NHL Lockout Follies: America Yawns, Media Hacks Choose Sides

For the NHL and its idle stars, the most disturbing news after two days of a labor shutdown is that almost nobody in the United States appears to have noticed.

Canada's leading sports network, TSN, had a reporter to New York yesterday to guage reaction to the lockout and the possibility of no NHL season. The conclusion: "If a hockey stick falls in the forest, does anyone south of the border hear it?"

A producer at the city's leading sports phone-in show said he had received exactly one call from a fan wanting to talk about the NHL. "I told him he had to call back because we're talking about the Mets."

If the lockout drags on, hockey will simply disappear off the New York map. "This is gonna be absolutely invisible," says Jason Diamos of the New York Times.

You can see the full report by registering at TSN and going to the audio/visual page.

Harry Sinden, the Bruins' ageless overlord and eternal optimist, is already musing over possible union-busting tactics. Asked if the NHL might wait a year, declare talks at an impasse, unilaterally impose a new deal and invite replacement players to fill the uniforms, Sinden sounded interested.

"We haven't addressed that," he says in today's Boston Herald. "That's one thing the commissioner did not address with the owners, and I don't think it's even on his radar screen. But we have that right."

"As I understand it, we can just put in our rules and say, 'Anybody who wants to come back and play under them, let's do it.' I don't know what rules they'd put in, but I imagine what they'd say is, 'If you want to come back and play, you have to sign a new contract under the new rules.'"

Several polls conducted in Canada suggest that the owners are winning the public relations war over the players. But media sympathies are more evenly divided.

"Will Gary ever learn?" asks Al Strachan of the Toronto Sun. He says the players are being reasonable, while the owners continue a tradition of stupidity:

"There will be those who call the players "greedy" and "stupid" without taking into account that the players' association has made an offer that is a reasonable starting point for negotiations."

"But it was rejected out of hand by the league, which has been organizing this lockout for at least five years, has put aside a $300-million US war chest, and apparently doesn't want to waste all the hard work that went into planning the shutdown."

Feelings are different in Washington, where Capitals' owner ted leonsis has obviously been doing his public relations spade work.

"Delusional players need to face reality," says Tom Knott of the Washington Times:

"The NHL has come to the lockout with a modest television contract and plummeting ratings and attendance figures. This is the cold reality that eventually will cut through the intransigence of the NHL Players Association."

"As the Uncle Fester of the sports neighborhood, the NHL owners have no choice but to curb the penthouse tastes of the players."

But many are declining to take sides, and those numbers are likely to increase as the lockout drags on.

"We should be long past this CBA stuff by now," writes Adam Proteau of the Hockey News. "What do we get instead? Rhetoric-by-numbers, a geyser of grim faces at news conferences, and 'You'll-never-take-me-alive-copper' bravado. If this is what passes for leadership, we'd hate to see the candidates who weren't good enough for the job."