the cost of ESPN's buying $50 million of ABC's airtime a year to show games), making it impossible to match the joint Disney bid. Fox agitated about trying to escape the fifth year and challenging the ABC-ESPN offer in court - reactions that, in part, reflected a corporate feud between two media giants - but ABC and ESPN snared the deal. It was Commissioner Gary Bettman's finest hour, and he famously said at the time that he "didn't attend the negotiations wearing a mask and a gun." Steve Bornstein, then ESPN's president, brushed aside doubts about overpaying, and predicted that the muscle of ESPN the Empire would produce a hockey profit. "We'll make money," he said. "This is a marketing machine." For ESPN, the deal provided the volume programming it needed to fill time; more than 100 regular-season games were to be shown each year by ESPN and ESPN2. But in 2002-3, when ESPN added N.B.A. games, the N.H.L.'s marquee showcase was kicked to Thursday from Wednesday, and the hockey telecasts on both networks slipped to 71. For this season, except for the playoffs, hockey was to have left ESPN, and ESPN2 was to show 40 games. College basketball is doubling the N.H.L. rating that ESPN2 scratched out last season. "Right now," Shapiro said last week, "we're not really sure how to value the league. We have to assess the damage, as do they, and only until you do that and consider your options can you put a true value on what it's worth." Shapiro's candor underscores what the N.H.L. has become: a damaged niche organization without a real national following or megastars in the United States. The league has to take the same deal from NBC that NBC gave the Arena Football League or get nothing at all. It should count itself grateful if ESPN doesn't ask it to buy time so that its cable games can be seen nationally.

Sorry Petey, I can't see it.

Wow! Where do you live Crasher?

Thanks for the info - and if anyone knows where one may purchase an old Red & Green Devils sweater, please fill in the blanks. In an era of throwback this and throwback that, finding an old Devils throwback sweater ain't easy.