Quote:
Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan
1995 was a completely pointless venture. Accomplished absolutely nothing and entrenched both sides further...resulting in the giant lockout in 2005 and a completely lost season.
2005 was essential. I don't think anyone could argue against it.
2013 was a bailout for the owners who made a giant mess of the 2005 CBA and needed to make some big changes to keep them from harming themselves.
So 1 of the 3 was needed, at least IMO. Bettman has presided over 2 lockouts that could have been avoided, and I disagree with your assessment that they needed 3 attempts to get it done. 1 time should have been enough, but the issue was dragged over 20 years and 3 separate work stoppages. Financially, things are in decent shape for the league now, but I think it came at a pretty hefty cost. Maybe in another 20 years under a different commissioner we will all look back at this current era a little differently. Perhaps I will look at it more favorably and Bettman's supporters will look at him a little more negatively. I think he's done some good and bad things, but he's made a lot of missteps along the way to his good things, so it tempers how I feel about those good things. Ultimately, I think the league is due for a new voice, and that, more than anything, is why I'd like to see a change.
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The 1995 lockout could not have been avoided. Though you are right that it didn't fix anything. By the mid 1990s, the economic landscape in all of sports was changing. The pendulum, which favoured the owners for so long, had swung and was starting to both favour players and the largest market teams at the expense of everyone else. Borne out of this was the NHL's 1992 strike, and MLB's catastrophic 1994 strike. These events taught the NHL two things: From 1992, the league learned it needed a much stronger leader than the the absentee President John Ziegler if it was going to counter Bob Goodenow. From 1994, the NHL learned that you don't start a season without a CBA, or very bad things happen.
1995 was pointless, but not because of Gary Bettman. 1995 was pointless because the NHL's ownership was developing that strong big market vs. small market discord. The players ultimately destroyed the owners in that negotiation because the owners had no unity.
And what that taught Gary Bettman was that he needed the power to not only negotiate with the union, but to control his own table. Nfotiu says Bettman lacks vision? I disagree. Bettman knew what was going to happen in 2004. And he convinced his owners to give him the veto power that would ensure the seven or eight large teams could not fold the way they did in 1995. Bettman then realized that - painful as it was to do so - the NHL needed to be willing to cancel the season to convince the union of how dire the situation had become. Bettman outmaneuvered Goodenow, and got us the salary cap that Bob had spent 15 years proclaiming would never happen.
2013 was unnecesary in some respects, but necessary in others. The system still required some tuning and balancing, and even an NHLPA led by a moderate would have struggled to agree with going from 57% to 50%. However, all the bitter hardliners in the union had installed a man in Don Fehr who pathologically hates sports owners. Once that happened, another lockout became inevitable. The players refused to even open negotiations until a lockout. And there was no way in hell that the owners would ever begin a season without a CBA when the guy on the other side of the table was the one who cancelled the World Series.