Changes Afoot

Only player apathy, it would appear, can save Ian Penny and Buzz Hargrove from losing their tenuous grip over the NHL Players Association.

A resounding majority of player reps voted last night by conference call to install a investigative panel of four veteran NHLers - Nicklas Lidstrom, Rob Blake, Mark Recchi and Chris Chelios - to look into the events of the past two months that have made the union the laughingstock of the hockey industry.

Included in those events was the early morning putsch in Chicago in late August that saw executive director Paul Kelly fired, and quickly resulted in the departure of senior executives like Glenn Healy and Pat Flatley.

However, while between 17 and 19 of the 22 teams represented on the last night's call voted in favour of the new committee, by the union's constitution the resolution did not pass because 25 teams were not involved and therefore there was no official quorum.

"It's really discouraging," said one player. "Guys have to understand this is important." Those in favour of the new committee have several days to try and get 20 votes in favour of the new committee, at which point it would be established. If more teams can't be persuaded to either participate or vote in favour of the new committee, it will die.

Penny, who took over as interim executive director after successfully leading the coup that resulted in Kelly's ouster, was asked to remove himself from last night's call and, after some discussion, he reluctantly did so. The players also declined to hear from baseball union boss Don Fehr, preferring instead to have a players only call.

Penny has made his opposition to this new committee known, and now has several days to try and sway the votes of various player reps. Still, this was the latest in a series of internal votes that have gone heavily against him, and it appears the five-year contract he received in June will also be reviewed.

Penny has declined requests for interviews from the Star.

Hargrove, the union's ombudsman and unofficial spokesman since Penny took over, appears on the verge of being dismissed, but he wasn't fired last night.

After allowing various more junior union members like Andrew Ference and Matt Stajan of the Maple Leafs to take influential roles in the firing of Kelly, it's noteworthy that the association seems to now be inclined to put its faith in the hands of more senior players like Chelios, Blake, Lidstrom and Recchi. Lidstrom's involvement is pivotal and there have been few influential European players involved in the union's affairs in recent months.

Ference was the loudest player voice in the room when Kelly was fired at 4 a.m. that infamous day in Chicago, but he has already announced he is stepping down as Boston's player rep. Stajan has consistently backed Penny and said the union was right to fire Kelly.

Chelios, meanwhile, was set to lose his position as Detroit's player rep on Oct. 31st because he is currently not on the Red Wings roster. This will keep him involved, and he was one of the most dogged opponents of former executive director Ted Saskin before Saskin was fired for spying on players emails.

That's not good news for Penny either.

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Wake Up Boys

Nothing's been done that couldn't be un-done.

Well, not quite. Glenn Healy, once Paul Kelly's right hand man with the NHL Players Association, has returned to the world of broadcasting in the wake of Kelly's bizarre dismissal two weeks ago. That ship has sailed.

Otherwise, if the NHLPA wanted to reinstate Kelly — more specifically, if the player membership wanted it done — it's still possible.

It's a bit pie in the sky at the moment. But the coup artists and plotters that managed to oust Kelly after a year of planning that began in Chicago in August, 2008, continued in Vegas last June and came to a head in the Windy City last month, have so far failed to consolidate their new-found power after the decapitation of the entire union leadership.

Ian Penny, who managed to wrest a new five-year contract out of the union last June as general counsel and then completed his remarkable year by suddenly succeeding Kelly on an interim basis, remains a cloak-and-dagger figure, an individual of little or no standing in the hockey world and one as of yet unable to explain publicly how and why his predecessor was canned or how he plans to lead the organization. Boston defenceman Andrew Ference has emerged as a ringleader in the ouster of Kelly, but the best defence he's been able to offer up so far is that the players fired Kelly through a secret ballot.

Well, nobody ever said that wasn't the case.

Otherwise, it would seem more and more players are questioning the details of Kelly's suspicious 4 a.m. firing, and their agents are voicing those concerns publicly. Pat Brisson and J.P. Barry, two of the biggest names in the game, are urging players to ask questions and find out what happened. Barry's involvement is particularly important since he used to work for the union.

One of Brisson's most famous clients, Sidney Crosby, chimed in today by saying all the players deserve a "good explanation" of what transpired in Chicago.

Chris Chelios, who was in the meeting that ended Kelly's tenure, is now saying that the entire process was at the very least "questionable." Former NHLPA executive Vincent Damphousse has spoken publicly about the "paranoia" in the union. Players familiar with the entire episode now understand that Kelly was under internal siege for a year or more, that his fractious relationship with former ombudsman Eric Lindros may have been his undoing and that the "office review" that skewered him was a rather clumsy attempt to assassinate his professional reputation. That said, it worked.

Despite his denials, Lindros is still very much a part of this picture. He certainly knew the details of the evidence that was used against Kelly in last month's meetings in Chicago even though he hadn't been working for the union for six months. Asked by text message if he intended to return to a position with the union in the near future, he responded, "I have no intentions."

If there was a groundswell of support for Kelly, could he come back? It's theoretically possible, but unlikely. The fact he was axed under the flimsiest of accusations that the plotters have tried to turn into Watergate doesn't change the fact that he was fired, and it's not easy to go back. Moreover, the dreadful bureaucratic structure of the union will make it impossible for any future executive director to lead the NHLPA without worrying about his job and authority every day.

But at the very least there should be yet another internal investigation of union activities and practices, something similar to that carried out by respected Toronto lawyer Sheila Bloch after the Saskin mess. Players will roll their eyes at that suggestion, but if they're smart, they're starting to understand that a very small cabal of players, retired players and suits — the names of some of whom they wouldn't even know — managed to have their leader canned without asking the wider membership what it thought.

All the player reps had to do was wait a few weeks for the players to assemble for training camp and it would have been easy to canvas opinion and develop a real consensus.

But the plotters didn't want that to happen. That should tell you something. They saw an opportunity and seized it.

Players in general couldn't give a fig about their union. But they'll get their backs up if they think they've been hoodwinked, and that feeling is starting to spread.

Waltzing Around The Truth

If the first casualty of war is truth, there is surely the sniff of cannon fire around the business of professional hockey these days.

The NHL can't quite get its story straight when it comes to the Phoenix Coyotes and dealing with Jim Balsillie. The NHL Players' Association, meanwhile, just decapitated its executive director, Paul Kelly, and is determined not to honestly tell the larger hockey community exactly why they did that.

The two issues are not un-related.

While the league and players are, according to the last CBA, supposed to declare all hockey-related revenues and share them according to a set formula, the league has effectively cut the union right out of all discussions relating to the bankrupt Coyotes. Astonishingly, the NHL has committed $140 million to buying the Coyotes if necessary, monies that, at least in theory, are partly those of the NHLPA.

But the union has no say.

With Kelly, meanwhile, the union at least had some potential to improve their working relationship with the league, although after putting the union in a stranglehold in the last CBA negotiations, the NHL, quite naturally, feels it can do whatever it wants without consulting a fractured, dis-spirited and dysfunctional union.

Now the players are clearly looking to go more hardline, although they won't say that, hiding behind bureaucratic doubletalk and pretending that Kelly wasn't undone by an internal coup.

If that's the direction in which the players go, any possibility of forging a better working relationship with the league, and possibly getting a bigger say in issues like the Coyotes, will go out the window.

The union seems to want a second Bob Goodenow. The league successfully separated Goodenow from the union in 2005 - some would argue the lockout was really about that and nothing more - and would be only too happy to do it again in the next round of labour talks.

The players, with no unity or collective backbone, are in no position to stand up to the league, but they may be driving themselves to the edge of that cliff again. 

But they won't be honest with their plans, and the skullduggery which unseated Kelly is an ominous sign of the civil war that is still being waged within that organization.

The league, meanwhile, keeps trying to pretend that Phoenix is salvageable. Only enormous concessions from the City of Glendale can make that work, and local politicians are saying they won't be giving away anything significant to make the Coyotes stay.

So nobody's dealing in truth these days in the hockey industry, perhaps a sign of a bigger war lying ahead in the near future.

Still Falling Apart

If there's a lasting legacy from the Alan Eagleson years at the NHL Players' Association, it could be described in a simple phrase that could be the union's motto.

Never trust anyone, either inside or outside the association.

Don't trust the NHL or the media, and don't necessarily trust anyone inside the union, some of whom from time to time must be purged for counter-revolutionary thoughts and actions. In rapid succession, the union has turned on three executive directors in less than five years, sometimes explaining what happened, sometimes not. It's like China in the 1960s, even more so given that while in theory a democracy, the hockey union is controlled by a small clutch of hired executives and player reps while the vast majority of NHL players don't give a hoot or are waiting to be told what they think.

So Paul Kelly has followed Ted Saskin and Bob Goodenow out the door, and the release from the NHLPA this morning regarding Kelly's departure was downright hilarious in its unwillingness to provide the hockey world with any specific information on why Kelly has been ousted.

This morning's release said the executive committee "voted overwhelmingly" to dump Kelly, the man who put Eagleson in jail, and said it followed an "in depth analysis of the NHLPA's operations."

Everyone is reading something into this, that it's the result of the unseen hand of Goodenow, or the departed former ombudsman Eric Lindros, or hardliners like Chris Chelios and Dwayne Roloson, the people who got rid of Saskin after he was found to be spying on association e-mails.

Must be a nice office to work in, huh? So comforting to always know the guy who's working in the office beside you may be secretly plotting against you. Goodenow and Saskin had a parting of the ways, and Kelly and Lindros were at each other's throats for months. Now it's lawyer Ian Penney and ombudsman Buzz Hargrove that may have led the charge against Kelly, men who were supposedly under his charge at the union.

Eagleson, way back when, was seen as too close to the league, and he betrayed the players. Now, the union seems incapable of ever fully trusting its leadership, or at least putting someone in place who isn't immediately the object of a coup attempt.

Meanwhile, most players simply want nothing to do with the union, not surprisingly given the way the organization collapsed during the 2004-05 lockout. The players now know that when push comes to shove there will be those among them that will jump ship and seek to cut their own deal, that the Europeans in the group will simply pack up and head home to play if there's another work stoppage, all of which adds to the internal distrust that has come to be the main feature of this dysfunctional organization.

The NHL general ignores the thoughts of the union because it can, because the union is too busy fighting itself to mount an effective opposition to policies and programs of the league with which it might disagree. Players are now coughing up more than 20 per cent of each and every paycheque to an escrow fund that few understand. The league has ignored the NHLPA on topics like franchise relocation and television, and now will once again have little or no idea who they should be dealing with at the union.

Does any of this matter to hockey fans? Not really, although in theory, a well-organized union could serve as an effective counter-weight to the league. But in general most fans believe the union does little of value for the game - the wonderful Goals and Dreams program would be one exception - and is there simply to serve the needs of wildly rich hockey players.

Talk that a more hard-line approach is required by the union is nearly laughable now that the league knows that it can break this weak-willed bunch just as easily in 2012 as it did in 2005. There is no rival league and there is no other meaningful employment option for hockey players who draw hundreds of thousands of dollars in paycheques.

Maybe Kelly wasn't hardline enough for some. But he was practical and reasonable. His biggest error may have been a naive belief he could trust those with whom he was working.

The knives at the NHLPA, it seems, are never actually put away.

Lecavalier at Olympic camp: Feeling good after surgery

Not Clearing Up Anything

So Dany Heatley's no longer a coward for failing to explain himself.

Now he just looks like a suckhole unwilling to live up to his obligations for reasons that appear to be at best flimsy.

Heatley claimed today he wants out of Ottawa because his role has been "diminished." Strange, given that he averaged between 18-22 minutes of ice time last season, and finished this year by playing 22:24 and 23:07 in the final two games of the regular season.

Doesn't sound like fourth liner minutes, does it?

Nobody's buying it. It may be that he doesn't like the new coach, Cory Clouston. Or it may be something else entirely relating to what has been a poisonous, destructive hockey environment in Ottawa since the club made it to the Stanley Cup final. Or it may be, as one NHL general manager says, that Heatley is simply a player who "wants nothing to do with the hard part of the game." The GM was speaking about Heatley on the ice, but it could also extend to his off-the-ice attitude.

What Heatley did not address today was any obligation he may or may not feel to fulfill his end of the enormous contract he signed two years ago, other than saying he'll show up at the Sens camp next month if necessary to keep the paycheques coming.

Moreover, playing the "diminished role" card makes him look like anything but a team player, particularly when you look at teams like Detroit on which players like Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk accept less ice time for the good of the team.

Sens GM Bryan Murray isn't having much luck moving the winger, and clearly he's tried. Problem is, there isn't much of a market out there for a one-dimensional goal-scorer who has found two NHL cities not to his liking and apparently has very specific needs for fitting into the team concept of hockey.

He might get you a few goals. But it doesn't seem likely you can win with him.

Monster Update: No Decision Yet, But Field May Be Thinning

LONDON - Brian Burke may continue to push, but The Monster hasn't decided yet.

In fact, agent Joe Resnick said today that Swedish free agent goalie Jonas Gustavsson's situation hasn't changed after meeting with Burke yesterday in Stockholm.

"No, no change," said Resnick. "It's really up to Jonas now. I can't make a decision for him."

The earliest Gustavsson will decide is tomorrow, but it could still drag on into next week. The Colorado Avalanche have already effectively dropped out by getting incumbent Peter Budaj and free agent Craig Anderson under contract.

The Leafs are likely to hang in there, and its not clear whether San Jose or Dallas may yet choose to head in a different direction for goalkeeping help.

Recession, What Recession?

LONDON

One day and $500 million in contracts later, it's worth wondering - what the heck was that all about?

Teams struck early and often yesterday as the NHL free agent season opened creating a blizzard of activity and many new questions about a variety of teams.

At the top of that list would be the Montreal Canadiens, who spent $60 million yesterday to bring in free agents Brian Gionta, Mike Cammalleri and Hal Gill just hours after making a deal with the Rangers to bring in Scott Gomez and his wildly oversized $43.5 million deal which still has five years left to run.

Interestingly, Gomez's salary in the first year of that contract was $10 million. But while the maximum allowable salary under the NHL salary cap is approximately $11.2 million, none of the free agents really approached that figure yesterday. Only Marian Hossa (12 years, $62.8 million with Chicago) got one of those mega-term deals popularized by Detroit. Mattias Ohlund got seven years from Tampa, Marty Havlat got six from Minny but otherwise it was all five years or less.

Hard to say which team really got better. The Habs are doing a North American makeover just like the Leafs but with small, speedy forwards while the Leafs look for size and toughness.

Chicago clearly was looking for players from winning programs with Hossa, Tomas Kopecky and John Madden. Hossa, more durable than Havlat, displaced him with the Hawks and gives Chicago another big body up front.

Then there's the Rangers. They dumped their own tough guy, Colton Orr, to pay Donald Brashear triple the salary, the same Brashear who was basically kicked out of the post-season for his blind-side hit on Blair Betts of the very same Rangers. Then GM Glen Sather gave brittle Marian Gaborik a five-year, $37.5 million deal, a risky deal to a very talented player.

The Rangers may also still be in the picture for Dany Heatley, who appears to be turning himself into a Canadian version of Alexei Yashin. Edmonton, dissed by the likes of Chris Pronger and Michal Nylander in recent years, is now looking like the NHL city players prefer to avoid, not a happy profile to have.

And the Leafs? Orr is a legitimate heavyweight and Brian Burke wanted one, or at least someone to make sure Luke Schenn was always the one coming to the defence of his teammates. Orr's challenge will be to find regular ice time under Ron Wilson. You can bet skating instructor Graeme Townshend will be spending some time with him.

Mike Komisarek is a bit of a puzzle, but he gives the club at least the potential of a blueliner who can actually be reliable in the final minutes of periods and games. He brings a bright, sunny personality with him and will be more of a physical presence in the defensive zone than Pavel Kubina ever was.

And Exelby? At 27, he has one more year on his contract at $1.75 million before unrestricted free agency next summer. Exelby, born in Manitoba but raised in Saskatchewan, is strictly a defensive defenceman but a dangerous open ice hitter.  Forward Colin Stuart, 26, is another big body, likely to spend time with both the Marlies and Leafs next season.

With Schenn, Komisarek, Exelby, the oft-injured Mike Van Ryan and maybe even a youngster like improving Phil Oreskovic, the Leafs have the making of a big, nasty blueline corps.