By Brittany Warlick
Put your Cam Ward jerseys aside and veer away from buying tickets because the NHL lockout is still underway.
For those who have wondered why our Hurricane season has been postponed, as usual, due to the expiration of the National Hockey League’s collective bargaining agreement, a labor dispute has been ongoing since the eve of September 15th.
In question are the desires to reduce the competitors’ guaranteed shares to 57% of hockey related revenues. These agreements were to also introduce term limits on contracts, reason free agency rules and eliminate salary arbitration.
Here are two organizations, the NHL and NHLPA, arguing over the money that the fans make for them and are now preventing these fans from seeing the game they love.
This lockout can truly show the potential selfishness that this system of professional sports has today. With proposals constantly being anticipated and tossed away, having Commissioner Bettman’s second player lockout in less than 10 years proves there is a problem within the league that needs to be addressed in order to restore life to a season the fans deserve.
“I think each day the lockout lasts the league is losing more and more credibility and more and more of its fans,” said Mike Wilkins, a freshman at William Peace University.
“I think it’s time they step back and remember when they were just fans and realize what they’re doing to hurt not just the league but the whole community that surrounds it.”
Since rejections have flown from the union’s tables of their last three scrutinized offers, the league has purposely made two rounds of game cancellations already.
Sources say that not only has the regular season for both October and November been drained away from fans, but there has also been talk of cancelling the Winter Classic game. Despite all the uncertainty, the season has been set to restart December 1, 2012 along with a shortened season of no more than 66 games.
“It’s frustrating they’ve proposed a 50/50 revenue spilt and still can’t come to terms,” said Matthew Lopez of Denver, Colorado, home to the Colorado Avalanche hockey league.
“As a fan, you don’t know who to be more mad at.”
For the Carolina Hurricanes and hockey fans everywhere, we hope partnerships will be agreed upon sooner rather than later so that we can get back to what matters most—cheering for our men out on the ice.