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Tipped Off
02-17-2005, 11:34 AM
From the Everett Herald:

Tips have mixed reaction after NHL cancels season
By Nick Patterson
Herald Writer

EVERETT - The final nail was driven into the coffin of the National Hockey League's 2004-05 season Wednesday. Commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the remainder of the schedule when management and players were unable to forge a new collective bargaining agreement.

And unsurprisingly, those involved with the Everett Silvertips had something to say about the NHL season going up in smoke.

"I'm very surprised," Everett general manager Doug Soetaert said. "I really believed the two parties would get together and solidify a deal. I'm very disappointed for the game of hockey, it's a dark day for the National Hockey League."

For the first time in North American major professional sports history an entire season has been lost to labor strife, and the Silvertips are disappointed their sport captured that dubious honor.

"I'm very upset," Everett right wing Alex Leavitt said. "I love to watch the game. As I've gotten older I still like to watch it for the enjoyment part, but I love to watch and learn and try to pick little things to help me with my game. So to go a full season without NHL hockey is disappointing from an entertainment side, but also from the fact you can't really learn anything new from watching the best in the world."

The owners, who locked the players out in September when the previous collective bargaining agreement expired, claim to have taken heavy financial losses and were seeking cost certainty in the form of revenue sharing and a salary cap. The players objected to a cap on salaries.

The owners and players seemed to be closing in on a last-minute deal, with the players agreeing to a salary cap. But in the end the two sides couldn't agree upon a salary cap number, the owners offering $42.5 million per team, the players asking for $49 million.

"I think the owners are responsible for the escalation in player salaries because they're the ones who dished out the money," said Everett coach Kevin Constantine, who spent seven seasons as a coach in the NHL. "But in the case of owning any business I think you have the right to control your costs for survival.

"Hockey at the NHL level lost a lot of money and everybody's got to bite the bullet a little bit," Constantine added. "In the end I really believe the owners offered a pretty fair deal at $42 million per team. Everybody would still be making a lot of money. So I think the players were foolish not to take the money."

But not everyone in Everett is on the owners' side.

"When a guy takes a 24-percent pay cut, that's a pretty good sacrifice in my eyes," Leavitt said. "I don't think there's many people who go to work every day and are willing to take a 25-percent pay cut. So you can't really fault the players, I really think they did everything they could. They finally said they were willing to take a salary cap, which was the biggest problem the whole time. So being an outsider looking in, you have to say the owners are just being selfish."

Regardless of who's to blame, the cancellation of the NHL season and the possibility of the labor dispute reaching into next season has ramifications for current Silvertips. If the NHL remains deadlocked, Everett's current overage players - Leavitt, Mitch Love and Tyler Dietrich - face uncertainty about what their hockey future holds, with fewer professional options not only in the NHL, but also the American Hockey League, East Coast Hockey League and European leagues.

"It's frustrating as a junior hockey player," Love said. "A lot of guys looked at the 20-year-olds from last year's team who were going to be affected by it, and some of them were. There's a lot of spots that aren't open in the American Hockey League and East Coast because of it, and in Europe there's 400 NHLers over there now. So it does affect everybody in some sort of way. But I can't control what the NHL and the players' union does. I've just got to go about business here and try to work my way into finding a place to play next year."