Is Gary Bettman the lockout commissioner?

I think it's a good question - under the tutelage of Gary Bettman he has presided over two NHL work stoppages since he took over the NHL League Commissioner job in February 1, 1993.

There is a very good chance that the NHL is going to have their third lockout under the leadership of Gary Bettman. Another dubious honor Bettman holds is that the NHL is the only professional sport to lose an entire season due to a work stoppage.

Jack Todd, Montreal Gazette --- You get the feeling that Gary Bettman loves his lockouts. This is Bettman’s thing. Shut down the league. Grind the players to powder. Go back to the owners and get his own salary bumped up for having satisfied the owners’ greed.

Then come back five or 10 years later and say that the salary system he shut down the league to get is unworkable, so he has to shut it down again. Why? Because he wants to. Because he can.

Last time round, it seemed like the owners had a case. We were on the fence, until the latter stages of the lockout, when Bettman morphed into Richard M. Nixon.

This time, it is Bettman who has presented an entirely irrational plan, one the NHLPA would be mad to accept — and it is PA executive director Donald Fehr who responded with a response so rational, so well thought out, that we actually hoped Bettman might accept it, at least as a starting point for a new approach.

Again, I am sure that most of us would have more empathy for the owners if the NHL had not made 3.3 billion dollars last season. Also, I am sure the owners would get more sympathy from the fans if the owners weren’t signing players to ridiculous salaries like they have this off-season.

Jack Todd is dead wrong

Wow!!! So this is supposed to be journalism? I want to make sure I read that right. If you disagree with the president of the United States Barrack Obama you're a racist? So Jack Todd is suggesting that Tim Thomas is a racist for not attending the White House Celebration? What a buffoon.  David Webb who is a leader in the Tea Party that happens to be black, talked about this subject on his radio show recently. 

Jack Todd, Montreal Gazette --- Thomas’s decision to skip a team visit to the White House because he buys the garbage pumped out by Glenn Beck and his ilk was bad enough. But then, having pulled a highly public stunt to call attention to his whacko politics, Thomas blamed the media for paying attention.

Look, if this cretin wants to stand outside the White House and spew his drivel, that’s free speech. But standing up the president? All that does is show that Thomas has the class of a swamp-rat.

What’s worse, you know Thomas would not have done this with the liberal Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House. Truth is, he felt free to dis Barack Obama, because Obama is black.

At least he accomplished one thing: Thomas earned himself a lifetime membership in the MMQB’s zeros section, right next to Jeffrey Loria and David Samson. May he suffer many a groin pull for the rest of his sorry career.