CNNSI.com's David Vecsey tackles three issues from around the league:

1	How serious is this threat of a work stoppage?

Gary Bettman Brian Bahr/Allsport Pretty serious, considering the Collective Bargaining Agreement doesn't expire for nearly two years and commissioner Gary Bettman is already posturing the league's willingness to let a stoppage happen. You hate to lay this comparison on Bettman, but his recent comments were delivered with the same cold bedside manner employed by Bud Selig during baseball's strike scare. "If the choice is short-term pain vs. bleeding to death over time, then we're going to take the short-term pain because we have to fix it," Bettman said to reporters in Toronto. "We owe it to our fans to fix it. If there's any guarantee that you want me to give fans, it's that we're going to fix it. We simply don't have a choice." What's the deal with all these commissioners embracing reality? I miss the good old days when a commissioner would insist everything was cool right up until strike time. Why is everybody so willing to talk about the worst-case scenario? I'm like George Costanza at the doctor's office; I just want a good, "Work stoppage? Get outta here!" The NHL seems to have everything going for it -- scoring is up, game times are down -- and yet there is trouble on the horizon. At the root of it is the inability of Canadian-based franchises to keep up with rising salaries and diminishing returns. Those clubs are paying out in American dollars and taking in Canadian loonies. And you don't have to be Warren Buffet to see the problem in that. Bettman said the league will wait out a work stoppage, no matter how lengthy, until a new CBA enables all clubs to be economically stable and competitive -- which means until teams like the Flames are more than just a farm club for the teams that come raiding all the best talent on payday, and until teams like the Rangers quit throwing $15 million at guys just because they're free agents. Nobody blinked when Selig pulled the plug on the Expos, but you can expect a whole different reaction if suddenly the Canadiens are checking out the real estate ads in The Oregonian. "Despite how strong the league has gotten, there are problems that are going to have to be addressed so that our fans in Edmonton and Calgary and Ottawa and Montreal and Vancouver don't have to worry about their franchises," Bettman said. The current CBA expires in September 2004, which would seem like plenty of time to come up with a luxury tax, a salary cap or any of the other dirty words of the negotiating room. But NHLPA head Bob Goodenow isn't talking CBA yet, and doesn't plan to until 2004, despite Bettman's attempts to start the healing process now.

2	Why the change in the All-Star format?

Jaromir Jagr, Mario Lemieux Robert Laberge/Getty images/NHLI Why argue the merits of something as trivial as an All-Star game? I don't know. Why complain about a free sandwich? It's just what sportswriters do. The NHL All-Star ballots are out and you may have noticed that the traditional East-West format has replaced the five-year run of the International Showdown. I, myself, will miss it. I thought it was interesting, and I thought it was appropriate to span the two Winter Olympics in which the NHLers played. In 1998, the Finnish line of Teemu Selanne, Saku Koivu and Jere Lehtinen looked as if it would steal the show in Vancouver, only to have hometown hero Mark Messier score the game-winning goal on an assist from Wayne Gretzky. Not only wouldn't that have been possible in an East-West format, but the spectacle was complete because fans outside GM Place were selling "My Canada includes Messier" T-shirts in protest to Messier's exclusion from the upcoming Canadian Olympic team in Nagano. If I remember it right, too, Messier laid a rare All-Star game check on somebody in the opening minutes, as if to show that the players were taking the format seriously. Two years later, it was the Russian line of Viktor Kozlov, Valeri Bure and Pavel Bure that turned Toronto on its ear, playing under Scotty Bowman and weaving into the offensive zone like the Soviet teams of old. Again, under a normal East-West format, it never would have happened. For better or for worse, the International Showdown opened the All-Star Game for European players like Lehtinen and Valeri Bure, who otherwise might not have stood a chance in a North American voting pool. But, at the same time, some deserving North American players probably were kept out of the past five games. So it's a wash. I'd say after five years, the International Showdown ran its course. We've had two Olympics in which to see international competition at its finest. I don't know if East vs. West adds any intensity, or takes any away. I don't know if it matters. It's an All-Star Game, after all, a free sandwich. It doesn't make sense to have such high expectations of it.

3	What is Ken Hitchock doing right in Philly?

Ken Hitchcock Mitchell Layton/Getty Images/NHLI The short answer: the same things he did right in Dallas. If you don't know what that is, Jeremy Roenick suggests you drop by a Flyers practice. "[Practices] are structured to where each drill that we do is set up where it lasts about 40 seconds for each group," says Roenick, "which is pretty much the length of a shift. Everything that we do in our drills is related to our time allotted in the shift that will be taken. "And it's very structured in terms of, you know, if we don't do a drill right, it's 'Turn around, let's go back and do it again.' If we have to do it at a high pace, tape-to-tape, you just -- it's just very position oriented. The teaching that he does is just amazing how in-depth and detailed that he runs things." For a team that goes through head coaches like Kleenex -- six in eight years -- the Flyers may finally have found the man who can make all their regular-season success translate into a Stanley Cup. The Flyers have finished first or second in the Atlantic Division in each of the past eight years, but have but only one Cup finals appearance to show for it -- the 1997 sweep at the hands of the Detroit Red Wings. And in four of the past five years, the Flyers have flushed out in the first round. Enter Hitchcock, who took the Stars to consecutive Stanley Cup finals in 1999 and 2000. After 12 games this season, his Flyers were 9-1-2 and leading the East with 20 points playing the same high-energy, defense-first system that was so successful for Hitchcock in Dallas. It's just a matter of getting everybody to buy into it. And if he can get Brett Hull to do it, he can get anybody to do it. "If we don't do it at a high pace, our system doesn't work," Roenick said. "So he emphasizes our work ethic and to play 60 minutes, you know, not take 40 on, 20 off. He's tried to get everybody to get into a 60-minute game with that attitude of playing strong defense, but yet at a high pace which creates a lot of good offense."