I've noticed that. I'm surprised you went with a Bryz quote also since your 3DS Mii message still says he sucks.
I didn't realize it still said that. I really think this is going to be a (humongous) big year for Bryz. He's more accustomed to the demands and pressures of playing in Philly, and he's got a considerably stronger defensive corps in front of him. Also, with the amnesty clause in the new CBA, if he blows it this year the team can cancel the rest of his contract, so he's certainly got something to play for.
Also, the Penguins are fucking going down Saturday.
I hope the players and owners think this labor dispute was worth the damage they did to the sport. Hockey was already a B-level sport in terms of popularity, and this dispute taking out more than half the season (not to mention the strike less than a decade ago that made the NHL the first major sports league to ever lose an entire season due to a strike) is gonna hurt it even more.
First off, this and the previous work stoppage were lockouts, not strikes. The owners were the ones who put a stop to it, not the players. Second, there's no question this hurt the league. Die hards like me will come back, but they'd been making real gains in mainstream popularity over the last few years, and now they pretty much have to start that from scratch.
I like the conspiracy theory that Gary Bettman is a manchurian candidate of sorts. The NHL asked the NBA to recommend someone for their commissioner and the NBA suggested Bettman, who was working for them at the time. This is like Burger King asking McDonald's for hiring advice. Why would you ever ask a competitor about something like that? So NBA commissioner David Stern suggested his most incompetent lackey so that the NBA would pull ahead of the NHL in popularity. Bettman isn't a willing participant either. He's not trying to sabotage the NHL for the NBA, his incompetence is just such that by trying to do his job he's fucking things up.
So if you ever wonder why a league that is struggling for relevence in the United States would have a lockout over some pretty idiotic stuff immediately after the team from Los Fuckin' Angeles, the second biggest media market in the NHL, and the exact sort of market they want hockey to be cool it, wins the Cup, well there you go.
It's been almost 20 years since Bettman was hired and hockey is clearly in a much worse position now than it was then. So I'm shocked that the NHL owners would still want to keep this guy around. But then incompetence spreads throughout an organization if it becomes part of the workplace culture. The idiot owners hire an idiot commish and then only let other idiots into their league.
For a while I was seriously worried that we wouldn't get a season at all. If any league was going to lose two whole seasons in such a short amount of time it would have to be the NHL, right? Who else would?
Bettman is really terrible, and I don't know why the owners put up with him. It also didn't help that Donald Fehr, the NHLPA director, was the guy in charge of the baseball players union during the 1994 strike, so this was a disaster waiting to happen. One of the terms of the CBA should have been that both of them be fired for letting this happen.