Comments from the NHLPA and player agent point to another lockout.

Terrible news for hockey fans.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 5 years ago
Comments from the NHLPA and player agent point to another lockout.
Keystone Press

If you've been a hockey fan for a significant length of time odds are pretty good that you've had the misfortune of enjoying one of the many labor stoppages that we have witnessed in the National Hockey League in recent years. It is always an awful time for hockey fans and each and every time finds themselves hoping that this will be the final lockout in their lifetimes, but each and every time they turn out to be wrong. 

Recently we saw a huge fiasco in which  the National Hockey League prevented their players from participating in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea and many believe that this was the first sign that we were headed directly towards yet another labor dispute. Now to be fair it's still too early to tell if the players and the league will be able to avoid another lockout in the future, but recently some on the player's side of the equation have started to comment. 

The NHLPA's executive director Donald Fehr,  a notorious labor disputer brought in for specifically this reason, recently spoke to the Canadian Press and indicated that there would be push back from the players this time around.

"It’s no secret the players made enormous concessions to the owners in the last two negotiations," Fehr said in a recent interview. "There’s a general sense that it would be appropriate for the scales to move back in the other direction a bit. We will see."

It's not just Fehr making the rounds or saying things publicly that he knows will get back to the NHL. There now seems to be a growing sense among the players that they are in fact headed for a labor dispute, and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. One need look no further than how the league's biggest stars have structured their contracts in recent years. Those contracts almost all include lockout protection in the form of seasons with low salary and outrageous signing bonuses in every year in which a labor dispute could take place.

Now you could call that just a big giant coincidence but I would have to question your skills of perception. Thankfully it will not have to come to that as we have even more evidence that there is a serious push on the players part to push for a labor dispute. Powerful NHL player agent Alan Walsh, a man known for speaking his mind to a fault, recently spoke to NHL reporter Jimmy Murphy and he also supported the lockout narrative. 

"Do I think there will be a lockout?" asked Walsh rhetorically. "I always think of what Donald Fehr always says, 'You go into any collective bargaining negotiation hoping for a good outcome but preparing for the worst and I think you have to prepare for the worst' and there certainly is a belief that there could very well be a lockout at the end of the current collective bargaining agreement."

Of course at the end of the day the people who suffer the most in these situations are hockey fans and you have to wonder when they will have finally had enough.

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