Just Shut Up

What do you mean, I'm not
the center of the universe?

One of the things I don't understand is the feeling of entitlement that some fans seem to have.

Exhibit A: Flyers fan and all-around entitled misfit Jaymes Hall.  Mr. Hall crashed a press conference that Mr. Bettman was giving, and demanded to know why they didn't just implement his overly simplistic band-aid and continue playing.

"Why not freeze the revenue generated from those sources that are still in dispute?" he screamed. "What about an escrow account or something so we can get back to playing? Let's get back to playing! The fans are angry!"

First of all, no, nobody in business is going to leave money on the table without applying a certain amount of leverage to get at it. That's what this lockout is -- leverage. The idea is that by denying the players money for playing, you'll put pressure on them to settle faster than if they just did their jobs. The players applied pressure back on the owners by offering to continue to play under the old CBA, but that would mean the owners would be on the hook for potential losses incurred under the old CBA. Now the whole lockout thing has horribly backfired on the owners under this strategy, and the losses the league will incur are now much higher than if they'd just played under the old CBA, but that ship has been quite thoroughly sunk in the harbor. No sense even thinking about it anymore.

So yeah, no. Shut up.

Second, if hockey is so important to your life that it encourages you to show up places where you shouldn't be and yell half-assed bandaid suggestions at people, then frankly your life is more than a little sad. If the strike really made you angry at hockey you'd give up on it and wouldn't care any more.

Going off on a rant like that makes me think that you are acting more like a spoiled kid who isn't getting to see his favorite bedtime show because the TV is broken, and is having a temper tantrum because his parents won't take him down to Best Buy every night to watch it while the parents work out financing a replacement.

So yeah, shut up.

I can understand the entitlement from the media. They are paid to cover this circus, and if the circus isn't running the articles can get repetitious and boring. I can even understand* anger from the people who would be working the games in the arena, and even sympathize with anger from people who work in the wider secondary markets (like restaurants and sporting memorabilia stores) because there isn't the same driver of business that there usually is.

But Mr. Hall doesn't seem to be either of these. He's just an entitled "fan".

In any case, I'd bet real money that when hockey resumes in January or in October, Mr. Hall will be more than happy to pay good money to park his butt in the arena again.

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*= even if I think their anger is misguided -- when you pick a pilot fish industry to work in, you end up in trouble if the shark dies.