Friday, November 3 Flyers GM knows changes have to be made in NHL By Rob Parent Special to ESPN.com

They call it an unwinnable struggle. An economic tug-of-war. A financial standoff headed for implosion.

Others call it hockey.

	Bob Clarke doesn't like modern hockey economics, but he doesn't mind paying Keith Primeau, left, or Eric Lindros if it makes his team competitive.

"It's still a good game," Flyers president Bob Clarke said. "But we have some problems that have to be fixed."

Clarke is still an athletic icon in Philadelphia, but it is an unsolvable puzzle of the mind that takes up most of his time now: How to ice a team of superstars without giving off the appearance of a spend-crazy hockey overlord.

To that end, he wants it to be known he's no Neil Smith, the Rangers general manager.

"I'm not in competition with Neil Smith at all," Clarke said in a press conference Monday as he was introducing newest Flyers multimillionaire Keith Primeau. "All we're trying to do here is worry about ourselves."

That's precisely what he's paid to do, of course, but it's a difficult job when your sense of ethics was formulated in a place called Flin Flon, Manitoba; your sense of financial independence the result of a career-long friendship with former union boss and convicted felon Alan Eagleson.

That friendship bloomed when Clarke was the president of the NHL Players Association. He was also once a client of then-agent Bob Goodenow, and now he's a staunch management force that thinks Goodenow and his NHLPA are on the verge of ruining the league. But his judgment doesn't end there.

For Clarke, the yin and the yang of NHL economics have come to roost in his dually overloaded brain. He hates agents. Not as individuals, but for the generalities they represent. He still loves his players but long gone are the days when he'd hang out in the Flyers' locker room after games, or call a favorite player into his office to talk hockey.

The sport has changed. The league has changed. The players have certainly been changed by the money ... and it's all left Bob Clarke struggling to maintain his lifelong identity, whatever that may be.

It is from baseball that Goodenow, the NHLPA's executive director, has crafted his strategies. It is from hockey's dinosaur days that Bob Clarke molded his beliefs. And if it got him a house with a pool in the shape of a Flyers logo and a double garage full of Mercedes convertibles and a lifetime contract that paid him even after he was fired from the organization and then brought back again ... who's to argue?

"Players have their story, too," Clarke said with a wistful smile. "A lot of times they're wrong, but a lot of times they're right. In the years I played I never saw a guy who wouldn't take an extra $10,000 or $15,000. He'd be making $40,000 and say, 'Ah, they (bleeped) me. I should be making $50,000.' "

What a quaint thought. Clarke said this as Primeau, who is a symbol of a spoiled brat athlete to more than a few in Raleigh, was sitting right next to him. A Keith Primeau who just added more than $20 million to the salary commitment charts of a Flyers team that is constantly claiming to be struggling to break even, but is considered one of the NHL's most profitable.

Since Clarke traded a Rod Brind'Amour on the downside for a Primeau with more upshot potential and who accepted a pro-rated, backloaded contract, Clarke didn't pad the Flyers' payroll any more than the $50 million he's already dishing out. And if some league financial wizards think that means he's just helped drive another nail into the already constructed coffins for teams that hail from his native homeland ... hey, he's not his Alberta brothers' keepers.

"I think the salaries are too high for what the league can stand," Clarke said. "But I think we're past the stage of seeing whose fault it is. My point is, let's forget about whose fault it is that we've gotten to the point where we are now, and let's figure out a way to stop it now, so that a team like the New York Islanders can be competitive, and Ottawa and Calgary and Edmonton don't have to move their franchises.

"I think Goodenow and (NHL commissioner Gary) Bettman better sit down and find a way to do that, because we're all making our livings in this game."

To Bettman, finding a way to put a player like Primeau in a major market like Philadelphia is only healthy for the game. The same can be said about a Theo Fleury going to New York. But leagues without major television contracts can't go the route baseball has blazed. The Yankees and Braves are great. A few others are good and everybody else stinks. Is that the model the NHL wants to follow?

It's one Clarke despises, but unlike many of his loudmouth colleagues at general managers meetings, he doesn't blame it only on greedy athletes and their agents. Bob Clarke has been on both sides of this senseless equation, and he sees more than he usually lets on.

It's why he can see Carolina's stand of not giving in to Primeau's demands and silently consider it a stupid bargaining posture. It's why he can hate the stand taken by Alexei Yashin, but not respect the inaction by the Ottawa Senators.

"It's interesting to me that everybody is applauding Carolina, Ottawa and those guys," said Clarke. "They're saying, 'Yeah, (bleep) those players!' But the reality is that these are players who make their teams better and are better for the game. Somehow, Goodenow and Bettman have to get together with these players and see if they can get them back. I don't think we should just say, '(bleep) the player' because he wants more money than you think he's worth. The association and the league owe the fans to try and get these players back."

Then, in the next sentence, the other Bob Clarke emerged. The one entrusted for years by Ed Snider to keep the Flyers fiscally sound, and a top contender just the same.

For when he looks at the example that Yashin is making, when he sees the upcoming legal battle to determine whether Yashin will be a free agent and figures it is a legal decision the future of the NHL rests on ... when he sees all of that, Bob Clarke sees clearly.

"Oh, I think Yashin's just an ass," Clarke said. "I don't care if he ever comes back. It's different with him because he has a contract he's not honoring. So to me, he's just an ass."

Since mid-December, this team is a mind-numbing 1-16-2. Even loyal Lightning fans (are you still out there?) who can recall the ignominious hockey that underscored Phil Esposito's final days in office can't recall a team as bad as this.

The Lightning not only can't beat anybody (even the Islanders beat them last weekend), they're getting blown out on a regular basis.

"We've had meeting after meeting and some guys ... well, all guys just don't get it," said Darcy Tucker. "The coaching staff has begged and pleaded and practically gotten down on their hands and knees, but unless guys start getting it, it's not going to get any better."

Probably not, but a lot of guys seemed to be getting it back in the fall. But that's before the coaching staff started acting like tyrants lopping heads off the citizenry.

Bill Houlder, Daren Puppa, Rob Zamuner, Shawn Burr, Alexandre Daigle, Colin Forbes, Andreas Johansson, Michael Nylander, Stephane Richer, Cory Cross ... No, this isn't the patient list for a career counseling therapy group, it's a rundown (albeit an incomplete one) of Lightning players either dumped, berated, kicked out the door or relegated to janitorial duty ever since Rick Dudley took over as general manager and his handpicked taskmaster Steve Ludzik assumed the coaching throne.

Taken individually, all of these personnel moves weren't ill-advised -- since when has getting rid of Stephane Richer ever been considered a bad move? -- but it does offer a viable explanation of what's going on in Tampa these days.

Any team that has to count on Chris Gratton as a scoring leader has problems of immense proportion. Gratton is actually playing well, but the problem is, people like Gratton and young Vince Lecavalier and newcomer Fredrik Modin have been blunted by shellshock.

They carry on while not knowing who the next comrade cut down by friendly fire will be.

Dudley and Ludzik came in with good intentions, striving to make work the style they thrived on with the Detroit Vipers of the IHL. They employ kick-tail, my-way-or-the-highway, take-no-lazy-prisoners management and coaching techniques. As a result, they made examples of more than a handful of indolent veterans.

Unfortunately, they've also created an unstable locker-room atmosphere that's manifesting itself into a disaster on the ice. So now that they've ruined the physical chemistry, what do they do?

Call in the shrink, of course. And even he has nothing but a successful minor-league track record on his resume.

The team held another meeting Sunday, this time to introduce self-taught sports psychologist Joe Sheridan. Ludzik knew of Sheridan because he had successfully motivated two minor league teams he was involved with that became great success stories. And you'd think such minor-league mentoring would work for the Tampa Bay Lightning.

"My job is to get the players thinking positively again," Sheridan told the St. Petersburg Times. "When a team is losing, it is (prone to) negative thoughts. The easiest thing to do is to turn to one another and say, 'Well, I scored my goal,' or 'Hey, I did what I was supposed to do. What did you do?'

"I'm here to get the players thinking positively and optimistically again, and to get them on common ground; make them realize what they need to get back on the winning track."

GO TEAM!

Ah, Sheridan says, he's used to scoffing in the media. But what counts is how athletes have responded to his techniques ... and athletes have in the past. These Lightning guys are 0-2 since his three-hour session with them Sunday.

Go team? More like a gone one.

The team that wasn't expected to go anywhere this season ... and weren't fast. And now can't do anything wrong? The snow's two feet deep in the nation's capital and based on the sudden success of the city's hockey team, you'd think it was July.

Just prior to Christmas, a loss in Vancouver left them facing a depressing holiday at 12-16-5. Since then, they've gone 9-1-3, including an 8-2 blowout Monday of a Tampa Bay team heading in the complete opposite direction.

"We had three days off around Christmas and we came back with a whole new outlook and a great attitude," goalie Olie Kolzig told the Washington Post. "Every time (fans) were ready to get excited about this team, we would find a way to break people's hearts, and I think the guys just realized we (needed to) put something together and make people proud of the Caps and make them cheer for the Caps. And the guys have been phenomenal. Since then we've won every way imaginable."

Rob Parent covers the NHL for the Delaware County (Pa.) Times. His NHL East column appears every week on ESPN.com.