The season kicks off in London, not much goes right for the NHL. Well, there is always Amy McCarthy

The season kicks off in London, not much goes right for the NHL. Well, there is always Amy McCarthy

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The season is here, I wonder who noticed besides me? Kicking off the NHL season in the midst of playoff races, NFL football, and NASCAR's Chase for the Cup seems to be not the best idea ever. Then to do so with a horrible opener with problems with lighting and more, seems to be par for the course for the NHL today.

The sellout crowd of 17,551 didn't get treated to a classic, the hockey at times was sloppy, more representative of a pre-season game than the real thing, add to that the fact that the lights didnt work delaying the start of the game, and apparently the folks at 02 Arena forgot which country supplies the most NHL players. Only the British and American national anthems were sung before the game. It was an overall sloppy start to a season when the NHL is still trying to recover. It may never happen at this rate. Sending teams 8 time zones away to play in a game in a market that doesn't even support the NHL makes no sense at all to begin with.

This is just one of the problems going on right now. The list is seemingly endless. Lets go through some of them.

Friday, Madison Square Garden, home and owner of the New York Rangers, charged in a lawsuit that the NHL is violating anti trust laws. The lawsuit seeks to block the league from imposing a $100,000-per-day fine on the Garden that the league has said it was going to impose on the Rangers if the Rangers did not hand over "virtually complete control" of the Web site nyrangers.com. Yes, you are reading that correctly. The NHL has decided it owns everything and that teams cannot do their own web sites anymore. That's just brilliant.

Then we wont get too far into the TV deal problems, but TV audiences have dropped significantly from the days ESPN2 carried NHL games. I still can't find Versus on the television.

The rules changes have made the game more exciting at the cost of long time fans, so now the NHL is competing with Football for fans looking for excitement. Good luck with that.

Before everyone gets too crazy though, lets have some good news. Actress Jenny McCarthy’s younger sister Amy McCarthy has become engaged to St. Louis Blues RW Dan Hinote. Amy, who was once name “cyber girl of the month” by Playboy, will wed Hinote next year in Colorado. That's great news because it will give me a chance to feature her photo here on occasion. Let's start with these.

At this point I am starting to think that the only hope the NHL has, is hot wives, as long as Bettman is around, he better hope that player wives are what we discuss.

Information provided in NHL Roundup has been gathered from A.P. reports, ESPN.com, Sportsline.com, NHL.com and numerous other e-sources. Opinions expressed in NHL Roundup are solely the opinions of the author.