Jack Todd, Montreal Gazette: For a difference that amounted to slightly more than the amount Jose Theodore would have earned this year, they sunk the Stanley Cup playoffs. For the take from a single exhibition game, they became the first major pro league to scuttle an entire season. For shame. Bettman, whose colour veered between chalk-white and seasick green, talked for a very long time yesterday. Nothing he said convinced this writer that there was not a deal to be done once the philosophical chasm of the salary cap was out of the way.
Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen: The penalty will be huge, but it will take time for the NHL and players to feel the full effect of failing to save the 2004-05 season, and much of the price will be paid well after the NHL resumes play. A new NHL will emerge from the ashes, but whether it will succeed as Bettman predicted once a salary cap or ``cost certainty'' is in place is a hard one to call because much depends on what other changes take place and whether a lot more Americans buy into the game.
Terry Jones, Edmonton Sun: Hockey players are the most honest athletes in the world. They know when they've won or lost. And they've lost big-time in this whole deal. I believe the players - not the players association - will now make sure they get NHL hockey back on the ice for the start of next season ... The space where the names of the winners of the Stanley Cup are normally engraved should be left blank. The next winners of the Cup should not be put next to the names of the Tampa Bay Lightning players of last season. That space should be there to remind everyone of the 2004-05 season which wasn't.
Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press: And by the way, Elvis is dead, too. They could have added that Wednesday, when they announced the hockey season was over. Really? Over? How about that? And Florida is hot and fudge is fattening and Paris Hilton has no talent. All declarations of the obvious. Wednesday was nothing more than Gary Bettman putting a sour face on an already sour story. Over? Wednesday? The truth is, this hockey season began dying long before that.
Ed Willes, Vancouver Province: In the wake of Gary Bettman's announcement, the more frightening aspect is where do we go from here? What lies in store for the game, the players' association and the league? And when you consider that question, you begin to understand how seriously the union miscalculated its position. It will never be this good for the PA again. The best they can hope for, in fact, is Tuesday's offer will be tabled again if and when the league tries to declare an impasse. Given the alternatives, that possibility is also starting to look like the cleanest way out of this mess.
John MacKinnon, Edmonton Journal: Shed no tears for the cancellation of the 2004-05 NHL season. The relaunch of a sports product gone badly wrong can now proceed in earnest. Some may wallow in what-ifs over a collective bargaining agreement left undone. Include me out of such a sad-sack chorus. If it takes one lost season to stop the financial insanity, fine. Let others crunch the numbers, which is what this deadlock came down to, finally. The good news is the NHL has a once-in-an-era chance to repackage itself. What's more, the conditions are in place for them to get it right.
Larry Brooks, New York Post: They don't trust the commissioner, they don't trust the owners, they probably don't trust their general managers and coaches to any great extent, either. Now the players can't even trust each other. Their union is in shambles. They are a battered band of serfs in disorderly retreat. What a mess. Gary Bettman and his zealous allies on the board have scored their victory. Now it's only a matter of when and where the final score will be totalled. They'll get their cap and they'll get it at their price, and they'll get it sooner rather than later and they'll get all of it simply because the union turned on itself over the last four or five days.
Al Strachan, Toronto Sun: They were like two children holding their breath until they turned blue. But even children know when the game has gone too far. They repeatedly promised us that they would do everything possible to bring back the game we love. Everything except picking up a phone, apparently.
Mike Garrett, Kamloops Daily News: As the NHL ponders its next move to resurrect a sport that even before the lockout was struggling to find its place, it would do well to learn from the mistakes Major League Baseball made as it emerged from its own brush with obscurity. In 1994, for the first time in 90 years, baseballs season did not end with the crowning of a World Series champion. The repercussions would be felt for years.
George Johnson, Calgary Herald: The season is a wash and all that's visible on the horizon is the Great Unknown, a hazy, zig-zagging, limitless stretch of bad road unmapped by cartographers. We've entered no-man's land. We're all going in blind. And that can't help but make everyone just a little bit frightened. What's most maddening about the sad inability to create a deal at the last minute is that a compromise appeared possible when players consented to a salary cap and the gap seemed to be shrinking.
Steve Bisheff, Orange County Register: That wasn't just the season, it was the entire future of professional hockey getting checked hard into the boards and left sprawled out on the deserted ice Wednesday. The puck officially stops here. Maybe for good. If ever a sport had a death wish, this is it. Commissioner Gary Bettman kept insisting he was pulling hard for a labor settlement, but all he wound up doing was pulling the plug. Say good night, hockey. And would somebody please turn off the goal lamps on the way out of the building.
Kevin Paul Dupont, Boston Globe: And make no mistake, this is on the players. And it's on their agents. And it's on their union. It would be absolutely unfair and foolish, even pernicious, to put it solely on Goodenow and his sidekick, Ted Saskin. They may be the figureheads in all this, but the rest of them are the dunderheads. But this is the same bunch that got led down the primrose path by Alan Eagleson many moons ago, so in the words of Forrest Gump, that's all I've got to say about that.
Tim Graham, Buffalo News: The loss of a season can't help the NHL's stagnant fan base. The game has suffered from national television ratings that are routinely surpassed by poker reruns and pro wrestling. The only way the NHL is considered a big-four sport anymore is with a giggle. Maybe the one notion in which owners and players can find solace when considering the fans' plight is that they won't have to worry about alienating the casual observer - because apparently there aren't many of them.
Bucky Gleason, Buffalo News: Step away from the ledge, folks, because by no means is this an end. It's a beginning. If anything, fans should be thrilled, especially in small-market hockey towns like this one. The NHL and everybody involved finally received the slap upside the head they so richly deserved.
Randy Sportak, Calgary Sun: Standing at his podium, seconds after pushing the self-destruct button, Gary Bettman was asked how he felt. The NHL commissioner said he could sum it up in one word: Terrible. Appropriate. His power play on the eve of cancelling the season-something a pair of world wars couldn't do-should make him feel terrible. Bettman isn't alone in deserving blame. Bob Goodenow and the players should be chastised for their greed and unwillingness to come to a solution. But Bettman, who along with Goodenow should be forced to the unemployment line, proved to be a poor winner and that's why this wasn't solved.
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.