[sportscurmudgeon]

All the talk and all the votes regarding decertification and/or statements about being for or against a lockout do not feed the bulldog.

There are economic issues and there are discipline/regulatory issues on the table and NONE of them have been resolved. The reason NONE have been resolved is that both sides continue to negotiate in the press with statements and staged events and not in a closed room with the lawyers and accountants sitting on the back benches.

Until the two sides sit down in that sort of venue and start working from 9:00AM until 11:00 PM with meals sent into the room so as not to disturb the momentum of the talks, take everything you hear or read and recognize that it got to you only after a half dozen PR twinkies massaged every last bit of it.

There will be kernels of fact and truth in there. There will also be LOTS of rhetorical nonsense.

Critical reading and thinking skills are needed here...

Wishful thinking (like hoping for a pony for Christmas when you were 4 years old) and/or magical thinking (like believing Santa Claus could actually visit about 2 billion households world-wide in a single night) are not going to lead to understanding here.