If Wayne Gretzky can come to the rink early,'' said Melrose,

You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take.

[Phoenix managing partner Wayne Gretzky is concerned that if the NHL and the players' association don't agree to a new collective bargaining agreement soon, the next season will be lost as well as this one.] If this is not decided in the next few days, I'm scared we could be looking at a year, a year and a half, two years, not just three months like a lot of people thought in September, ... From April to October, the players don't get paid, so I can't see us coming to an agreement in August or September. If we don't find a way to make everyone who is part of this sort of happy and get a deal done, we could be looking at a long, long time before hockey is played in the NHL and that's very alarming too. I hope in the next couple of weeks we can come to an agreement.

I don't want to get into a situation like 2002 when we picked the team so early and then some players got hot later and we got criticized,

I don't think that we as a group worked as strong early in the game as they did, and that was the difference. If you look at a team like Los Angeles, they are successful because they are pulling together in the same boat. Everybody is going in the same direction, everybody knows their responsibility and does their job.

I am probably in the sky, flying with the fish, or maybe in the ocean, swimming with the pigeons. See, my world is different...