Thank you NHL leadership, because of you we may have another lockout. 

Players are angry and have every right to be. 

The NHL wants players to take a 25 per cent pay cut for the upcoming season. 

The issue is the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations already happened in July; the NHL Players Association agreed to a new deal that was supposed to take away any chance of a lockout happening until at least 2025. 

But here we are, players are angry, the NHLPA is unhappy and management is being greedy.

The players already took a 10 per cent cut under the new CBA deal for the upcoming season, but no, management had to get their money-grubbing hands all over the deal and try to squeeze the players for anything they can get. 

If the NHL wants to start the 2020-21 season on Jan. 1, they needed to come to an agreement this month, it’s still possible that can be attained, but this is a big monkey wrench thrown into a pre-existing pile of monkey wrenches. 

In an article by Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet published on Nov. 19, unnamed NHLPA union representatives expressed the players’ disappointment in how the NHL has handled this situation. 

“We just made a deal, so why should it be changed?” “In the past, when we’ve been unhappy with a CBA, we’ve had to live with it,” “Why did this get proposed so late, we didn’t need a gun to our heads,” “If we agree to this, who’s to say it won’t happen again,” and “They knew this was going to happen all along, didn’t they?”

How the next season is being proposed would be a shortened 60-game season, ideally starting on Jan. 1. 

It would consist of division-only play including a Canadian-only division.

Now that sounds like a lot of fun. 

This shortened season would allow for the playoffs to be wrapped up by mid-July. 

This is only possible if management and the NHLPA can get their crap together and work out a deal, the players want to play and management wants to play, so let’s do something already. 

The main complaint by management is that their revenue estimates were off and are now wanting to claw back some of their profits. 

That may be true, I definitely don’t fully understand escrow and the inner workings of players’ contracts, but the NHL management has made their bed and now it’s time for them to lie in it. 

The NHLPA made bad deals in the past, but what did they do? 

They realized their mistakes, took it like a champ and looked ahead to future negotiations.

What they didn’t do was whine like a three-year-old because their plan didn’t go their way.

Get it together, work something out and let’s get this season ready.