What Does J-U-D-G-E Spell? Can You Say Coward?

Bloomberg News is reporting from Phoenix that the bankruptcy court judge has ordered the NHL and Jerry Moyes/Jim Balsillie/Phoenix Coyotes into mediation. And the subject of who has the power to send the team into bankruptcy, i.e., who actually has the power to run the team, is to be decided in mediation.

For those of you not up on your legal speak, that means the bankruptcy court judge is a pussy who doesn't want to make an actual ruling on a tough subject.

This happens all of the time in legal proceedings, and it always pisses me off. Judges are appointed to these courts so as to make tough decisions. Instead, they wimp out and have a party who is responsible to no one make the actual decision. That way, no one can get mad at the judge. This means that the mediator will go back and forth for however long it takes -- while billing out of his ass -- to try to get the parties to agree on who runs the team's actual day-to-day operations. This way, instead of the judge actually doing his damn job, he's taken the cowardly way out. And I despise cowardly judges.

All the mediation will do is determine who is really running the team. There's still the matter of Chapter 11 which will have to be determined, though I get the feeling from the pussy bankruptcy judge that he will continue to let others handle all of the hard work while he works on his golf game. God forbid that the people of Phoenix or Hamilton get any decision anytime soon -- none of that is as important as a good round of golf.

(Can you tell I'm frustrated? Well I am because there's no legit justification for this decision. It should be a relatively easy one for a judge to make.)

Since many people get confused, there is a difference between arbitration and mediation. A mediator shuffles between the parties, trying to get them to agree to a middle ground. An arbitrator makes a legally-binding decision in favor of one party after hearing arguments -- it's kind of like being a judge except that arbitrators make way more money and aren't responsible to anybody.

And in non-court related Coyotes news, it's being reported today that part of the mythical Jerry Reinsdorf bid for the team -- mythical because I don't think the deal has ever been fully reported or seen by anybody but certain NHL flaks -- is that Wayne Gretzky must go.

It was also reported today that, in order to qualify for league revenue sharing, Moyes himself was actually buying thousands of tickets out of his own pocket then distributing them around the city. That's because, to qualify for revenue sharing, not only does the team have to be poor, it has to meet minimum attendance requirements, and the Coyotes weren't meeting these requirements. The NHL, however, did put a stop to this.