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NHL will return next season

Ending a dispute that led to the cancellation of the entire 2004-2005 National Hockey League Season, the NHL owners and the players` association reached a labor agreement on Wednesday afternoon. Though the agreement was finally reached, the opinion of many was that it was preferable to have resolved the issue long ago.

"At the end of the day everybody lost," said Wayne Gretzky, aka "The Great One", the NHL`s career scoring leader and the managing partner of the Phoenix Coyotes. "We almost crippled our industry. It was very disappointing what happened."

The Philadelphia Flyers` Jeremy Roenick said of the deal "To be totally honest, I really don`t care what the deal is anymore. All I care about is getting the game back on the ice. I think the deal is not great for the players. It is definitely an owner-friendly deal. For the last 10 years, the players have made a lot of money and now we are in a position where everybody is going to make money. Unfortunately, it had to take a whole year to get to a point where we could have been last year."

In February, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the season, making the NHL the first North American sports league to lose a year because of a labor dispute. Labor disputes often threaten sports league seasons, as demonstrated in the past with MLB and NBA disputes. But this particular lockout was worse obviously than any other lockout having previously taken place, dwarfing the lockout that cut the 1994-95 hockey season nearly in half (and resulted in the agreement that expired last September and led to the cancellation of this year`s season).

It is not yet known how fans will take the deal, or how badly damaged the NHL really is. In any case, no one will really know until tickets go on sale for the 2005-2006 season.