APHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

For a lot of hockey fans, it's going to be a rough couple of months.

The lockout is all but guaranteed, and will begin in less than two weeks. That means no training camp, no preseason, no regular season. For at least a few months. There will now be nothing to fill out October and November nights. No filtering through three east coast games on a Tuesday night, no scoring last-minute tickets to a game on Thursday, no staying in all Saturday and watching four games in a row.

Let's be honest: You're not going to fill the void with basketball. Football is only on a handful of nights a week. So how are you supposed to fill your time?

By throwing yourself into other hockey, that's how. Here in North America, or at least many parts of it, where hockey fans are already concentrated, you have a wealth of options available to you when it comes to consuming this sport. Nope, you're not going to have the NHL. But there's high school, junior, college, and minor league hockey just waiting for you to go enjoy it. And the best part is, it's dirt cheap.

While millionaires and billionaires stomp their feet and hold their breath over amounts of money we can barely imagine, there's bargain-basement hockey within a relatively short drive, available for relatively little. Everyone talks about how it costs a few hundred dollars to bring a family of four to an NHL rink, and that's if your seats aren't very good. If they are, between tickets, parking, food, beers and souvenirs, among other expenses, you might end up spending even more than that. It's legitimately crazy.

I was still in college during the last lockout and as you might imagine, wasn't exactly putting away big money. Yet, that year, I saw probably 60 college hockey games in person and caught a few dozen AHL games. I had never even been that big of an AHL fan despite having a team in my hometown for most of my teenage years, but I figured some hockey was better than none, and found myself very pleasantly surprised with the quality of the product.

The best part was that it all cost me very little, except probably the AHL playoff tickets. But that's not something you'll have to worry about this time around, since the NHL will have long since come back by then.

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Remember like three or four weeks ago when Greg Jamison finally put enough money together to go out and actually buy the Coyotes and re-sign Shane Doan and keep hockey in the desert and vindicate Gary Bettman and everyone would be happy forever?

Yeah, that was like three or four weeks ago.

Nothing has happened with it since, not really, because of course all this stuff moves at a glacial pace unless the league swoops in and basically sneaks a team out of the country overnight because it's a lost cause. Such was the case with Atlanta, and it should be the case with Arizona.

The latest bit of news in this seemingly never-ending saga is that the City of Glendale, broke and limitlessly daft, has asked Jamison to rework the deal they agreed to earlier in the summer to give the team a lease for Jobing.com Arena for the next 20 years. The deal as originally structured would have given Jamison's group, or whoever ends up buying the team, $324 million over that time. That's more than two Shane-Doan-To-Buffalo contracts a year!

And the problem seems to be a rather vicious cycle. While the city is allowed to approve the deal even if Jamison doesn't yet own the team, it's not comfortable doing so. Meanwhile, Jamison doesn't really want to buy the team without the deal being in place, and of course there's that whole business with the lockout. If the league is asking for $170 million to buy the team — and maybe Jamison and his buddies actually have that money on hand these days — he wants assurances that he'll be able to collect on that with a team that actually plays and generates revenues and things of this nature.

All of this has, of course, been complicated by referendums and potential work stoppages and all that, so who can blame anyone for wanting to stay out of it? But at the same time, how much more of this stupid garbage are we going to have to sit through before someone just says enough already?

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

So let's just operate under the assumption that there's no way the NHL avoids a work stoppage, and that the players are locked out despite having done nothing wrong under the framework ownership pushed on them seven years ago.

Then what? Granted, it seems no one particularly feels as though the League will miss another entire season as it did last time out; but nonetheless, rumors are already starting to swirl about what might happen if this lasts two weeks or two months.

The obvious answer for many players who find themselves locked out of a job will be to sit at home, skate with some buddies, keep training and wait this thing out. It's been reported in a few places that players will be getting sizable escrow checks soon after the season would have begun, and that will certainly tide more than a few over as they twiddle their thumbs, not collecting cash legally owed to them by their teams' owners.

But some might not have that option, or might want to pursue bigger paychecks overseas. And what happens then?

(Coming Up: Flyers prospect charged with sexual assault; Tyler $eguin and his new contract; Kyle Quincey dabbles in tampering; Dan Bylsma, true patriot; Neuvirth out of context; interesting concussion news; and your winner and loser of the weekend.)

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Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

So in the midst of all this hullabaloo about the state of negotiations between the NHL and the NHLPA, there has also been a meeting for players in Toronto. The point of the meeting, if you've not heard, is to try to stamp out things that are problems in the game. Things like embellishment, obstruction and the size of goalie pads.

All of these issues are, as they so often end up being at this time of year, ultimately about the amount of goals scored in the game. We have to have more goals. Goals are the thing people like to see in hockey.

Never mind the fact that attendance leaguewide has increased in each of the last two seasons, and in all but one since the end of the lockout (it dropped between 2008-09 and 2009-10, by about 588,000 altogether). Last season saw the second-highest attendance total of any year since the 2005-06 campaign. This despite goalscoring dropping in every season but one since that time.

But the long-standing theory is that goals equal attendance equals profits equals something the owners can deny the players when the next CBA expires. I mean, umm, goals equal attendance equals profits equals game growing equals good thing. Right.

Thus, as you might imagine, people who have ideas about how to improve the game mainly want to make sure that more pucks can go in the nets.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Bad news, gang.

A report that came out Sunday said that if the lockout were to happen, it would not only derail a few weeks or more of the NHL season, but would likely also mean the cancellation of Columbus' turn to host the All-Star game. And it wouldn't even take all that long to do it; Atlanta was scheduled to host the league's most important annual exhibition game in 2005, but that was canceled less than a month after the regular season was scheduled to begin.

This is, I think we can all agree, pretty much terrible news. If there's no All-Star game for the second time in eight years, the league's fans — the only ones who will be truly hurt by this labor war between millionaires, billionaires and Greg Jamison — will be robbed of one of their favorite traditions: Complaining about the All-Star game.

Can you just imagine how terrible the months of December and January will be when no one is complaining about how many votes the home fans are stuffing into the ballot box for all their favorite stars, like Rick Nash, Jack Johnson and … um, is David Vyborny still on the team?

How will we deal with not hearing about how such-and-such-an-old-player doesn't deserve to make it because he's old and terrible now? What happens when we don't get to complain about players not doing their duty to the fans and showing up despite debilitating knee injuries?

It's going to be truly shameful. If a great NHL market like Columbus, which finished fourth (from the bottom) in home attendance last year, doesn't get rewarded with an All-Star game, it will be borderline criminal, and we won't know who to blame.

(Coming Up: The return of Alex Kovalev?; Dany Heatley's lawsuit; Jarret Stoll's grandparents violate the CBA; Justin Schultz Hate Night in Anaheim; Tyler Seguin and Aly Raisman being set up by Boston media; Dallas gets a new voice; Darren Helm, lynchpin; Scott Hannan to the Preds; Dale Hunter won't miss DC media; and stop blaming Gary Bettman for all of this.)

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Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

While Donald Fehr and Gary Bettman are kicking up dust at each other on behalf of their constituents, like discontented baseball managers whose players just got tossed for arguing balls and strikes, there remains the whole business of the current collective bargaining agreement still being in effect.

You might have noticed a little bit of an uptick in activity and rumors over the last week or so. While these are the summer doldrums, no doubt about that, some teams have been getting to work by locking up some players and exploring their options.

Witness both the Montreal Canadiens and Philadelphia Flyers having recently signed restricted free agents Max Pacioretty and Wayne Simmonds to six-year extensions worth $4.5 million and $3.97 or so per year, respectively. (Though obviously that's under the current CBA and doesn't take into account any salary rollbacks, over which Fehr will engage Bettman in a knife fight if he has to.)

Meanwhile, the Flyers also continue to kick the tires on a number of defensemen to make up for the fact that most of the ones they have under contract are either not very good or injured; or, in Andreas Lilja's case, both.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

We talk an awful lot about the relative strength of divisions in the NHL.

The Atlantic, for example, is loaded with some of the best sides in the league. The Northeast has good top teams and utter dross at the bottom. The Pacific has some squads capable of serious success. The Central could be the second-toughest top-to-bottom division. The Northwest has Vancouver and a bunch of minnows. The Southeast, though? Well, who knows?

If nothing else, it's been a summer of change for the Southeast Division, perhaps moreso than any other in the league. There have been somewhat stunning significant player movements, coaching changes, additions, and subtractions throughout the division, and now it's more or less impossible to tell who is going to do what, and finish where.

Obviously the big headline grabber in all this is Carolina, which finished dead last in the division and 12 points back of the winners. Jim Rutherford made it clear that he was done casting about in the bottom of the conference, and spent huge money and assets to both add and extend Jordan Staal, then added Alex Semin from a division rival for good measure. It's probably a lot to ask of those two players to add the equivalent of six wins over the course of next season, but what makes Carolina a contender here is what everyone else can do as the season progresses.

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Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

Well here we go again.

A few weeks after the league presented its laughable, insulting opening salvo in this latest labor war, it more or less dropped the hammer once again, all but saying the one word no hockey fan wants to hear.

You know what that word is. It's the one that starts with an L and ends with missing at least a few games from this upcoming season. It's the word that has been on everyone's lips since the first salary-gutting proposal the owners tabled. It's the word that got screamed in fonts as big as you like in headlines on every hockey website worth reading.

Of course, it's "lockout."

But as Marc Spector pointed out just minutes before yesterday's newsworthy announcement, there are a great number of misconceptions about the lockout. And pretty much all of them start with Gary Bettman himself, which is perhaps inevitable.

What people seem to forget, pretty much constantly, is that Bettman serves at the owners' pleasure. They tell him to go say a thing, and jeez that thing gets said in a hurry. People act as though he's evil, they boo him every time he appears in public (except in the greater Los Angeles area, apparently), and now they say things like, to sample a few of the top bookmarks in my browser:

"Without a new deal, NHL lockout by September 15, says Gary Bettman"

"Bettman: Players Locked Out If There's No Deal by Sept. 15"

"Bettman on CBA: 'The owners will not play another year under the current agreement'"

You get the picture. I understand he's the league commissioner and he was the one who said those things. I also understand that, as many were terribly quick to point out in the immediate wake of the announcement, he might soon be presiding over his third lockout since 1994. That's quite the record, and gives the world a pretty nice target for vitriol because it looks like he is the one depriving the world of NHL hockey.

Bettman, however, is not an inherently evil guy. His biggest crime isn't personally barring the doors to every rink in the NHL with novelty-sized giant padlocks, then swallowing the keys with an [expletive]-eating grin. It's being a puppet to cartoonishly cynical owners who demand that the players' union give, give, give until salaries — set by the rules they foisted upon the NHLPA seven years ago, let's not forget — are rolled back to levels not seen since 2007-08 (because of the new way in which they would be able to define hockey-related revenues). The word draconian springs readily to mind, and clearly, people already have their target.