from Patrick Rishe of Forbes,

Is there any sports executive who comes off as being more arrogant, snotty and unlikable in professional sports than NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman? You couldn’t find 3 NHL players today that wouldn’t pull a Hanson brothers attack on Mr. Bettman if they thought they could get away with it.

That said, it is aloof – and standard negotiating rhetoric by the way – for Donald Fehr (the NHLPA’s executive director and former long-time leader of baseball’s powerful players association) to suggest that the NFL and NBA lockouts from 2011 should not have any influence upon the direction of the NHL’s current labor negotiations.

Here’s the simple reality of the matter:

- Perhaps what goes on in other sports shouldn’t matter from a financial standpoint, but it does matter from a practical standpoint if there is evidence that the current model is causing more teams than not to lose money. This data from Forbes suggests this could still very well be true in the NHL.

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