Chicken Little vs. Waldo

 The Blackhawks’ third Stanley Cup in six years has sent the Chicago media into a tizzy.  Chicken Little columnists and reporters warn of impending doom because of the salary cap while everyone else with a mic and a camera is chasing after the Cup here, there and down the street before it gets packed off to points unknown.

The salary cap is merely another way for owners to say, “We have the power.”  There is no corresponding sales’ cap for when a franchise gets sold.  The Bears, Blackhawks and Bulls all have some form of salary cap (“hard” or “soft”) while the Cubs and White Sox don’t; baseball employs a luxury tax about as loose as my old sweat pants.  Now guess which sport has the cheapest tickets on average.  (Hint: It’s the game with the bat and ball.)  So, the cap has little or no bearing on ticket prices while depressing player salaries.  Workers and fans of the other sports, unite, or at least follow the lead of baseball, where a proposed cap never made it out of the 1994 lockout.

Of course, if they did get rid of the salary cap in the NHL, I might be subjected to a Stanley-Cup travelogue for the next 10-15 years.  Who cares?  It’s not the Holy Grail or the Magna Carta (Happy 800^th Birthday, by the way) or the Declaration of Independence or….Let it go, guys, and find some real news to report on, like the impending collapse of the baseball house of Reinsdorf.