Bill Simmons is calling this the hockey fight of the year. To me, this is one of those scenes that makes the sport so strange…

I know most hockey fans enjoy this, but I’d rather see these guys use that pent up anger and energy and make a play that actually impacts the game. A situation where two guys grab the other by the jersey and throw 50 right hooks doesn’t seem like it should take place in a professional sport, save for boxing or MMA.

If you, like me, live in fear of the fall of 2011 having no NFL football, but don’t understand all of the legal mumbo-jumbo associated with the labor dispute, I’m hear to put things in terms we all can understand.

First things first, and that is that the owners unanimously opted out of the current CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) in 2008, one that they had signed off on in 2006. Since I’m making this as easy as possible to understand, let me tell you that a CBA is the agreement two sides, usually labor and management, come to on various topics, most of which include how money will be divided. And in this case, the owners realized that player salaries were escalating out of control and that their profits were being squeezed more each year. Yes, part of the problem is they are agreeing to these salaries, and player agents are a huge part of that. In the bigger picture, the real problem is revenue sharing, a.k.a. how to split the financial pie. And while the NFL is bringing in a ridiculous amount of money ($7.6 billion in 2008), about 62% of that goes to player salaries, a number that keeps climbing due to increases in the overall salary cap. To make matters worse, there is also revenue sharing among teams, meaning the big market teams have to help the small market teams to help them compete with each other on the field.

So the owners want something like 18% of the pie back, in the form of salary cuts to the players. Naturally, the players do not want to give them this money back, and that is why head of the players’ union DeMaurice Smith announced during the Super Bowl’s hype week that the chance of a lockout were a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10. For his part, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell denounced that, saying he hoped it wouldn’t come to a work stoppage, but he also knows that it’s a very real possibility. The players aren’t necessarily saying they won’t give part of the pie back, either. Smith wants the owners to show the players that they are struggling to run their businesses, meaning he wants them to open up their books. And the owners won’t do it. So are the numbers being reported not what they say? It’s hard to say the owners aren’t lying about these numbers, when they keep agreeing to player contracts and they keep building huge state-of-the-art stadiums, but they also have the right to not open their books if they don’t want to. And the bottom line is that the owners are not happy about doling out more and more of their profits.

Then, of course, there is the issue of an uncapped 2010 season. The current structure calls for a salary cap through the 2009 season, with 2010 being an uncapped year if the owners opt out of the CBA, which they did. Last time this happened, in 1993, player salaries rose to 69% of NFL revenue, and that is expected to happen again. But of course, nothing is guaranteed in 2011, so the players have to be careful of what they wish for.

If organized sports have taught us anything, it’s that the possibility of no games being played can and will happen. You might remember the NFL had a similar situation in 1987, and the owners used replacement players for a few games before the dispute was resolved and the regular players went back to work. MLB cancelled the last two months of the 1994 season as well as the playoffs and World Series, a black mark they have not recovered from. The NBA had a similar situation in 1998-99, with almost half a season being wiped out. And of course, the freshest in our memories is the NHL’s 2004-05 season that was not played due to a labor dispute.

So as fans, we have to hope a few things happen between now and the summer of 2011, which is spewing a black cloud that keeps getting darker and more imposing by the day. We have to hope the owners agree to open up their books, and we have to hope the players agree to give back part of the pie for the health and financial well being of the NFL. Sure, we want the players we love to watch get the money they deserve, but within reason. Certainly it’s not worth much to anyone to have no NFL games being played, but it may very well come to that.

Of course, the NFL is not the only business that would be affected by a lockout. Besides the local businesses near stadiums that thrive during the season, fantasy football and all of the money (reported as upwards of $3 billion in 2007) associated with that is threatened here. Think about that for a second. The folks that make their livelihood in that world will be flattened financially. Well, maybe that’s going to be the subject of my next piece on this, but for the moment I wanted to do my part to help everyone understand the dispute between owners and players, and what it all really means.

Many think that a lockout won’t really happen, and I’m optimistic myself that it won’t. But history surely does make us all nervous, doesn’t it?

I’m not a hockey nut, but the top three are pretty amazing.

We’ve partnered with the fine folks over at On Goal Analysis to provide quality NHL content throughout the season. Here’s an excerpt from a post by Michael Pryor.

It’s my turn in line and I would like to think I have been pretty good this year. So I thought I’d ask for three things this Christmas to help grow my favorite sport.

First, please restructure the NHL schedule. This is a specific request, so here’s what I mean:

1. Go to 84 regular-season games.

2. Each year, give us an inter-Conference home-and-home set so we can see every team in our building at least once. (That’s 30 games.)

3. Give us three games each of inter-Divisional play in our conference scheduled any way you want to make the season’s scheduling problems easier. (Our total is now 60 games.)

4. And give us six, intra-Divisional games in three-games-in-one-week sets. Do one set in the NOV/DEC timeframe to give us weekly rivalries (like a Red Wings’ “Blackhawk Week,” or an Islanders’ “Rangers Week”) in the Thanksgiving/Christmas period to build NHL excitement going into the Winter Classic(s). Then end the season with the other set of rivalry weeks so everyone feels like they have played some playoff series regardless of whether or not they get to compete for the Stanley Cup. (And that makes 84 games.)

This present gives us all of the stars in our building every year and two stretches in the regular season feeling like playoffs. (We will love our Hockey even more and come to games even more often!)

Read the rest of the post over at the OGA blog.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

We’ve partnered with the fine folks at On Goal Analysis to provide our readers with some good NHL content this season. Here’s the intro to a recent post by Michael Pryor:

What is the measure of a hockey skater’s contribution to his team? Plenty of statistics define goaltenders and their contributions. But what about the players who skate in front of them? While highly knowledgeable Hockey fans will say such enlightened comments as ‘it depends on their position and how they play it,’ many others will tell you it’s how many points they rack up.

At On Goal Analysis, we have a tradition of looking at things with a different twist. While we like to key on points, sometimes they are misleading because theoretically speaking the leading point scorer in the NHL still might play on a team that does not even make the Playoffs. And yet, maybe points themselves just need a slightly different emphasis to make their true significance understood.

That’s why we are recommending for your consideration Points Per Shift – PPS – as a new statistic to use when analyzing who is the most productive player on the ice. PPS analyzes how many Points Per Game (PPG) each player provides divided by the average number of shifts he takes in order to tell you what he brings to the Great Game each and every time he goes over the boards. It also makes Shifts Per Game (SPG) more relevant to the average fan of the game.

Read the rest after the jump…

Photo from fOTOGLIF