Tom Jones chimes in with a little report on what Lightning Head Coach John Tortorella is up to during the lock out…

It ain’t much.

Though I do have to bring up a point in this article that Tortorella makes as I had been thinking along the lines of the same thing yesterday:

But these days, Tortorella has no team to defend a Cup. Many are scattered throughout Europe playing what Tortorella calls “Ice Capades,” leagues absent of contact but full of bad habits. He has no idea when the lockout will end, but he is worried that the team that won the Cup will not be the same team that shows up for the Lightning’s next training camp.

“I’m scared,” Tortorella said. “I think we’re going to have to reteach our players. I think it’s going to be an awful brand of hockey when (the NHL returns) because (the lockout) has gone on for so long.

“My guys are going to be retaught. They’re going to be come at hard because I know the bad habits are going to be there.”

The “Bad Habits” are the part of this quote that scares me the most becuase I believe it. There is no one monitoring player performance in Europe and, while I have faith in players like Fredrik Modin (who is playing in Sweden) and Martin St. Louis, Vincent Lecavalier and Pavel Kubina have been known to lapse when not held to Tortorella’s rigorous standards.

Things will remain in doubt until the lockout ends… then we’ll be able to start picking up the pieces and see where the Lightning stand.

You hear stories in the paper from the player reps or those who are close to the team player reps… You hear things like the Union will never bend. It will never break. It will not allow for there to be a cap and it will let the Free Market live on in the NHL (someone give me an “Halleluja”! Somebody give me an “Amen”!).

And then there are stories like these that come along every so often that make you wonder just how tight the players union actually happens to be?

For every annonymous player that questions the NHL, there are the over-the-top macho players that vow the Union will never allow a cap and Gary Bettman is at fault… For every player that ran to Europe to keep paying the bills through the strike, there are other players still here in North America who are face the labor war daily and give the patented annonymous quote that shows dissent in the ranks.

And the saddest thing: for ever Mike Commodore who has come forward and express how bad this work stoppage is, there are 10 players that come out and say they are open to the owners plans, only to retract their statement and damn the source where there comments were published (with great thanks to the pressure ffrom the NHLPA).

So what’s the truth? Are owners dissenting like Larry Brooks would have you believe? Is there a good number of players truly ready to cave as Stan Fischler tells us? It’s most likely somewhere in the middle and neither side is willing to even consider dealing with common ground — even if that common ground is a unified desire to end the work stoppage.