TORONTO -- NEW YORK -- There will be dust not champagne in the Stanley Cup this season -- for the first time since 1919. Commissioner Gary Bettman cancelled the 2004-05 season yesterday, saying there was no labour agreement and not enough time to play a shortened schedule.
The NHL becomes the first of the four major professional sports in North America to cancel an entire season from beginning to end. The Stanley Cup will not be awarded for the first time since the Spanish flu halted the 1919 final between Montreal and Seattle.
Even the Second World War couldn't stop the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The future looks bleak. Talks are back to Square 1. Everything is off the table. Backs are up.
"What scares me now is ... I don't feel there'll be a lot of negotiating between now and next September," Wayne Gretzky, managing partner of the Coyotes, said in Phoenix. "Hopefully I'm wrong."
Bettman made the announcement at a news conference at a New York hotel, officially turning the lights out on the top flight of Canada's flagship sport.
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