Gretzky Not Alone in Hoping Lockout Ends Near Christmas

Ladies and gentlemen, add Wayne Gretzky to the list of those hoping for a (somewhat) timely resolution to the National Hockey League lockout. The former team owner — as well as the owner, in whole or in part, of dozens of NHL player records — said he thinks the league will resume in time for the Winter Classic between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs.

While others have said that the entire season could be lost to the dispute, Gretzky is not one of them. “I believe in my heart, maybe because I’m such a big hockey fan, that they will be playing by Jan. 1,” he said on Monday in a question-and-answer session about, of all things, personal finance. “I think the hard part of their deal was the last negotiations (in 2004) of players agreeing to a salary cap.

“Now that there is a salary cap in place, and revenue sharing, I see them ultimately getting a deal done here and I see them playing hockey this (season).”

Around the time the former collective bargaining agreement expired on Sept. 15, I speculated that the owners and players would figure things out by Christmas: after all, that’s what happened with the National Basketball Association and its lockout, which started on July 1 and ended on Dec. 8, 2011. Their shortened season began on Christmas Day that year and played out as a 66-game schedule.

Gary Bettman has pointed to the deals struck by both the NBA and the National Football League in their recent disputes and noted that NHL’s owners would like a similar deal, with reduced revenue sharing at the top of the list. Bettman may hold the title of the league’s “commissioner,” but it’s the owners who pay him and it’s to them he must report. So in addition to maximizing revenue for his bosses (such as clawing back the amount of revenue the owners share with the players), he will do his best to reduce their costs as well as their exposure to risk, such as insisting on limits for long-term contracts.

On its face, it would appear to the reasonable person that both sides would want to save face and give the already angry fans the Christmas present they all want: big-league hockey for the holidays, including the Winter Classic on New Year’s Day 2013.

But no one, not even the Great One, knows how this will all play out. That uncertainty is one of the reasons Krys Barch took to Twitter last weekend to bare his soul. Barch is an enforcer for the New Jersey Devils, and wrote an appeal for understanding in several posts on the social-media platform which generated a story published in USA Today.

“Let’s get a deal where the owners, players, and fans benefit from, where we can be sitting around in beautiful Canadian falls around a fire playing and watching the game we love,” Barch wrote in one of his posts in his account. Amen to that.