Realignment and It Feels so Good Pt. 2: "Cold as Ice"

In part 1 of my realignment series, I discussed Major League Baseball's future realignment, where the Houston Astros will move from the National League Central Division to the American League Western Division.  Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to this as part of their newly ratified collective bargaining agreement.

Like Major League Baseball,  the National Hockey League wanted to realign their divisions for the 2012-2013 season.  In December, the NHL's Board of Governors were forced to realign due to the Atlanta Thrashers move to Winnipeg.  It did not make much sense to keep the Canadian team in the Southeast division so they did a one-for-one swap moving the Jets into the Western Conference.  Moreover, the NHL Board of Governors also voted on a complete overhaul plan that made even more sense in their eyes.  The plan was to realign the league into a 4-conference setup where the top four teams in each conference would make the playoffs and the initial two playoff rounds would consist of inter-conference match-ups.  However, much to the chagrin of the NHL's Board of Governors, the proposal was rebuffed by the National Hockey League Player Association and their new executive director, Donald Fehr.

Major League Baseball's Top 10 CBA Related Issues: #2 A Worldwide Draft

Well the World Series may be rained out, but the rain cannot rain on my MLB CBA Parade.  In fact the players and owners met today in New York to discuss the new CBA.  Here is part two of MLB's CBA related issues.  In my last post, I discussed the battle Commissioner Selig will wage for hard slotting in the amateur draft.  This post will continue our discussion of Commissioner Selig's wish to reform the MLB draft with the imposition of a worldwide draft.

What exactly is in the new NFL CBA?

Lost in the excitement of the fact that football is back and the preseason games are in full swing is the fact there is a new 10-year collective bargaining agreement that is chock full of new and modified rules and provisions. With the second and third stringers seeing a majority of snaps, now is a better time to dig deeper into what exactly is in the new NFL CBA and the type of impact it will have on the NFL labor market as well as the ongoing and future CBA discussions in the NBA, MLB and NHL. The NFL CBA can be found here if you want to follow along at home.

Because the majority of the news reporters already covered the salary cap/revenue sharing deal points that seemed to take up a majority of the NFL lockout coverage, I will focus this discussion on more of the nuanced provisions such as: (1) the prevalence of binding arbitration as way to settle most disputes, including player contract holdouts; (2) new performance enhancing drug (HGH) testing; worker's compensation rules; (3) worker's compensation filing rules; and (4) the Commissioner's power to discipline players for off the field conduct, among others. Up first, we will discuss the rise of alternative dispute resolution, specifically the rise in the use of arbitration and whether it can be used to settle contract holdouts. Stay tuned!

Are you ready for some football?!?!?! For realz!

It's over, it's over. The 136 day lockout is finito! Once again, it holds true that football does not really start until end of July! However, just as I predicted it was one hell of a roller-coaster ride to get to this point, from the Owners' vote last Thursday (gratuitous link due to this very bLawg getting cited) to today, but I do not think it is premature to say that the lockout is over and there should be football in the near future!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. What is a 'Non-picture" worth?

The Los Angeles Times is running an interesting story on how NBA.com and all NBA team sites have removed all player images from their sites. Now when you surf over to your favorite team's site or NBA.com, you are greeted by images of pictures David Stern's mug (meh), cheerleaders (niiiiiice), and WNBA players (yiiiiiikkkkkkkkeeeesssss!).