Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

(Please note: the following is a fictional, satirical, yet wholly plausible letter that could [and possibly should] be written by Donald Fehr.)

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for coming.

I understand that, right now, I am either public enemy number one, or public enemy number two, depending on your take on which of us is more to blame for the current state of the NHL: me, or Gary Bettman.    While animosity toward me is currently fashionable, I would like to take some time during this holiday season to ask you to find a new target for your venomous letters, emails, texts, Tweets, Facebook updates, and so on.   After all, I’m just a person with a job to do, and it’s not my fault that I’m doing my job so well.

When I was first contacted by the members of the National Hockey League Players Association, I assumed it was just an effort to reach out to me and pick my brain on a few issues related to labor negotiations.  Never in my wildest dreams did I think the NHLPA would be foolish enough to give me an opportunity to complete the task I had started, but ultimately failed, when I started working for the MLBPA: namely, the complete and utter collapse, and subsequent disappearance, of a professional sports league.

But they did, and here we are today.

You see, I hate sports.  Hate them like terrorists hate democracy.   Hate them like guys hate Twilight. It should be painfully obvious that as a child, I was always picked last when my classmates played sports at recess, and sometimes, I wasn’t even picked at all.  Some days, my peers decided that they would rather be down a man than have Donald “Fear the” Fehr on their side.   After a few years of that, I decided to complain to my teachers about my classmates’ unfair practices, and from that point on frivolous games such as kickball , football, and baseball were no longer allowed during recess at my school.  From that point on, I realized that I had a calling in life, a destiny to fulfill, and while I managed to preside over the cancellation of one of the most beloved, iconic sporting events of all time – the World Series – Major League Baseball somehow managed to survive me, and is back to being popular again.

Trust me, I won’t make the same mistake twice.

Now many of you might be asking yourself, “But why hockey?  It’s not one of the major sports; how much resentment could you have towards it?”  Good, but stupid, question.  First of all, I hate all team sports.  All of them, from basketball to broomball.    Every team sport ever invented fosters arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a heightened feeling of disdain for anyone not in the sports clique.  Hockey, despite its low profile in the United States, is no different.  Plus, have you ever smelled a hockey bag?  Good lord, the stench is enough to end a marriage.  I’d say those reasons as as good as any to make me want to kill off the NHL.

But let’s be realistic here: I’m not the bad guy.  Before you throw that computer you’re using to read this across the room, stop to think about this: I’m only doing what the players and owners want me to do.  If you think for an instant that the players and owners actually want the NHL to survive the 2012-2013 season, you’re only deluding yourself.  If that was the case, this labor dispute would not have even reached the lockout stage.  Consider: the sport has never been more popular, or prosperous.  Hell, the owners themselves admitted this in the complaint they submitted to the court earlier this week: Paragraph 102 – “The system of common employment rules instituted in 2005 improved the financial stability of the entire NHL, including most of its clubs . . . .”    What kind of league allows a lockout to occur when the previous CBA resulted in unprecedented growth and revenue?  A suicidal one, that’s your answer.   I don’t know why the NHL owners are so self-destructive, but they are, and anyone with a reptilian brain can see that.

As for the players . . . I know it’s easy to sympathize with them, falling under their spell of “we just play for the love of the game” mantra . . . but hello!  They hired me to represent their union.  When the Devil shows up at the priest’s door, it ain’t to confess.  The players are guilty by association, and they knew what they were getting when they gave me the call.  You all sympathize with the players because many of you hate your bosses and feel you are over-worked and under-paid, too . . . except none of you are millionaires playing a sport for a living.   How under-paid and over-worked do you think these guys really are?  This isn’t an example of the little man fighting the good fight; it’s the rich against the richer, and the players want the same thing the owners want: more money, baby.

So this holiday season, give me a break.  Don’t wish for coal in my stocking, a hard-as-a-brick fruitcake to fall on my noggin, or a package of cherry bombs to go off in my face.  Instead, enjoy your family and friends, kick back, and enjoy the sports that actually want your support.   Your NHL has a death wish, and I’ve been brought in to put it out of its misery.

Cheers!

Donald Fehr

Ron Chenoy-US PRESSWIRE

In 1984, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure wrote the song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in an effort to raise money for the famine that was decimating Ethiopa at the time.  In writing the lines “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all? and “We know / Let them know it’s Christmastime,”  the songwriters were pointing out that, when you’re knee deep in your own, ah, crap, it’s often impossible to notice what is going on with the rest of the world.

Well, if you haven’t noticed, the NHL is not knee-deep in its own crap; it’s neck-deep, and about to start drowning in it.  The problem is, I don’t know if the players and owners TRULY realize how this lockout looks to everyone witnessing the madness as it unfolds. It’s virtually impossible to believe that the players and owners are oblivious to what the media and fans are writing and saying about this mess – between tv, radio, print sources, the internet, and social media complaints about the lockout are literally everywhere – so it cannot be that the guilty parties haven’t read or heard how pissed off anyone not gainfully employed by the NHL is about the third labor stoppage in the past twenty years.  No, they know what we’re saying, and players and owners alike are saying all the correct things to the media:   Bill Daly’s apologies to fans here, or Ryan Miller’s sympathies here.   On the surface, then, it would appear that each side understands how we fans feel, and what is at stake . . .

. . . but if that was the case, wouldn’t this lockout be over already?  If you listen to the experts – for example, Jesse Spector of The Sporting News saying via Twitter, ”Even after writing my column on the latest NHL-NHLPA breakdown, I cant get over what a fustercluck this is” – the players and the owners are not so far apart that a deal cannot be reached.  As a matter of fact, most people are amazed that we have even gotten to this point; namely, a lockout with zero reason to exist.   With so many chances to get a deal done, and with so little conflict to resolve, wouldn’t it appear that the players and owners who fully understood how wrong and misguided this lockout is would have put the finishing touches on a new CBA months ago?   I mean, that’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

All of which leads us to a painfully obvious truth, that only gets more painful as the lockout drags on: the prime movers involved in the current NHL lockout either don’t know, or don’t care, how much they are damaging the sport we love.

Theoretically, it is possible that the players and owners just don’t get how destructive their behavior is.  They know it’s bad, and they know people are not happy, but perhaps these skilled athletes and savvy businessmen lack the cognitive capabilities required to fully realize the weight of their decisions.  My two year-old knows that when he hits me, it is bad; what he doesn’t realize is that when he hits me, it hurts like hell, because he lacks the ability to judge exactly how badly he has hurt me.  I suppose the same could be said of the bozos battling each other in the NHL right now . . .

. . . but more than likely, that would be untrue, which forces me to arrive at the conclusion that the men involved in this debacle know damn well that under normal circumstances, this would be no way to run a business.  They know, and they don’t care – because they don’t believe we’ll be able to hold a grudge once the NHL is back under.  Maybe the recent NFL and NBA lockouts have deluded the NHL into thinking its fans will return to the sport as quickly as football and basketball fans returned to their sports.  After all, they really are the only hockey game in town, so even though we fans will all grumble about how we can’t believe they did it again, our anger will quickly transform into relief, and we will go right back to supporting our teams in the same capacity we used before the lockout occurred.   Remember, folks: to the NHL, we’re just cattle.  We will be herded back into the  mob.

Perhaps it’s time for the NHL to listen to guys like these, then:

The guys behind the Just Drop It campaign are just one example of the true state of the NHL fan: pissed off, tired of being disrespected, and ready to take action.  I honestly feel that the NHL is guilty of underestimating its fan base.  Sure, other sports leagues have experienced lockouts, and having watched those leagues suffer little, if any, fan backlash, the NHL is probably saying, “Yeah, we know we’re pissing off a lot of people, but who are they kidding?  They’ll be back in no time.”   What the NHL seems to be neglecting, though, is the fact that fans have already endured two recent lockouts, and the loss of an entire season.  Fans ran out of patience pretty quickly this time around, and the longer the lockout goes on, the more permanent the damages will be.   I don’t get the sense that the people committing to the pledge found on the Just Drop It Facebook page are just letting off steam; they are demonstrating a level of fan anger that has never been seen in professional sports.  This is an unprecedented turn of events, and I fear (or is it Fehr?) the NHL is going to be stunned once it discovers that it pushed its fans too far.

The world as we know it may not be ending this year, but the world of NHL hockey may be irreparably damaged if the 2012-2013 season is lost.   It’s the biggest game of chicken ever played, and the NHL is guilty of severely underestimating its combatants.  Tick tick tick, guys.  Your time to just drop this is running out.