from Tim Panaccio of CSNPhilly,

Mark this down: When hockey returns, it will do so with less longtime, loyal sponsors who have stood by and watched two lockouts in seven years and understand there is something fundamentally wrong with this business model.

What kind of sports league forces a shutdown to achieve “economic certainty,” with a CBA, and then after record revenues seven years later feels it needs massive changes to assure better economic certainty and sets out to destroy everything it had achieved?

Amid this chaos, The Commish, Gary Bettman, if he hasn’t figured this out by now, has more than met his match in Donald Fehr, the man who brought Major League Baseball to its knees, then rebuilt the game with an economic structure that has had guaranteed labor peace for 15 years.

If Bettman thinks he’s going to get Fehr to blink, he hasn’t done his homework on a man who stared down the World Series and won.

The danger now is that in their desire to annihilate the NHLPA under marching orders from Jeremy Jacobs, Bettman has strengthened the players’ resolve to see this through even if means losing another season.

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