The playoffs will be longer than the season I heard.
It's sad news over here for the Swiss and other European leagues who were quite pleased to be hosting all the NHL-ers while they stayed fit and their skills up to date.
...but like what happened last NHL lockout (someone said NHL now stands for Next Hockey Lockout), a few of the smaller fish from the NHL will have found that it is much nicer to be a star player over here instead of a bench warmer 4th line player in the NHL and be bounced from team to team every year or so, and choose to stay in Europe for the remainder of their career. There is a guy on our local team from Calgary who is a shining example of that. He came over 8-9 years ago during the last labour dispute and stayed ever since. It's not such a bad lifestyle. If you manage to get into the A league (which our little team is not), your salary can be as much as $500,000 a year, but in addition almost all your expenses are paid. Every driver gets a car for their contract, and the A league teams it is often a BMW or Mercedes. Every foreign player gets their own fully furnished apartment right near their home rink (downtown rents in Switzerland average about $3-4000/month unfurnished). There was a guy who played for our team a few years ago that I got to know fairly well, and he used to go on and on about what a great life it was. All he had was a cottage back in Canada just outside Montreal. He spent 4 months a year there, waterskiing and generally just having a blast, then back here for 8mths in the winter. Families complicate things of course, but the teams generally bend over backwards to keep a Canadian or two on the squad.
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