SPORTS
NHL LOCKOUT IS OVER!
By Ajay Basran
Gary Bettman is an apocalyptic man of hockey because of the disaster he created. The lockout started in September 2012 (11:59PM Eastern Time) when the usual season starts. Everyone was devastated. It started when Gary Bettman declared a lockout since the players and owners had some financial issues before the season even started. The issue was that the players had the most money in history two years ago in the 2011-2012 seasons. In October 2012 some folks had hope that the NHL owners and the NHLPA (National Hockey League Players Association) had an agreement but it was crushed when Gary Bettman came in and ruined it. Since the lockout 625 regular season games have been cancelled from September 2012 to January 14th 2013. The reason for this is because the NHL owners and NHLPA could not seem to make a deal; the deal is the owners and players split 50/50 but they were unable to negotiate that agreement. Then another deal was thrown at the players from the owners proposing a $70 million cap which they rejected as well. The players wanted the deal to be more than 70 million dollars from the average of 60 million dollars for themselves which seemed to be a bit out of range. Anyway every negotiation they tried resulted in a failure which led to a loss of $18 million - $20 million in business for other companies.
Also each player and owner loses about $8 million - $10 million a day from their NHL budget. That money is from their team. The last negotiation the league had was recently disapproved by the players and then the deadline passed of January 2nd2013. Then suddenly right when the faith of the NHL went plummeting down to its doom, the players and owners made a deal (hooray) at January 06th 2013 (7:00am Eastern time). It was unbelievable. The compromise was a salary cap of $64.3 million for the 2012-2013 seasons and a base of $44.3 million; though to ease out the revenue split the players got 300 million dollars. It was a tough struggle but everything worked out. Now everyone is looking for the next game of the NHL!
GO FLAMES GO!