Mavs' Cuban: NHL's chance to fix league is now

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BOSTON -- The NHL lockout rages on after both sides met today with mediators and got . . . nowhere.

It's been nothing but bad news for NHL fans who just want to see their favorite teams and players shoot rubber cylinders into the back of a net.

Is that so much to ask? Apparently.

NHL owners have taken the brunt of the backlash, but the NHLPA, specifically Donald Fehr, is also feeling the heat.

The NBA and its fans dealt with a brutal 149-day lockout before the NBA and NBPA came to terms on a new CBA in late November. But not every NBA owner voted in favor of the new CBA. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, in Boston Wednesday night to support his team against the Celtics, has gone on record saying he voted against the NBA's current CBA.

For that reason, he doesn't cringe when he sees NHL owners trying to find a CBA that's going to really work this time around.

"No, actually, I don't cringe," Cuban said. "I think they're smart. You got to fix the problem. I cringed like with what we did. But if you don't fix the problems, they escalate, so they didn't fix them the last time, and they should have. So you see where they are now.

"When you have all your southern franchises basically sucking wind, there's a message there that you have to fix it. I mean, you have two different worlds; the north and the south. It's kind of like the civil war right now going on, and it's got to be fixed. So, yeah I'd cringe more as a hockey fan. I'd cringe more if they don't fix it. Just like the last one, it's only been like seven years right? But I even wrote a blog back then that they should have fixed it, and they didn't."

The NHL and NHLPA are reportedly stuck on the more "minor" issues, but Cuban says that whatever the issues are, when the CBA is finally agreed upon, the NHL better be in a place that it can succeed in.

"I don't know all the particulars, but whatever it is they gotta fix, they gotta fix it," Cuban said. "And if a market like the Dallas Stars can't survive with whatever they do, they should be embarrassed, because this is your chance to fix this."

Cuban certainly isn't sitting in on any NHL-NHLPA discussions, but having just been a big part of the NBA lockout, he has a pretty good idea on how the NHL negotiations are going right about now.

"They're both clusterexpletives. There's no good way to negotiate because everybody thinks they have a solution in those scenarios and nobody wants to listen to the other guy's solutions," Cuban said. "And it's just when desperation sets in that something gets done. It's not the best way to solve business problems, but that's what ends up happening."

It sure sounds like desperation over on the NHL sides of things. Does that mean a resolution soon? We'll find out. And a few years from now, we'll find out just what "resolution" meant.

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