NHL lops 16 more days off master sked

In another totally-anticipated move, the National Hockey League excised another 16 days from its original 2012-13 master schedule on Monday.

The earliest an NHL season can start with a re-formulated Collective Bargaining Agreement is December 31, but if any reports are to be believed, the original schedule won't matter because a late start to the year would precipitate the use of a whole new inter-conference schedule for all 30 teams.

For the Flyers, this means that six more games were taken off their slate, but a New Year's Eve game in Phoenix is still provisionally left alone.

That makes a whopping 526 regular-season games removed due to the lockout, which has ground on since midnight on September 16.

One light through the proceedings was NHL deputy commish Bill Daly's assertion that talks will continue this week, though none were formally scheduled after the breakdown between the sides in New York last Thursday.

Another interesting event in the post-Manhattan discord which did not get a ton of play in the USA, was Don Fehr's speech to the Canadian Auto Workers Union, which took place in Toronto on Saturday.

A key quote from the proceedings, from the Washington Times, went like this: "What you do is trust your membership because they'll tell you the right thing to do...what they said they were looking for...is they wanted to rebuild their organization, they wanted to create an entity that the players would be proud of, they would support and far and away most importantly they would participate in."

So, perhaps the players aren't so dumb after all given how the 2004-05 lockout proceeded to shake down the union, and Fehr is just the bulldog on the chain opposite the pitbull that is Gary Bettman. Either way, it's unwise to paint Fehr, at least, as some kind of provocateur or Svengali.

“I wouldn’t disagree with Ron (Hainsey) that it is difficult to have real ‘negotiations’ with so many people in the room,” Daly said to TSN of Canada. “It really needs to be done in a much tighter group setting.”

That statement certainly rings true at this late stage. And perhaps, if the union can be blamed for what Hainsey termed a "miscommunication" in the way the union's latest proposal was portrayed to the league, the next time both sides meet, they shouldn't have half of the 18 that were present for most of the negotiations if the owners only have six.