The Boston Bruins had called together an 11 a.m. press conference at the TD Garden for Bruins President Cam Neely and Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli to announce the end of the NHL lockout in position.
As if on cue, a delay in nailing down signatures from both the NHL and the NHLPA for a temporary Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the 2013 season caused the press conference to be cancelled for Saturday. The MOU is a roughly 25-30 page CBA document both sides will utilize for the short 48-game regular season while the lawyers hash out the fine print details for the CBA document that will govern the NHL for the next 8-10 years.
The NHLPA vote was supposed to be finished by 8 a.m. on Saturday morning and the MOU should have been signed, sealed and delivered shortly after that. But like so many things in the four-month plus torturous odyssey of the NHL lockout, it is taking much, much longer than anybody expected at the outset.
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Once the MOU is signed by both NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA Executive Director Donald Fehr, the Bruins are expected to release information like the 48-game schedule, training camp invitations and other things that Bruins fans will be keenly interested in. Then the hope is that Sunday will be the first day of official training camp for the Black and Gold with the players on the ice and everything finally back to normal after 113 days of lockout insanity.
But as for Saturday, it was more like a giant episode of Seinfeld at TD Garden. Absolutely nothing happened and everybody will be right back to square one on Sunday morning hoping for a reboot to open NHL training camp.