Who to look up to?

As a kid, I couldn’t imagine life without the NHL.

In the winter, Saturday nights were for hockey night in Canada. In the summer, they were for playing street hockey and pretending I was the great Paul Coffey racing end-to-end scoring a hard slapshot goal, beating Mike Vernon glove side.

I’m starting to wonder who young hockey players today are looking up to for their inspiration?

Who are their heros now that the League and the NHL Player’s Association is in a stalemate and the year is all but officially over?

NHL and more specifically the Edmonton dynasty of the 80s is what got me interested in playing, watching and loving hockey.

With the lockout still raging, there is no superstar-calibre players for youth to admire and emulate. Their heros aren’t on television scoring high-light reel goals, and leading their teams to the trophy of all trophies.

Hockey youngsters need professional players to look up to. They need inspiration.

The junior leagues just aren’t enough. They’re good to watch, but not in the same league.

The WHL, OHL, QMJHL players are still figuring out the game. They are not quite ready to make that leap to the elite, if they were they’d be locked out right now.

I never made it to the NHL, hell I never made it past Bantam hockey, but I still never would have made it that far without NHL players to idolize.

Kids need to imagine they are their favorite player. They need to pretend they are Jerome Iginla, Martin St. Louis, Martin Brodeur.

It should be about the love of the game, not how much money the league is actually losing. It shouldn’t be how much the players are being played. It should be about the fans. What are the fans going to do?

As it stands, they is not as much outcry for hockey as I would have guessed. The fans are looking elsewhere for their hockey fix. Attendance at junior hockey has increased dramatically. The players were hoping for some public support, but they are not getting it.

I don’t see how long the players hold out. I’m guessing their stockpiles are dwindling at a rapid rate.

Not all of them have other sources of income. They don’t have that steady flow of cash cycling into their bank accounts every month. They need their $1.8 million, the league’s per player average, a season. They’ve become accustomed to their gigantic, over-the-top paychecks.

The players’ association is paying the players $10,000 a month as long as the lockout continues. That’s a little less than the $150,000 a month average.

I don’t think they’ll want to sit out two seasons now that the first one is all but done.

The owners will lose some, but there isn’t an owner in the league that uses his NHL team as his main source of income.

Most of them are all wealthy individuals already. Their pockets are still filling up with cash as the lockout rolls along. They can wait for as long as they have to.

i do sympathize with the players. It’s not their fault that salaries got out of control.

The owners kept giving their players more and more money. The contracts kept growing and growing.

If my boss was willing to give me way to much money, I wouldn’t tell him not to. Then when he tried to take it away, I would be pissed.

The owners should have put an end to their stupidity before they lost control.

Now they need to establish some guidelines, create cost certainty, so history doesn’t repeat itself.

And that’s just what Gary Bettman is doing. The players are going to have to live with it. They are going to cave eventually. The only question left is when?

I’m also going to be a tad upset in 10 years if all the European players are winning the golds, while Canada is dropping down the rankings.

Our stars shouldn’t be playing for other leagues. The kid over on the Eastern hemisphere get to watch the likes of Joe Thorton, Jose Theodore and Vincent Lecavalier.

The interest in hockey is going to skyrocket over there and shrink over here.

Canada could use some high-calibre hockey. Let’s end this trivial dispute and put the players back in the rinks.