Well, John Tortorella doesn’t have to just sit aroudn and watch Tape any more…

But then again, that’s one thing he excels at and it will no doubt help him in his role as an Assistant Coach for Team USA.

Taken from Hockeybird.com

Are they kidding? So now every time they make some crappy offer and the union doesn’t accept it, they are going to file a complaint? Well it looks that way. So much for a partnership, and so much for good faith. This was the plan all along, and now you can look forward to replacement players and legal battles.

If this was the ‘plan all along”, the NHLPA could have circumvented the plan by actually showing some interest in COLLECTIVE BARGAINING to begin with. That means, you get an offer and you bargain over certain aspects of the offer… you negotiate. The NHLPA’s tactic with Collective Bargaining to this point has been thus: Recieve offer, find aspect you do not like with offer, reject offer. There has been very few attempts to find a middle ground, and the only time that has really happened was when Trevor Linden called several CBA discussions to order - where there was talk, not just flat out rejections.

Now the NHLPA is posturing by just waiting, and after a lockout and failed bargaining process (because there was no bargaining on the Players side of things) it’s high time someone held the PA accountable for dragging their feet and avoiding negotiations… If it has to be a National Labor Relations Board, then so be it. We lost the 2004-05 season, folks, and both sides are responsible - that much is true - but one side tended to be less intersted in bargaining and more interested in having their members whine and complain about the other side in the media while another faction of it’s members avoided negotiations by running off to Europe for the duration.

As for the assertion we can look forward to replacement players now? Good. I want the Tampa Bay Lightning back on ice and I wnat the bullshit posturing from the upper-echelon, overpaid star controlled NHLPA to be put on ice (no pun intended) so I can focus on my team again.